For the week of August 5th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Detective Pikachu to Blu-ray. Pretty much everything that's fun and diverting about the film stems from its title. I know almost nothing about the greater Pokémon universe, but I find something inexplicably charming/bizarre about taking the "Pika! Pika!"-chanting lightning shooter and plugging it into a noir mystery where Pikachu works a case and follows leads and navigates the genre's requisite red herrings. I love how ridiculous the character looks - he's wearing a hat not a million miles removed from Sherlock Holmes' deerstalker, and he bops around an office looking for clues with a magnifying glass. And those aren't the only noir signifiers. Pikachu frequents a (coffee) bar that could come straight from a Walter Hill movie, and he even visits an illegal Pokémon battle club filled with glowering denizens of the underworld. Visually, the whole movie looks like Blade Runner for Kids, and what a pleasure it is to see a four-quadrant blockbuster that isn't afraid to drench the frame in murky blackness or bold swaths of primary colors. In addition, I rather like stunt-casting Ryan Reynolds as the titular character. Outside of one incongruous Deadpool-style quip (when our heroes find themselves stuck on top of earthshaking, giant Torterra, Pikachu screams, "How can anyone not believe in climate change at this point?" and I kinda wanted to die), he brings the right kind of fast-talking, hardbitten energy to sell you on the character as a credible (JV) noir hero. Kudos, too, to the team of CGI animators and digital technicians that brought the character to life. Whatever my quibbles with the movie as a whole may be, Pikachu feels present in a way that even Thanos doesn't. He's textured. He has weight. I know director Rob Letterman credits the decision to shoot on film (with Gladiator DP John Mathieson) as instrumental in selling the reality of the Pokémon, and while I don't think all the effects work is as consistent, I can't deny how nicely the film uses light and shadow and FILM GRAIN to integrate Pikachu into the frame. When Detective Pikachu is chugging along those lines, it works. It's just a shame that "not being offensive" seems to be the prime directive on set. I kept waiting for something surprising that never materialized, and if you think I'm expecting too much from a movie called Detective Pikachu, then let me direct your attention to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Director Robert Zemeckis' masterful special-effects blockbuster is clearly the pop-culture touchstone for Detective Pikachu; both plug popular children's characters into film noir. Except Who Framed Roger Rabbit actually has a pretty great central mystery - it rips off Chinatown, for God's sake, and deals with the history of L.A. traffic - and genuinely thrilling life-and-death stakes. Detective Pikachu gets the world right (Ryme City feels like a live-action Toon Town) but treats the actual mystery as an afterthought. And since we're not all that invested in the story, maybe we start to drift and resent the other clichés. Like casting Justice Smith as the boring human lead, especially when Kathryn Newton is doing such good work as a gum-chewing junior reporter (she reminds me of Kim Cattrall in Big Trouble in Little China). Or using an expositional video to telegraph all the major third-act plot points in the least artful fashion possible. Or the stunt casting that doesn't work, like using models Rita Ora and Suki Waterhouse as an evil geneticist and henchperson, respectively, or giving Smith a wacky best friend (Karan Soni, and if there was ever a role that demanded a Griffin Newman type, it's this one) until Pikachu shows up. It's like they came up with the idea, the world, and nothing more. But hey - you could do much worse.
In his Blu-ray review, Randy Miller III wrote that "exposition is sloppily revealed, and the human characters - which leaves out Ryan Reynolds, who imbues Pikachu with an entertaining Deadpool-lite brand of boyish playfulness - are largely flat and lifeless. I daresay the movie as a whole really doesn't have much in the way of legs whenever our title character is off-screen, but even his presence isn't quite enough to salvage what ultimately amounts to 'My First Film Noir.' That wouldn't be a bad thing if Detective Pikachu were aimed strictly at kids (as its PG rating implies), but the franchise is well over 20 years old and thus appeals to an extremely wide demographic. Simply put, most of them will be looking for much more than what this tame and tepid mystery ends up revealing. Still, it's not a total loss. Where Detective Pikachu clearly excels is its organic world building, a thoughtful mixture of film (yes, film) and strongly rendered CG elements. Simply put, a lot of love and care went into Detective Pikachu's all-in concept of humans and Pokémon living side-by-side, which gives the final product a lot of visual appeal that die-hard fans will appreciate. They'll enjoy picking out their favorite characters from a supporting cast of several dozen species, most of which are beautifully designed and blend seamlessly into backgrounds largely devoid of green-screen elements. It's a surprisingly old-school approach that could have doomed the production but, quite honestly, ends up being its most obvious strength."
I confess that I don't quite get the enmity reserved for The Curse of la Llorona, the latest Conjuring Universe feature from New Line and Warner Home Entertainment. Does it reach the heights of James Wan's two solo Conjuring features? Absolutely not. In fact, I'd put The Curse of la Llorona, which puts a widowed social worker (the great Linda Cardellini) and her two kids (Roman Christou and Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen) into conflict with a vengeful spirit (Marisol Ramirez), more on par with The Nun or the first Annabelle picture. La Llorona doesn't have the gleaming polish of a Conjuring (La Llorona cost about $9 million, which seems a little high, frankly), and about 84% of its shocks are jump scares: after a while, you start to clock the formula, wherein one of the characters will hear/see something, investigate, find nothing, and then turn IMMEDIATELY into La Llorona's yellow eyes and distended jaw. But the film isn't bad. Despite the preponderance of jump scares, La Llorona generates enough high-quality tension. The exorcism ending is an effective light-and-sound show, and every so often we'll get a more elegant setup, like glimpsing the titular character through just a reflected surface, or the chilling setpiece when she silently emerges to bathe an unsuspecting Kinchen. Plus, Cardellini is really good here - tough and subtle in ways that recall Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga's Conjuring heroes. She's got a scene where she wields a bat at La Llorona that gets under your skin just through the frenzy of Cardellini's reaction; at this point, she doesn't know she's dealing with a ghost, so she's just freaking out at this surreal, wedding-dress-clad interloper that's broken into her home. Ultimately, The Curse of la Llorona moves along with the clockwork precision of a beloved theme-park ride. The Conjuring universe people have the formula down so well that we can appreciate their economy and efficiency in handling these horror programmers. The Curse of la Llorona is under ninety minutes before the end credits roll. This is a no-fat feature, one that foregrounds the scares, builds to a big setpiece, and then closes on some kind of light-to-moderate cliffhanger. We need brainless, cheap entertainment like this. Otherwise, it's all $200-million superhero epics or $100,000 VOD indies. Watch this and support the middle ground.
From A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes Joanna Hogg's semi-autobiographical character study The Souvenir. In a summer season suffering from a dearth of complex, adult filmmaking, The Souvenir feels more bracing than it might any other time of year. Visually, Hogg gives her film the hermetic precision of a jewel box: she presents everything as a series of square, static tableaus (she and her DP David Raedeker are working in the boxier-than-usual 1.66:1 aspect ratio) that invite us to study the frame as her characters move through it. It's fitting - The Souvenir is a film of micro-emotions, of subtle shifts, of gradual changes in the relationship between film student Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne, daughter of Tilda Swinton and John Byrne) and ostensible Foreign Office agent Anthony (Tom Burke). We watch Julie and Anthony meet for drinks at Harrods or listen to music in Julie's sterile flat, and maybe we get distracted by the fringe on the table or the mirrors lining the dining room wall, but all the while, these little emotional revolutions are churning and evolving. The effect is alternatively hypnotic and tedious, and I suspect the latter adds to the former. Hogg immerses you so fully in the minutia of her young protagonist that after a while, the scrim of the film evaporates, and you're simply existing alongside Julie. Comparatively minor outbreaks register with the force of a horror movie: a car bomb explodes down the road from the flat; Anthony breaks that mirrored wall; or a stranger stares right into the camera (this moment also has one of the most unsettling instances of full-frontal nudity that I've seen in some time); and we react with more horror than we might expect, so thoroughly has Hogg disrupted her carefully cultivated atmosphere of dread. I'm being somewhat vague here, but The Souvenir really isn't a film that lives or dies off spoilers. Rather, it's experiential cinema, and nothing I can write quite compares with the sensation of letting yourself drift through The Souvenir, discovering the world as Julie does.
Finally, Kino Video is bringing Billy Wilder's version of The Front Page to Blu-ray. You couldn't pick a more ideal person than Billy Wilder to helm The Front Page. The fast-paced account of two newspaper men (here played by Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, in their third on-screen pairing) investigating a politically motivated killing, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's original stageplay traffics in the same kind of cynical media satire than Wilder so clearly loved. The play's - and film's - world of Chicago journalists privileges copy over character and subscriptions over ethics, and it's only a short distance between this and Wilder's Hollywood poison pill Sunset Boulevard or his even more savage Ace in the Hole. It helps, too, that Wilder brought his longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond to rework the script. Diamond and Wilder wrote The Apartment and Some Like It Hot together, although their most relevant picture might be the underrated farce One, Two, Three (that Jimmy Cagney comedy moves with the kind of whiplash velocity that The Front Page demands). There's just one problem: you can't mess with perfection, and Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday is a perfect film. It's the best version of The Front Page and maybe the greatest romantic comedy ever made, and so even the great Billy Wilder is going to suffer by comparison. And you can sense a degree of trepidation on Wilder's part. His Front Page is fine (Matthau is especially good as the charmingly venal Walter Burns) and little more. It looks good, but it also looks like a period film in ways that His Girl Friday did not (The Front Page came out in 1974 but is set in 1929, whereas His Girl Friday was released and set in 1940). The patter is still funny, but it's not as blindingly quick as His Girl Friday - by 1974, Wilder had gotten stagy, and visually The Front Page plods along in too-wide tableaus that don't serve the story. And while Diamond adds a bunch of risqué language that Hawks couldn't have gotten away with, the slurs and swears aren't as shocking as Friday star Cary Grant's gleeful sociopathy. In a world without His Girl Friday, The Front Page would satisfy, but in this world? Fit for Wilder, Matthau, and Lemmon completists only.