For the week of August 12th, Marvel and Walt Disney Home Entertainment are bringing the Russo Brothers' Avengers: Endgame to Blu-ray. There are two ways to approach this massive, years-in-the-making blockbuster. The first is to treat Endgame like a sign of the cinematic apocalypse. Now that Disney has consolidated so much money and power, we're far more likely to get more of these four-quadrant, $400-million behemoths instead of smaller, more adult-centric fare. Disney's shuttering of the Fox 2000 branch sent a clear message - we make movies for children, thank you very much, and why would we spend $10 million to make $50 million when we could spend twenty times that and maybe make $1 billion? And then there's the second approach: stop worrying, and learn to love this funny, exciting, overstuffed, and more-than-a-little emotional superhero epic on its own terms. And it is very easy to like Endgame, and to appreciate the craft Anthony and Joe Russo (and a small continent of Marvel employees) have brought to what could be a rote summer blockbuster. Endgame screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely swore to Vulture that their film was "a lean three hours", and I'd have to concur. People far smarter than me have called the MCU the equivalent of a theatrical TV series in terms of how it's plotted and structured, and Markus and McFeely turn Endgame into, essentially, a three-part season finale that unfolds in three distinct acts. (Spoilers to follow, obviously.) The first hour plays like The Leftovers for kids: the surviving Avengers (Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Thor, Hulk, Rocket Raccoon, Nebula, and Captain Marvel, who gets almost nothing of value to do here) have failed to stop Thanos (a very digital Josh Brolin) from snapping half of the galaxy out of existence, and so we flash-forward five years after Infinity War to a world that's still struggling to process the massive loss of life. There's very little action in this section, but it might be the most riskiest - and most satisfying - thing Marvel has ever done. I never thought one of these action spectacles would devote so much time to its heroes quietly being sad, but Endgame lets viewers linger in the characters' shared ennui. With the re-emergence of Ant-Man (Paul Rudd, who's like the fourth or fifth most important character in the film), Endgame kicks off its second act, a jazzy, witty "time heist" that pulls equally from Inception and Back to the Future Part 2 as the Avengers use quantum physics to move through time and space (and into important scenes from other Marvel movies) in the hopes that they might re-steal the Infinity Stones. This section plays a bit like a victory lap, but you likely won't care. It's so much fun, and I love how it downplays rote fight scenes in favor of comedy and heist-movie mechanics. As for the last hour, well, that's where things get tricky. I can say that the film lands every major emotional beat it sets out to make; this movie makes people sob, and rightly so. I can say that Robert Downey Jr. is emotionally open in ways he hasn't been since Zodiac. And I can say how refreshing it is that Endgame feels like a proper ending, and not just a setup for eighteen different sequels. But so much of the end plays like one big, CGI battle, and we begin to miss the more acute interpersonal dynamics of the first two acts. It's a credit to Endgame, though, that even its indulgences in CGI flubber can't negate everything that's capital-g Great about it. If this is what the future of Corporate Hollywood looks like, then I hate to say it, but: Another ticket, please.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the Russos are well capable of delivering a movie that is more than action. They find a sweet spot in the three-hour runtime, crafting a film that is at once both zippy enough to carry that runtime and happy to slow down and allow the characters, and the audience, the necessary opportunities to feel and appreciate the characters and the story rather than merely watch those currents unfold. Endgame accomplishes much by way of innumerable highlights, fan service, and story building and finishing, but it also feels intimate within the maelstrom of activity. Indeed, for such a sprawling movie in terms of its character roster, reach, and runtime, it remains remarkably focused for the duration. The emotional pull is strong. The feel of loss, both large-scale and intimately personal, is palpable in every face and in many frames. The cast, all of them from the major players to secondary and tertiary character performers, excels. Each is content to play their part, no matter how prominent or how deeply in support, how much screen time is earned, no matter who lives or who dies. The cast and the Russos harmoniously blend humanity into the film's digital highlights. For the CGI sprawl on display the picture never loses sight of its center."
Marvel and Disney are also using Endgame's big release to help springboard 4K re-releases of Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man Three, Thor, and Thor: The Dark World. I will not deny that Iron Man is one of the most important superhero movies ever made. If Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (also released in 2008) helped legitimize the superhero genre as an art form, then Iron Man established its viability as the only mainstream cinematic form. Had Iron Man flopped, we wouldn't have Endgame or much of the MCU, I'd wager. Director Jon Favreau calcified the tone to which every Marvel feature aspires (breezy, funny, somewhat artistically anonymous), and he made an icon out of Robert Downey Jr., whose bon vivant playboy-turned-unlikely hero provided the emotional spine of the MCU's last ten years (Endgame weaponizes his last line here to devastating effect). But after a cracking opening act (everything with Tony and Yensin in the caves is aces), the first Iron Man downshifts into a far more slapdash groove. It's no secret that Favreau was working from an unfinished script and letting his actors patch together the narrative on a day-by-day basis (Jeff Bridges famously equated the experience to a $200 million student film), so I guess it's a miracle that Iron Man is even remotely functional, but for every moment of inspiration (anything between Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow; the great moment where Bridges petulantly denies Tony pizza), you get one or two tiresome bits of wheel-spinning (Tony attacking terrorists in Burbank...ahem, the Middle East, or the stakes-free finale). Iron Man's massive success emboldened Marvel and Favreau to double down, and so we get the perplexing, shapeless Iron Man 2. This isn't a movie: it's a bunch of amusing-to-tedious improv routines and franchise table-setting. It manages to make Tony Stark irritating, although he's a shining beacon of charisma when compared to Mickey Rourke's tic-crazy, unthreatening Whiplash villain. Only Sam Rockwell comes out of this thing looking good, but even he's coasting on his verbal facilities and sleazy charm. You'd be forgiven for writing off this franchise after Part 2, but leave it to Shane Black to write the ship almost entirely with Iron Man Three. This remains one of the best MCU ventures, a weird, sarcastic, violent, and subversive blockbuster that's also 100% a Shane Black picture. I love Downey's prickly chemistry with young Ty Simpkins, or the film's ample forays into '80s action-movie territory (the whole dockyard finale; everything with Guy Pearce's scum-bum baddie), or its sublime handling of the Mandarin character (Ben Kingsley, who's just a gas). By comparison, anything else would look quaint (Iron Man Three is more idiosyncratic than the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and that's saying something), so you almost want to excuse Thor for being so basic. It isn't bad. Thor expands the MCU universe and thrillingly introduces both Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston to the MCU. But it's also way too timid. Thor plays like a superhero movie from the '90s, where you'd take someone cool like Blade or Steel and restrict them to some studio backlot or generic cityscape. Thor is set mostly in New Mexico and leans way to hard on fish-out-of-water comedy; if Iron Man established what you could do with a character like Tony Stark, Thor kicked off a series of scripting challenges that the MCU wouldn't fully crack until Thor: Ragnarok. The critical consensus says Thor: The Dark World is even worse...but I kinda like it. It's way too self-serious, and the filmmaking is beyond anonymous (Alan Taylor gets the credit, but apparently Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige directed most of this one). However, it isn't as afraid of the fantastical as its predecessor is, and it nails the Thor-Loki dynamic - we stan Loki because of this movie. You keep seeing all these little cool threads that Marvel would better exploit in later features (the galactic weirdness of the Guardians movies; the portal jumping of Doctor Strange). Still, you gotta start somewhere, and The Dark World is an admirable first (or, rather, second) at-bat.
In addition, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is using this week to platform a number of catalog releases. To a film, we're looking at a series of also-rans: offbeat genre pictures that were just anonymous / unsatisfying / slight / uneven enough to disappear soon after their theatrical releases. That said, there's a lot to enjoy here if you're willing to exercise patience. The least of the four is Robert Young and Fred Schepisi's Fierce Creatures, and this one hurts the most because of all the wasted potential. A farce about a Rupert Murdoch-esque weirdo (Kevin Kline, overacting wildly) whose machinations force a quaint British farm to kill all its gentle animals in order to make room for more dangerous ones, this film reunites the Fish Called Wanda quartet of John Cleese, Michael Palin, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kline. That 1988 hit is one of the greatest comedies ever made, so anything would probably suffer by comparison, but Fierce Creatures is so toothless and labored that you'd feel bad for these very talented funny people even if they weren't tarnishing their legacy. Then comes the 1997 Leave It to Beaver adaptation. The original Leave It To Beaver TV series remains memorable more as an exemplar of the traditional '50s sitcom than anything else (it's pleasant, inoffensive, and largely disposable, much like Father Knows Best or The Donna Reed Show), so I'm a little surprised that Universal greenlit a film version, and doubly so that the movie really just presents itself as an extended episode of the TV show. Unlike, say, The Brady Bunch Movie or Pleasantville, Leave It to Beaver doesn't want to comment ironically on '50s culture: the Brian Levant and Lon Diamond script keeps many of the same values and aesthetics as though nostalgia alone would warrant a viewing. But it isn't as bad movie, and Christopher McDonald and Janine Turner are quite good as Ward and June Cleaver. Far more ambitious is Malcolm D. Lee's blaxploitation spoof Undercover Brother. When Undercover Brother connects, it reminds me of Keenan Ivory Wayans' great I'm Gonna Git You Sucka or Spike Lee's School Daze: there's this anarchic, angry energy powering the jokes, and you can feel Malcolm Lee and co-screenwriter John Ridley's hands in shaping the most socially incendiary stuff. But Undercover Brother also sports a writing credit for SNL and Goldmember scribe Michael McCullers, and I wonder if McCullers is responsible for the terrible, hacky stuff with Chris Kattan and Denise Richards. Last up is the unfairly maligned Radioland Murders. This comedy has a reputation as a notorious bomb, one that let producer George Lucas over-inflate an otherwise humble screwball homage with lots of early CGI effects. The mesh doesn't always work, and the film often confuses frenetic with funny. But I like its energy all the same, as well as its reverence for a bygone time.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is giving Lucille Carra's The Inland Sea a Blu-ray showing. As a brief (56 minutes) travelogue about the people and environs in and around Japan's Inland Sea, the film satisfies. Carra and her ace DP Hiro Narita (he shot The Rocketeer, which is the most beautifully lensed superhero movie of the modern era) capture stunning images, from the seaweed farmers cultivating their wares to the rhesus monkeys that wander the landscape with almost practiced calm. Carra presents a land in transition, and the best moments offer a contrast between the present and the past. Vide the detour into Japan's coffeehouse culture; Carra uses Puccini's "Turandot" to score the montage of well-to-do Japanese elites drinking coffee, and in that meld of image and sound, we able glean so much about the country's changing values and priorities. Carra echoes that moment with the musings of a monk who loves big-band music and Audrey Hepburn films - he recalls the joy of seeing Funny Face right after weighing whether it's more or less financially responsible to painstakingly restore his crumbling temple or raze it to the ground and build a newer one. Insights like these would make for a diverting hour watching the Travel Channel, and there's the rub. In 1991, outside of PBS and Rick Steves, contemporary media hadn't yet latched onto the travelogue as a viable commercial genre. A film like The Inland Sea would feel more vital simply because it had less competition. Now you can turn on your TV and work with the Travel Channel in the background, or you can switch to Netflix and binge on Anthony Bourdain, and so The Inland Sea loses some of its novelty. Cinematography and social agenda aside, there's not much here to distinguish it.
In his Blu-ray review, Neil Lumbard writes that this "award-winning documentary which should be considered essential viewing for those invested in and fascinated by Japanese culture. Richie is an exceptional tour guide for the film and makes the experience feel greatly enriching and deeply satisfying. There are many personal insights from Richie's writings which bring viewers a personal perspective on the country that is intimate and rewarding. The abundant love of Japan by Richie is apparent and the filmmaking reflects that passion. One of the things which can make or break a documentary is the way in which the cinematography is handled alongside the direction. If the filmmakers can capably produce a beautiful and intimate film, the results are often far more rewarding. The Inland Sea is no exception to this key idea and the film features stunning cinematography by Hiro Narita...This is a filmed work of art which completely transported me to Japan and showcased the country's enormous beauty."