For the week of September 2nd, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing the teen comedy Booksmart to Blu-ray. Someone once said that there were like five stories in the world, and all any of us can hope to do is innovate using the familiar. And maybe that's true, but when you get something like Booksmart, you can't help but crave a little more invention from all relevant creative parties. What the film offers is Superbad with female stars: no more, no less. Like that 2007 classic, we follow two best friends (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever) on one long, crazy night as they try to crash a raucous party and hook up with the people of their dreams (Mason Gooding and Victoria Ruesga, respectively). Both films unfold in a space that's simultaneously grounded and absurd. If Superbad heightened its honest teenage dynamics with the two cops (Bill Hader and Seth Rogen) who wanted to impress a bunch of seventeen-year-olds, Booksmart brings in a slacker principal (Jason Sudeikis) moonlighting as a mystery-writing Lyft driver and a twenty-something English teacher (a very funny Jessica Williams) all too willing to party with her students. Even Feldstein's casting feels like intentional synchronicity - she's playing the Jonah Hill role, which is fitting, considering she's Hill's sister in real life. When you're watching Booksmart, these comparisons don't matter much. From a technical standpoint, actress Olivia Wilde makes a hell of a directorial debut. She and her DP Jason McCormick create a widescreen canvas that feels so reflective of the film's SoCal vibe. The film's aesthetic is both ethereal and manic, dreamy and raucous. I normally have a problem with the screenplay-by-committee, but this particular joke factory (Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins wrote the first draft, which Susanna Fogel rewrote, and then Katie Silberman rewrote Fogel) put together something that coheres nicely. It helps that the film is naturally episodic, which means we can cut from the loneliest yacht party in the world to a murder-mystery party where the host's parents have been relegated to playing board games in the kitchen. And across the board, the cast is fantastic. I wasn't as keen on Feldstein in Lady Bird, but she's a spark plug here, all brassy comic energy. Dever is more of the straight man in the comic dynamic (although, in a sly in-joke, the film makes her an openly gay straight man), but it's still such a charismatic star turn from an actress who upstaged the likes of Timothy Olyphant, Walton Goggins, Margo Martindale, Jeremy Davies, Sam Elliott, and Mary Steenburgen on Justified. That said, the real scene-stealers are Billie Lourd as a supernaturally gifted party-crasher and the great Skyler Gisondo as a rich dolt with a pathological need to buy best friends. But after a while, the film's surface pleasures begin to fade, and only the Superbad riff remains. The structure is so close that Booksmart starts losing vitality. We know that our heroes will labor mightily to find this party and that once they do, some third-act contrivance will force them apart until their (inevitable) climactic resolution. Don't get me wrong. The movie is funny, but it doesn't resonate past the runtime. I suspect Wilde might have shot more scenes in that vein; how else to explain the presence of editor Brent White, who's made a name for himself taking the improvisatory indulgences of directors like Adam McKay and Judd Apatow and paring their comedies down to feature length? In the case of Booksmart, I would have appreciated more sprawl.
From Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes the distributor's latest 4K upgrade: Rambo (or John Rambo, if you're going by the director's cut), the last (until Last Blood next month) in Sylvester Stallone's iconic Rambo series. The greatest problem - or strength, depending on where you're sitting - of the Rambo series is the tone with which it approaches Stallone's title character. The masterful First Blood unfolds like a pulpier Taxi Driver. John Rambo is an isolated Vietnam vet suffering from a nasty case of PTSD, and when he snaps and goes after the police force of a small Pacific Northwestern town, the results are just as scary as they are exciting. You can feel Stallone and director Ted Kotcheff using the B-movie framework to say some unsettling things about the state of veterans in America. And then Rambo: First Blood Part II comes along, and Rambo's been juicing HGH so he can win Vietnam singlehandedly. I can't think of another franchise that vacillates so wildly between critical examination and hero worship, and the 2008 Rambo lives right on the dividing line. In terms of its subject matter, the film presents an even more dire sociopolitical situation than First Blood. Stallone wants to draw our attention to Burma and the bloody aftermath that followed the Saffron Revolution: Burma's State Peace and Development Council went after any suspected dissenters among the Karen people, massacring whole villages full of innocent civilians. These parts of the film are almost brutally unwatchable and to Stallone's credit, he doesn't flinch from gory scenes of violence perpetuated against men, women, and children. And had he stuck with this sobering look at human-rights violations, we might have a clunky-but-noble piece of agitprop. However, the film is still called Rambo, and the character's entrance shifts the movie's objectives. No longer are we wallowing in docudrama-esque mayhem. No, Rambo rises up as the Karen's unlikely savior, and he. Kills. Everyone. Of the film's ninety minutes (the film really only has two acts: setup and payoff), forty-five are devoted to Rambo shooting / stabbing / exploding / skewering / pulverizing / liquefying / disemboweling one venal member of the SPDC after another. At one point, Rambo grabs a .50 caliber machine gun and tries to re-enact the opening of Saving Private Ryan all by himself; at another, he uses a still-active "Grand Slam" bomb to expedite the process (and destroy like a fourth of the Burmese jungle in the process). It's one of the most violent mainstream action movies I've ever seen, and admittedly, when Rambo gets to it, it's often a lot of fun. Stallone has always been an underrated master of staging and executing action choreography. Yet there's an uneasy disconnect between the sober genocidal recreations that start Rambo and the splatter-movie pyrotechnics that end it. The situation in Burma deserves honest examination, and using it as the MacGuffin for the fourth movie in an action-movie franchise scans as more-than-a-little exploitative. Still, that's the risk these Rambos have always run. No one can accuse Stallone of not being true to himself, even if that truth seems icky.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "was obviously designed to reboot a venerable franchise, and in some ways at least it succeeded perhaps surprisingly well, offering Sylvester Stallone a chance to offer an older, wiser and perhaps slightly less angst-y take on the character. Despite the fact that this story is at least partially shorn of the 'personal connection' to wartime that made the earlier Rambo entries so distinctive, there still remains an unexpected amount of emotion on display. Stallone, who also directed, perhaps hoped to balance that emotional aspect with an emphasis on over the top action and especially some at times gruesome and graphic violence, and as a result this particular Rambo is among the bloodiest in the franchise."
HBO Home Entertainment is releasing the third season of its police procedural series True Detective, and with it, the show unintentionally lays bare the strengths and weaknesses at True Detective's core. The consensus dictates that the Matthew McConaughey/Woody Harrelson-starring first season is the best while the Colin Farrell/Vince Vaughn/Rachel McAdams/Taylor Kitsch-starring second season is a mess. I'm not going to argue that Season One is exponentially better than Season Two or that HBO was probably wise in forcing showrunner Nic Pizzolatto to craft a third season more in line with that inaugural year. Once again, we have two mismatched cops (Mahershala Ali's Vietnam vet and Stephen Dorff's cocky good ol' boy); once again, we're looking at a bizarre murder in America's forgotten spaces (the Ozarks); and once again, the investigation crisscrosses between multiple timelines (1980, 1990, and 2015). I was scratching my head why 2015 instead of something closer to the series' release date (2019), and then it hit me: the much maligned second season came out in 2015, so by setting Season Three at the same time, everyone involved is not-so-subtly pretending like the Farrell-Vaughn year didn't happen. As do-overs go, Season Three works when you're watching it. The trifurcated chronology wends in and reflects on itself in consistently interesting ways, and Ali is very good as the lead, although Dorff quietly emerges as the season's heart. Dorff's Roland West is a too-proud, too-prickly company man who grows more loyal the lonelier he gets, and Dorff layers in the character's regrets and hidden sadness like a second skin. However, since the season hews so closely to Season One, we realize what really elevated that first year: star power and direction. It was McConaughey, Harrelson, and the brilliant-but-difficult director Cary Fukunaga who turned Pizzolatto's purple noir mystery into an almost-cosmically terrifying study of masculinity. Without them, we'd get a show that's absorbing enough but never all that essential, and that's how Season Three feels when all is said and done. Ali and Dorff work well together, but we're always aware of the formula behind their relationship, and the direction is premium-cable polished without ever evincing any real creative or aesthetic spark. On that note: initially Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier was supposed to direct all eight episodes of Season Three, but dreaded "creative differences" poisoned his relationship with Pizzolatto, and Saulnier left after the first two episodes. Maybe that's what HBO wants, something that privileges the writer over the director. Too bad that's never been the show's main strength. The sooner the series gets back to having a strong vision, the better, because vision is much harder to just copy.
Finally, Kino Video is giving Blu-ray releases to a number of classic Ealing comedies, the best of which is Charles Crichton's The Lavender Hill Mob. The great Ealing farces of the 1940s and 1950s are such charming, effortless cinematic engines that you almost can't be blamed for missing the levels of depravity to which they'll sink. Everyone is so proper and polite and upright, even when they're fencing millions in stolen bouillon or trying to murder old women. It's a veddy British sensation, wanting to debase oneself whilst still making time for tea. At their best - Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit, and The Lavender Hill Gang - they draw us into knotty moral conundrums, and we were none the wiser. What makes The Lavender Hill Gang my favorite is the precision with which the Ealing folks toggle between genre thrills and the darkest of social commentary. You'll often see this one pop up on lists of the best British crime films, and deservedly so. As a heist film, it's almost peerless. At only 81 minutes long, it generates a thrilling gold heist plus two nail-biting procedural setpieces: the first finds Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway's amateur criminal masterminds trying to get through customs in pursuit of their ill-gotten gains; the second one begins as they follow a young girl with a very special Eiffel Tower model, and it keeps building and building, leading our antiheroes through a police museum crawling with coppers and climaxing with a still-superb car chase that pits a newfangled wireless police sedan against some unstable radio technologies. But as a study of repressed masculinity, the film is even slyer, and for that, we can thank Sir Alec Guinness. His Henry Howard is a milquetoast's milquetoast, a boring little fussbudget tasked with accompanying vast quantities of gold week in and week out because no one thinks he's imaginative enough to take advantage of his position. Except we know better, and all because of Guinness's eyes. He'll maintain this stuffy façade (Guinness looks like the Monopoly man here), but then he'll start thinking about gold, and stealing gold, and spending gold, and Guinness lets his eyes goggle out of his head like the Tex Avery wolf. Crime turns him on, and I don't think that's an accident. British society, as portrayed in the film, forces men into these inoffensive, sexless archetypes, so of course when they snap, they end up breaking bad in the most antisocial fashions possible. Now, because this is Britain and the 1950s, the level of subversion can only go so far. The status quo gets restored, and law and order prevail. But you still gag at the social norms. That's the Ealing way.