For the week of September 30th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing the hit superhero sequel Spider-Man: Far from Home to Blu-ray. The nervy young actress Zendaya is the best reason to watch the Spider-Man shingle of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As Peter Parker's high-school peer and fellow mathlete Michelle, Zendaya brings these off-kilter, loopy rhythms to everything she does. Michelle reminds me a little of Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice: she might be an oddball, but she's a glorious one, and one who uses her expert poker face and excess of chill to puncture the Sturm und Drang of the Marvel house style. When Spider-Man: Homecoming reveals that Michelle is actually the latest iteration of "M.J.," Peter's most enduring canonical love interest, I experienced this simultaneous rush of anticipation and dread. Anticipation, in that M.J. might finally become a full-fledged individual (and one designed to correct Kirsten Dunst and Emma Stone's less idiosyncratic takes on the character); and dread, in that a performer with Zendaya's chops deserves more than decades-long internment inside a superhero franchise. So credit where credit's due: M.J. gets far more screentime in Spider-Man: Far From Home, and Zendaya makes the most of those extra minutes. A good portion of her duties involves plotting franchise architecture. M.J. has moved from background needler to object of Peter's affections, so we get a lot of scenes where Peter stares at her with puppy-dog eyes and tries to keep his heart from bursting (if this movie came out in 1987, 80% of the soundtrack would be from The Smiths). But Zendaya and Holland handle the teen romance aspect with humor and an absolute minimum of schmaltz. Although they're a little bit out of their teens (Holland is 23; Zendaya is 22), both actors nail that teenage thing of coming at the big issues from the side and trying to drown their anxieties in a torrent of irony and chatter; we get these great almost-declarations of love where both parties pray the other person will decode the subtext just so they don't actually have to say the words. And Zendaya, in particular, keeps finding these grace notes that animate M.J. beyond mere love interest. She's obsessed with murder - Peter has this Black Dahlia flower pendant he wants to give M.J. because she loves the story of the Black Dahlia killer - and she's the first M.J. to actively loathe having Spider-Man swing her through the New York City skyscrapers. All told, Zendaya is quietly delivering the second or third best performance in the whole MCU. As for Far from Home itself, it's great whenever we focus on the high-school drama. The smartest thing director Jon Watts ever did was put together this super-group of young actors. Besides Holland and Zendaya, we have Jacob Batalon, Angourie Rice, and Tony Revolori, all of whom are so needle-specific in terms of the high-school archetypes they're assaying (Revolori, in particular, is so great as a elitist jerk with too much money and way too many Instagram friends). I would love to watch a new version of Freaks and Geeks with this same cast, and that's the problem. Whenever we toggle away from the kids and into the mechanics of Elementals and alternate dimensions and world-ending extinction events, I just zone out. At this stage in its development, the MCU just has to release a movie for it to be successful. If the comparatively underwhelming Captain Marvel could make one billion dollars, then you wish Marvel would use that cachet and experiment with the form a little more aggressively. I love Jake Gyllenhaal's Mysterio - Gyllenhaal makes a meal of the character's pissy drama-school theatrics - and I dig that he becomes an avatar for some very timely sociopolitical realities, but at the end of the day, the character's ultimate motivations won't surprise anyone who's even the slightest bit familiar with comic-book mechanics. But a group of uniquely styled teens trying to get through the business of being young and alive? That's more exciting, superhero pyrotechnics be dammed. This whole franchise should take a page from Zendaya and embrace the weird.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the story is tailored to explore Peter Parker's struggles with his identity, his purpose, and his ability. In the movie, the late Tony Stark entrusts him with incredible power and technology, but he believes he's unable, and therefore also unwilling, to wield so much power. He's come to the decision to give it up quickly and without much thought or serious consultation. He drops it on the first person he finds who is willing too take it, the first person in whom Peter sees as worthy of taking up the mantle, of shouldering the burden he so desperately wishes to surrender. Of course, the individual to whom he bestows it is all too happy to take it. Mysterio is not at all who he claims to be, and is in fact much the opposite of Peter: he seeks the power, the fame, the responsibility, all of which he believes to be rightly his. The film explores some secrets that shape his past and embolden his motivations, but the film is otherwise solely focused on the clash between the reluctant hero and the misguided villain and what it is that separates their pursuits and truly defines 'heroism.' It's an interesting concept that the movie explores to satisfaction within the larger fracases that are a result."
From Warner Home Entertainment comes one of the year's most anticipated 4K titles: Stanley Kubrick's 1980 masterpiece The Shining. Somehow, The Shining has developed a reputation as Kubrick's most accessible movie; credit some combination of its prominence in the pop-culture lexicon, its affiliation with the Stephen King source material (even though King famously hates this movie), and its staying power among many a horror-movie marathon (I first saw this at a junior-high sleepover, and I know a lot of movie geeks who had a similar experience). And that's all well and good, but it does undersell how deeply, profoundly alienating so much of The Shining is. This might have been people's first horror film, but it was also likely their first art film. For a movie about a haunted ski resort that turns winter caretaker Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson, who would go this big only three times in his career: here, Tim Burton's Batman, and Martin Scorsese's The Departed) into a murderous psychopath, the North American cut of The Shining is in no rush to get to the spooky stuff. Kubrick lets scenes play out for much longer than you might expect. We get Jack's interview for the caretaker gig, and in what feels like real time. Once he and his family (Danny Lloyd and the great Shelley Duvall) arrive at the resort, Kubrick includes scenes of them cooking dinner, shoveling snow, and struggling with writer's block. Sure, he'll deliver a good jolt every so often (the ghoul in Room 237; the twin specters that roam the hotel), but he's also not afraid to flirt with tedium in a manner not dissimilar from, I kid you not, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. By the end, we're going as squirrely as Jack, and that's when Kubrick has us in his trap - he wanted us to crave murder as much as his protagonist. If I've one complaint about Warner's 4K set, it's that it only presents the North American cut and not the U.K. version as well, which is rumored to be Kubrick's preferred version. The two are a fascinating study in opposites. If the long (144 minutes) North American version immerses you tick-deep in the Torrances' situation, then the shorter (118 minutes) U.K. version plays like a streamlined thriller, one that uses Jack's abusive history as a mid-film twist and barrels towards its surreal finale. It is a completely different viewing experience, and one that Shining fans deserve to see.
Of the film's 4K transfer, Randy Miller III wrote "what a difference 12 years can make. Warner Bros.' outstanding new 2160p transfer is easily one of the most film-like and natural 4K presentations I've seen for a catalog title to date, and obviously represents a giant leap beyond their own 2007 Blu-ray. The restoration was sourced from a new 4K scan of The Shining's original 35mm camera negative conducted at WB's Motion Picture Imaging facility, with the updated press release also stating that filmmaker Steven Spielberg and Kubrick's long-time personal assistant Leon Vitali were very closely involved during the entire process. The key differences here are image detail and color, both of which have improved greatly: textures and overall image stability are now rock-solid, immediately evident by the opening sequence's breathtaking helicopter footage and further highlighted in the Overlook Hotel's cavernous but cozy interiors. Natural light filtering through its windows offers yet another improvement, aided greatly by the new remaster's much more refined contrast levels and greater amount of shadow detail. Even the film's snowy climax looks better, largely due to its slightly more muted hue - the Blu-ray was noticeably pushed towards cyan, which now looks quite a bit more artificial in direct comparison. HDR is a prime factor here: it tastefully tweaks certain scenes in subtle but noticeable ways, from the interiors of Dick Halloran's Miami apartment during a nighttime phone call to the searing red interiors of the Overlook Hotel's restroom."
The other big Warner 4K crowdpleaser is Joe Dante's 1984 smash Gremlins. On David Sims and Griffin Newman's great podcast Blank Check, the two hosts define a cinematic blank check as the film (or films) directors get to make after they've had some massive financial success. And I mention that because while I don't think Gremlins is Dante's most technically accomplished film (that'd be either Innerspace or The 'Burbs) or even his most personal one (his lovely, warm Matinee), it is the one that gave Dante his blank check (Gremlins 2, but that's a conversation for another day). Both the biggest hit of Dante's career (it grossed almost three times more than his second-highest grosser, the underrated Gremlins riff Small Soldiers) and the fourth highest-grossing film of 1984 (and this was a year that included Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), Gremlins monetized Dante's brand. While fans of The Howling and his Twilight Zone segment knew Dante as a pop ironist with a yen for Looney Tunes cartoons and '50s culture, Gremlins filtered his style through both the populist sensibilities of executive producer Steven Spielberg and the prestige of Warner Brothers. Essentially, it's a slightly glib monster-movie: after buying his son (Zach Galligan) a strange new pet (voiced by Howie Mandel, of all people) for Christmas, an inventor (musician Hoyt Axton) unwittingly unleashes a horde of vicious little beasts in his Norman Rockwell-esque small town. There's a certain subversive appeal in watching the titular character tear through Suburban America, but by and large, this setup lets Dante stage his own version of a Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the latter of which he name-checks twice (Galligan watches it on late-night TV, and the Gremlins emerge from disgusting pods that aren't far removed from the Pod People's incubation sacs). Sure, Dante weaves in enough of his puckish humor to keep things interesting. Phoebe Cates's winsome love interest has a horrifying/funny monologue about Santa Claus, and I've always loved how Dante's handling of the Mrs. Deagle character lets him stage an alternate version of It's a Wonderful Life wherein Mr. Potter is violently murdered for his transgressions against the community. But Dante keeps a lot of his weirdest sensibilities in check, content to stage a bunch of wild attack sequences and coast off Chris Walas' still-stunning practical effects work. You see why it was such a big hit. Shame he never had another one this big, but we'll always have Paris (Gremlins), I suppose.
Finally, Warner's last big 4K title is Guillermo Del Toro's shivery Pan's Labyrinth. Del Toro makes children's movies for adults. Sometimes that instinct turns his features into extended exercises in viscera: he pores over his nauseating Reaper vampires in Blade II with all the clinical zeal of some kids examining a dead animal carcass on the road. Sometimes he faceplants, as with the disappointing Crimson Peak, which struggled to marry the emotional intelligence of a thirteen-year-old girl to the graphic FX details of a Fangoria spread. And sometimes he creates magic, as with Pan's Labyrinth's dazzling fantasy. The third part of a loose trilogy that began with Cronos and The Devil's Backbone (both of which are Del Toro's other perfectly pitched fables-for-adults), Pan's Labyrinth takes viewers to the bloody aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Horrified by the actions of her new fascist stepfather (the revolting Sergi López, who's essentially playing the Big Bad Wolf), young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) retreats inside a fantasy world of mythical creatures and ancient prophecies, but she isn't prepared for when her escape grows just as disturbing as anything in the real world. If there's anything for which I might criticize Del Toro, it's that he once claimed that he tried to foreground the cruelty of the fairy-tale world by underplaying the violence in the real world, and this assertion (I forget where he said it) is complete nonsense. We see Lopez cave in a man's face with a wine bottle, a punishment that remains unmatched until someone subjects Lopez to a particularly grisly form of mutilation. Nothing we see in Ofelia's dreams - a giant cave frog vomiting up its own guts, a fairy-eating "Pale Man" who sees through eyes embedded in his hands - has the same blunt-force impact, if only because the fantasy setting does dull the sting of the violence. But Del Toro's misconception is our gain. Try as she might, Ofelia can't hide from the world's horrors - even her imagination starts acting against her. The situation lends the film a hard-edged realism that is often lacking from Del Toro's works. Sure, the movie nerd who obsesses over screen monsters is present (and I haven't even mentioned Doug Jones's title character, who remains a stunning example of practical makeup work), but we also see the man whose father got kidnapped when Del Toro was a boy, who knows what people will do to each other when they're feeling petty and small and weak. That second guy is in charge for most of Pan's Labyrinth's increasingly bleak second half, where all the magic in the world can't help his protagonists dodge a real gut-punch of an ending. This film is still Del Toro's high-water mark, and I wonder if he'll ever top it.
Note: Please enjoy the following video interview with Guillermo Del Toro that Warner provided.