For the week of October 7th, Pixar and Walt Disney Home Entertainment's Toy Story 4 is coming to Blu-ray. What makes Toy Story Pixar's most enduring franchise is its willingness to reflect some core human unease. If a whole generation of kids learned about death watching Woody and Co. slowly lowered into the incinerator at the end of Toy Story 3, then the melancholic, affecting Toy Story 4 pivots from physical death to emotional irrelevancy. After Bonnie (voiced by Madeleine McGraw) loses her new favorite toy Forky (Tony Hale) on a road trip, Woody (Tom Hanks, natch) embarks on a desperate quest to save Forky, only to fall into the orbit of an unhinged "Gabby Gabby Doll" (Christina Hendricks, the new film's MVP) with a psychotic need for love and a horde of terrifying ventriloquist dummies ready to do her bidding. What elevates the film beyond this rote setup is how thoroughly director Josh Cooley and writers Andrew Stanton & Stephany Folsom (with an assist from Will McCormack and Rashida Jones) suffuse this formula with regret. Woody is no longer the top toy - Bonnie likes him, but not as much as Joan Cusack's Jessie or Forky, and even Dolly (Bonnie Hunt) has supplanted him as general manager of all things toy bureaucracy. He's trying to put on a good face, but he just can't deal with not being in charge. Pixar does some of their subtlest, most interesting sociopolitical commentary here. It's no accident that Woody doesn't know how to handle playing second-fiddle to a woman, or that in his increasingly desperate attempts to stay relevant in a world that's moving past him, Woody resembles nothing more than a boomer unwilling to step down and let new voices assume responsibility. And if all that wasn't clear, most of the film is set inside an antiques store where old toys collect dust and take up space. The message is clear: adapt or die. Yet for the first time in the Toy Story universe, that word - obsolescence - isn't a bad one. Woody's problem isn't that he's old. It's that he doesn't want to change. Enter Bo Peep (a phenomenal Annie Potts). Long relegated to the peripheries of these movies (she's not even in Toy Story 3), Bo is practically the second lead. She's been cast out, a lost toy through and through, except exile has liberated Bo. Pixar even includes a nice little in-joke at its own expense: in the past, the writers would shelve Bo because they thought her porcelain frame made her too fragile, but now she carries tape everywhere she goes so she can patch herself up in the diciest of scrapes. She's found new purpose living on her own, and her spirit makes Woody question his own role in the world. All those ideas, of longing, of purpose, of new beginnings, start paying off in triplicate. Do not be surprised at the speed with which you go from glassy-eyed to open-mouthed sobbing. And the film earns its tears. Unlike, say, the fun-but-shallow Incredibles 2, the film respects these deeper themes and the histories of the characters. By the time Toy Story 4 reaches its perfect final line, we feel like we've reached the best kind of ending, one that affords our heroes grace while definitively concluding their stories. Here's hoping this is Pixar's last sequel for a while. It's a hell of a curtain call.
Martin Liebman wrote that "Pixar makes movies audiences can invest into, not simply watch from afar, movies with a fabric of family and not simply names and faces performing empty actions. Toy Story 4 does well in balancing the process of advancing its established characters - notably Woody but also Bo Peep, who has been thrust into a primary role - while building new characters from the ground-up, characters with identifiable personality and purpose who do not just fit a plot point of convenience but rather make a difference in expanding the world and opening the heart. The film does struggle, at times, to build a wholly unique identity. It does recycle some core dramatic content and essential themes about belonging and purpose and loyalty, but director Josh Cooley, his animators, and his voice actors accomplish what should be impossible: making a fourth film in a series that seemed to finish after its third feel not only relevant but required, not recycled but real"
Speaking of curtain calls: HBO Home Entertainment is releasing the great Deadwood movie this week. Had this new Deadwood just offered one last opportunity to luxuriate in creator David Milch's beautiful gutter poetry, I'd declare it a rousing success. From that standpoint alone, the movie is easily the most successful years later IP revival that I've ever seen. About the only problem I have is that it's not six - or twelve - hours long, but to its core, this feels like Deadwood. The buildings might be a little nicer (development has brought electricity and mason work to Deadwood), and the actors a little older (save for Robin Weigert, Molly Parker, and Gerard McRainey, the three of whom haven't aged one day in the intervening thirteen years), but the milieu and dialogue all feel like coming home. Milch and director Daniel Minahan pack the movie with incident. On the eve of South Dakota's impending statehood, the venal tycoon/senator George Hearst (McRainey) decides to assert his authority over Deadwood, thus putting him in the crosshairs of now-U.S. Marshal Seth Bullock (the vocation change feels like a sly reference to Olyphant's Marshal Raylan Givens on the Deadwood-inflected Justified) and a couple dozen of Deadwood's scoundrels, saints, and hangers-on. You will likely find that at least one of your favorite characters doesn't get enough to do as you'd hope, and the ending leaves many significant plot elements just-this-right-side of unresolved. But we spend a little time checking in with everyone, all of whom get one (or two) great scenes. Yet Deadwood also weaponizes the elapsed time against its cast and, by proxy, us. For all its generosity of spirit and wit, this movie regards the end in a way the Season Three finale did not. To a person, everyone here is aware of the years: of what came before (hence the brief-but-vital flashbacks at key points) and what's coming after. The Deadwood revival, then, feels like an autumnal work, and never more so when detailing the slow, strangely noble passing of McShane's Al Swearengen. Once the clear lion of Deadwood, Al enters the movie rattled by an infection of the liver. He's never seemed this small, this weak (and remember: we once saw Al rally after a stroke and The Worst Kidney Stone Known to Man), and the film never misses a chance to undermine his authority. For McShane, this development gives him untold layers to mine, not least of which is Al's surprising acceptance of the unknown. Truth be told, it's hard to see Al and not think of Milch, the brilliant television auteur who only recently made public his battle with Alzheimer's. I'm not going to speak in depth on the subject; you can read Milch discuss his condition with more eloquence than I could ever convey here. Like Al, Milch's own degeneration plays like an ironic joke. Take the most febrile mind in Hollywood, and then strip it away, piece by piece. So it's fitting, then, that if this is to be Milch's last TV hurrah (and he's intimated as such), he, too, goes out as himself, dimmed by time but not extinguished, and in full measure of strengths and weaknesses alike. Someone wiser than myself once said, "All bleeding stops eventually." With Deadwood, we get to watch it flow, until it doesn't. How glorious, and how devastating.
You'd have to go back to John Landis' An American Werewolf in London to see a filmmaker who delights in foreshadowing his characters' grisly fates as much as director Ari Aster's does in his ghoulish and mordantly funny Midsommar, which hits Blu-ray courtesy of A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment. Frame 1 of Werewolf plunked our heroes into a truck full of sheep (lambs to the slaughter, you see); Midsommar saves its nastiest shock for the cold open, a seven-minute aria of pain that finds young Dani Ardor (the brilliant Florence Pugh) at odds with her oafish boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor, in what feels like a Barry Lyndon-esque example of weaponized typecasting). It is clear that these two people should not be dating - he is breathtakingly indifferent to her emotional needs, and she, to be fair, is more than a little clingy - and Aster mines so much agony from how Christian's lazy self-absorption sends Dani into Ativan-seeking bouts of anxiety. And all the while, Aster keeps cutting back to Dani's childhood home in wintry Middle America, her parents slumbering under the night sky even as Dani frets over the "dark" email she got from her sister, and...well, if you've seen Hereditary, you'll have a sense of the brutal sting that kickstarts the opening credit sequence. What transpires at the end of the first act obliterates any sense of security we might have had going into the picture. Horrible things continue to occur at a steady clip - Dani, Christian, and his three grad school buddies (Vilhelm Blomgren, William Jackson Harper, and a magnificently douchey Will Poulter) head to Sweden for a mid-summer festival that's adjacent to the one that ended The Wicker Man - but we're never surprised at the violent chaos because the movie has already primed us to expect the worst. What we get, then, is a slow walk to the gallows. Yet Midsommar retains this feverish, almost antic sense of tone. Midsommar represents a major leveling-up for Aster in pretty much every regard. Along with his ace production designer Henrik Svensson, Aster built the whole village in camera - the aesthetics keep you on edge as much as the gory plot twists or the Haxan Cloak's droning, insidious original score. When all hell does break loose at the film's hallucinatory "ättestupa" setpiece, Aster uses surrealism to cut the tension, giving us a fever dream that's part Sergio Leone, part Alejandro Jodorowsky. That most of the horror unfolds in full daylight only adds to Midsommar's pitched derangement. Aster makes no attempt to hide how bad things are getting, staging abhorrent depravities under sunny skies and in placid green fields. It's more than a little funny. Aster's characters encounter one ominous, brightly lit harbinger of doom after another, and still they bumble closer to destruction. Especially the men, who are so consistently, staggeringly dumb. Watching the film subject these stupid, stupid boys to the worst kind of pagan horrors proves satisfying and richly amusing. Like David Robert Mitchell did with Under the Silver Lake, Aster wants to filet a very odious type of toxic masculinity. But for Dani, Midsommar provides a journey of self-actualization. She becomes, as Aster noted on The Big Picture podcast, the heroine of a gruesome-but-traditional fairy tale. Dani wants community and love, and she's not getting it from her jerkface boyfriend. By comparison, this weirdo cult butchers people for specious sociopolitical ends, but at least the various members treat one another with respect and compassion before the inevitable bloodletting. Midsommar concludes on a note of apocalyptic horror, except we don't leave the theater drained. Pugh's presence tinges it with hope - the possibility of some greater connection - and that might be the one thing we don't see coming.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that the film "depends on a steadily growing feeling of unease to establish its supposed 'horror movie' ambience, more so than delivering a series of gory imagery (though Midsommar does in fact feature some of that as well). While some of the underlying plot dynamics of the film are going to be nothing new for some, the film does a rather effective job of developing an oppressive, almost paranoiac, mood that helps to elevate some of its sillier aspects, including the fact that Dani spends most of the film either hysterical or in a stupor (and, frankly, at times in a hysterical stupor). Aster seems to want to hint at ambiguity at times without ever totally going there (especially in terms of some of the characters having been 'under the influence' when certain events occur), and in fact if the film fails to register for some, it may be because it's actually too literal for its own good."
On the other hand, you'll be able to predict exactly where Annabelle Comes Home is going five-to-ten minutes before it gets there. The film is the latest in Warner and New Line's Conjuring Universe, which is rivaled only by the MCU in terms of consistent franchise output. Why, just this year, we've seen the release of both this and The Curse of la Llorona, with a third Conjuring movie slated for 2020. What's both interesting and a little disappointing about Annabelle Comes Home is how strongly it tries to yoke together many of the pictures in the series. To wit: although Annabelle was initially spun off the first Conjuring for a successful two-film run, this third film almost acts like The Conjuring 2.5. We begin with the Warrens (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), who are retrieving the cursed doll after another run of demonic mayhem. This part of the film is best: Wilson and Farmiga are so warm and charming, and series architect Gary Dauberman (making his directorial debut here) stages a nicely creepy setpiece as the Warrens head home. Their car breaks down in front of an old cemetery, with Annabelle grinning placidly as the mist (and worse!) rolls over their vehicle. Dauberman has a lot of fun pitting the Warrens' genial good faith against an ever-more aggressive spirit presence. But after the cold open, the senior Warrens promptly exit the picture, Annabelle gets loosed from her spirit cage, and we shift focus to Warren daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace) and her babysitter Mary Ellen (Jumanji 2's Madison Iseman) as they try to survive an onslaught of ghouls over one very long day. Credit to Dauberman for inventing three existentially unsettling new threats: a cursed TV that sees your fate seconds before you do, the bouncily disturbing board game Feeley Meeley that Judy and Mary Ellen make the mistake of playing, and the horrifying Ferryman who secretes coins from his eyes (I would be amazed if the Ferryman doesn't get his own spinoff). But a good portion of Annabelle Comes Home feels slight, like we're watching an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode instead of The Avengers. Even though Grace and Iseman are likeable, they're never as compelling as Farmiga and Wilson, although Katie Sarife fares better as Mary Ellen's mischievous best friend who has an unexpected (and problematic) melancholy streak. And a lot of the scares feel recycled. The Bride looks like a mash-up between La Llorona and The Nun (it doesn't help that her big entrance is very similar to the Nun's scariest moment in The Conjuring 2), and the film doubles down on beast monsters with both the Annabelle demon and the werewolf-like Black Shuck. Annabelle Comes Home is never boring, and it maintains a decent hold as you're watching it. It just evaporates as soon as the credits roll.
Of Annabelle Comes Home, Randy Miller III wrote that "The movie's focus gradually shifts from Ed and Lorraine to Judy and Mary Ellen and ultimately, and most interestingly to Daniela, a teenage girl whose father tragically died in a car accident and with whom she has been trying to communicate. She hopes that by mere presence in the Warren house she will have better luck, and when she stumbles upon the artifact room, she comes to realize that there's more to the spirit world than peaceful reconnection with the dearly departed. The movie is both slowly paced and narratively unrewarding as it powers through the motions, as things transition from perfectly normal to paranormally intense. The story maneuvers through effective, but unimaginative, atmosphere but does find hearty engagement in the final few minutes as various demons and other supernatural riffraff enter the picture, but is it enough to save a movie that feels made by rote and from spare parts and recycled concepts? Not really."
It would be a tad imprecise to call any of the films in Criterion's 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg modern. All three features - Underworld, The Last Command, and The Docks of New York - are very much products of the silent era; they're awash in impressionistic mise-en-scene, exaggerated acting, and somewhat stagy approach to blocking and location (with the exception of The Last Command, these movies each unfold in only a couple of spaces a piece). Yet von Sternberg cultivates an attitude that feels ahead of its time. You get the sense that all of the contemporary filmmakers who matter took their cues from von Sternberg's command of ambivalent morality and postmodern thematics. 1927's Underworld, for example, offers a gangland melodrama that has no interest in condemning its criminal protagonists; von Sternberg loves their bad behavior just as Howard Hawks fell hook, line, and sinker for Paul Muni in Scarface and Martin Scorsese did for the world of Henry Hill in GoodFellas. There's very little moralizing about the wages of sin here because everyone's having too much fun. And von Sternberg was just as playful when looking at his own industry. Case in point: the 1928 Hollywood farrago The Last Command, which follows the tragic decline of a Russian czar (Emil Jannings) from Grand Duke to penniless background extra. In his meld of fantasy and reality, past and present, von Sternberg presents a surrealist exposé of power within the movie business that recalls both Barton Fink and Adaptation. What von Sternberg does in this set's last film - 1929's The Docks of New York - is subtler but no less revolutionary. On the surface, he's making a pre-Code saga of love and loss in the New York Harbor (The Docks of New York is much racier than I expected), but he does so by structuring the film as a silent hangout picture, of all things. Just like Only Angels Have Wings or Dazed and Confused, we learn so much about this world just by hanging back and observing von Sternberg's rich stew of bums, tramps, and working men. All three films look like silent cinema but act like they've sprung from the sound era - you marvel at the cognitive dissonance between the silent era and the contemporary attitudes.