For the week of October 21st, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is offering a 4K upgrade to the box-office hit Charlie's Angels as well as a regular Blu-ray edition of its much maligned sequel, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. I say this with total and utter sincerity: the 2000 Charlie's Angels is kind of a miracle. By all accounts, the film's progression to the big screen was only slightly less torturous than the Bataan Death March. After various film adaptations got stuck in development hell following the original TV series end, Drew Barrymore's production company put together a version with an untested director (McG, then best known for directing the "All Star" and "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)" music videos) and basically no working script. From what I gather, Sony had John August on set rewriting Ryan Rowe and Ed Solomon's screenplay in real time, a text that only came together after Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman, Steve Pink, and D.V. DeVincentis submitted failed drafts. Still, that didn't stop Bill Murray (who plays Bosley) from coming in with his guy Mitch Glazer to rework all his scenes, but I guess that's preferable to the never-ending feuds between Murray and Lucy Liu that gobbled up shooting time. Depending on who's talking, Liu tried to attack Murray, or Murray tried to attack McG because he was so pissed at Liu. And yet the finished project is one of the most sheerly enjoyable studio pictures of the Aughts. This is 21 Jump Street before 21 Jump Street: a TV-to-big screen reboot that spoofs the original series' conventions while faithfully honoring them. That means we get all sorts of horndog outfits and poses involving Barrymore, Liu, and Cameron Diaz (who has never been more likable or engaging on screen), except our three leads are in on the joke - they make it so the more ludicrous they look, the funnier the movie is. In addition, the film satisfies as an action spectacular, with Cheung-Yan Yuen choreographing some blistering fight sequences (the best being a three-on-one brawl between the Angels and Crispin Glover's Thin Man that McG scores to Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up") and McG displaying a sure command of spatial choreography. Everything here just works, from Sam Rockwell's deceptively goofy tech billionaire to the litany of callbacks to the show. Even Murray is so in the pocket: it's one of his funniest supporting performances. Of course, Full Throttle had to go and mess everything up (only Liu comes out of that film with her dignity intact), but we'll always have the first one.
Only time will tell, but I suspect that we'll regard Daniel Craig as the best actor to ever play James Bond. Sean Connery might have been more iconic, and Pierce Brosnan might have been more poised, but Craig possesses emotional registers that are far more nuanced and surprising than the Men Who Would Be Bond usually have. However, Fox's new 4K 007: The Daniel Craig Collection reveals that while MGM, EON, Sony, and Fox may have shown great prudence in selecting Craig, they couldn't have treated him to a more inconsistent slate of franchise adventures. Certainly they got off to a good start: 2006's Casino Royale does a thrilling job of rebooting Bond. The film has some of the series' best setpieces - the opening parkour chase is an all-timer, and the sinking Venice mansion climax manages some genuine pathos amidst all the destruction - and it effectively capitalizes on everything that's interesting about Craig. As Judi Dench's M observes, his Bond is a "blunt instrument" capable of savage violence (vide the pre-credits sequence, wherein Bond destroys a bathroom and slowly drowns a target in order to earn part of his "00" status), but Craig slowly reveals that he lashes out to keep anyone from realizing how lonely and scared he really is. When MI6 operative Vesper Lynd (Eva Green, who should have gotten a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work here) enters his life, Bond experiences a human connection more traumatic than the ghoulish torture he receives at the hands of Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen, who's slightly underused here). Casino Royale isn't perfect. The poker scenes drag, and as with all Bonds, it's twenty minutes too long. Still, it examines the character better than almost any other Bond adventure. I wish that I could say the same about Quantum of Solace, the disappointing 2008 follow-up. In theory, this picture is a direct continuation of Casino Royale, watching as Bond tries to untangle the emotional and geopolitical unrest he feels in the wake of that film's most personal betrayal, except Quantum came together during a writer's strike, and it shows. Plot events happen as if at random, and for a film that's ostensibly about Bond's damaged internal states, we spend too much time lurching through frenetically edited action sequences to get any sense of how Bond has developed as a person. At 106 minutes, Quantum of Solace is the shortest of the recent Bonds, which would be a plus save for the fact that the movie feels much, much longer. 2012's Skyfall, then, feels like a return to both a proper Bond adventure and to what Craig can do as an actor. It's a narratively indulgent, needlessly convoluted thriller that has elegantly structured action and the most beautiful cinematography of any Bond movie (if nothing else, you can coast off Roger Deakins' gorgeous widescreen photography). And Craig is just splendid. The first seventy minute might be a bit of a slog, but Craig's haunted visage powers you through, and once Javier Bardem's terrifying Big Bad enters the picture, Skyfall makes a case for itself as the best Bond movie. We watch as Craig struggles with his own mortality and inner demons - and his verbal tete-a-tetes with both Bardem and Dench do a brilliant job of articulating these conflicts - so much so that his ultimate acceptance of the Bond mantle at the end plays like an earned triumph. But nothing stays gold in the Bond world. Case in point: 2015's Spectre, a bloated, uninvolving epic that offers little but canned fan service. This picture underwent massive changes as a result of the Sony hack, and almost none of them work. Outside of the opening single-take shot in Mexico and the grueling Bond-vs.-Hinx (a terrific Dave Bautista) train brawl, the action setpieces don't impress, and the script tries to retcon everything in the previous three Bonds as the backstage machinations of one Colonel Hans Landa...um, I mean, one Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz, terrible). How Spectre could undo pretty much everything that Skyfall corrects is one of the great franchise mysteries, but such is the Bond series, I guess. I just wish someone had told Craig before he accepted the offer.
Warner Archive is bringing the newest season of Veronica Mars to Blu-ray. Ignore the confusing "The Complete First Season" moniker on the box; this is technically the eight-episode Season 4 that Hulu aired this past summer. Of course, if you're already a Marshmallow (a Veronica Mars fan), then you probably already know that, and you've probably already inhaled the show's latest run, which finds an older-but-no-wiser Veronica Mars (the great Kristen Bell) fully returned to her family's P.I. business in Neptune, California. The best thing about Season 4 is how it balances Bell's irrepressibly sarcastic gumshoe against a lifetime's worth of regret and uncertainty. Much as she might like to investigate divorce scams (including one that features a very funny cameo from Eliza Coupe) and get drunk on the beach, Veronica is nearing forty and surrounded by people who can't afford to stay mired in the past. Her special-ops boyfriend Logan (Jason Dohring) has gotten into therapy and wants Veronica to join him, and her dad (Enrico Colantoni, wonderful) is suffering both cognitive and physical damage after surviving a brutal car crash. And that's before a spate of terrorist bombings rip through Neptune, putting everyone in danger and Veronica on the trail of a massive conspiracy. For anyone who thought the show had lost a step since its too-episodic third season and fan-service-y movie, fear not. Season 4 gets back to the balance of serialized storytelling and impeccable character work that made Seasons 1 and 2 so enjoyable. Bell and Colantoni make the greatest father-daughter pairing that TV has ever seen, and we meet a host of new faces, most notably a teenage girl (Izabela Vidovic) who loses her father and starts behaving in some very Veronica-esque ways and an ex-con (J.K. Simmons) with ties to both the gangland world and Neptune's biggest real-estate developer. Simmons never plays his porkpie hat-wearing smoothie as a villain: in fact, the best scenes find him and Veronica's dad falling into an easy friendship even though they both know the other guy can't be trusted. I'm not as keen on how the show weaves in two cartel assassins (Clifton Collins Jr. and Frank Gallegos, doing cut-rate Tarantino), or its use of comedian Patton Oswalt in a key role. This is Oswalt's most challenging part - he's probably the fifth most important character on the series, and he has to carry a lot of emotional baggage - and it's disappointing watching him ever-so-gently drop the ball during a crucial moment. But overall, this feels like Veronica Mars, and I'm willing to put up with some bumps if it means hanging out in the '09 again. Bring on Season Five.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering an HD version of Leon Gast's Academy Award-winning When We Were Kings. As a documentary, When We Were Kings remains a crackerjack piece of entertainment; you can go into this thing knowing almost nothing about iconic boxer Muhammad Ali (as I knew almost nothing back in 1996) and come out of it with your world expanded. Such is the facility with which Gast conveys Ali's travails during his 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" bout in Zaire against George Foreman's young upstart. Gast covers so much ground in just over ninety minutes. We get a sense of the sociopolitical currents moving behind the bout, with fight promoter Don King trying to capitalize on Ali's big redemption after years of being struggles against various states' athletic commissions. At times, the film functions as a character study of two very different men, the gregarious Ali adapting to the media circus in Africa far better than the more taciturn Foreman. Speaking of media circuses, Gast even makes time for a little coverage on the soul music festival that King used to accompany the fight (Criterion's Blu-ray also contains Jeff Kusama-Hinte's Soul Power, which focuses exclusively on the concert and is a must-watch in its own right). We even feel like amateur boxing experts by the film's stirring conclusion – Gast delves into the mechanics behind Ali's famed "Rope-a-Dope" strategy against the more physically powerful Foreman. When We Were Kings is so good, it makes other movies suffer by comparison. I respect what Michael Mann is getting at with his impressionistic biopic Ali, but when that film just turns into a truncated version of When We Were Kings, I start yearning for the real thing. Essential viewing.