For the week of October 28th, Warner Home Entertainment is offering a new 4K scan of The Wizard of Oz. I know, I know - first an "Ultimate" 70th Anniversary Edition, then a 75th Collector's Edition (and in 3D, no less), and now this, Oz in 4K. Do not blame yourself if you're experiencing format fatigue. But if I may, let me offer two counter arguments as to why this 4K copy remains such an attractive proposition. One: the movie itself. There's very little that one can say about this classic 1939 fantasy that hasn't been said many times before. It is, quite simply, a perfect movie, funny and scary and moving and just the right amount of sad, and all of the songs are wonderful, too. Judy Garland has never been more engaging (and yes, I've seen Meet Me In St. Louis), and she's supported by a wonderful supporting cast that includes Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Frank Morgan, and Margaret Hamilton, whose Wicked Witch of the West remains one of the most frightening villains in cinema history. Plus, this 4K scan is building off Warner's stunning 8k restoration: the Technicolor print looks better than ever. You're likely to feel not unlike Dorothy when she first lands in Oz. But two, and most importantly: if you support high-profile 4K releases of classic titles, then studios will keep making them a priority (albeit a small one). It's no secret that we're cresting the streaming revolution, and most distributors would like nothing more than to lease you a digital feed that they can retract whenever they want to charge you again. Supporting 4K Blu-rays like The Wizard of Oz or Gremlins or The Shining tells Warner that a) you care about their back-catalog (and, by proxy, their studio history) and that b) there's still money to be made in physical media. I can think of no better way to vote with your dollar than buy supporting The Wizard of Oz.
Speaking of supporting physical 4K releases: note Paramount Home Media Distribution's 4K edition of It's a Wonderful Life. Last year, Paramount quietly debuted a 4K stream of this title (along with a few others, including George Pal's War of the Worlds adaptation) but is only now offering a 4K Blu-ray copy. I get it - we're nearing the holiday season, which harmonizes nicely with some of It's a Wonderful Life's subject matter (although more on that in a minute) - but the move towards corporate synergy does feel a little bit like neglect towards this classic title. And it deserves your attention: for my money, director Frank Capra has created the perfect melodrama, a funny, sad, and surprisingly bleak look at one George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart, giving the performance against which we measure all his other performances), a bank manager whose dreams sprawl past the confines of his small-town existence. No one has quite been able to replicate Capra's achievement here: over the course of the film's long (but not overlong) 135 minutes, Capra patiently catalogues a list of minor regrets and grievances that, aggregated over the span of a lifetime, threaten to consume Bailey. It's not that his life is bad. He's married to the most wonderful woman (Donna Reed, who manages to steal scenes from Stewart, which isn't easy); he's beloved by most in his home of Bedford Falls; and he's a perpetual thorn in the side of venal industrialist Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore, loathsome). It's just that...well, none of this is how Bailey saw his life panning out, and he can't navigate the difference between who he is and who he thought he'd be. Capra knows how dangerous this kind of insecurity is, and he lets it infect the film in ways that always surprise me. This is a decade before Stewart's more morally ambiguous work for people like Anthony Mann or Alfred Hitchcock, yet we see the beginnings of that darkness as Bailey despairs in the third act. He gets petty and low in ways that make us uncomfortable. And I'm still shocked that a major Hollywood studio (RKO) in 1946 allowed for so much of a prestige release to operate around suicide - Bailey spends a lot of the movie wondering if he should just kill himself and end his suffering, and Capra takes that pain seriously. I know that the film's reputation as a Christmas classic saved it from obscurity, but anyone who bristles at Die Hard getting branded as a Christmas movie ought to considering re-evaluating It's a Wonderful Life. Maybe twenty minutes takes place on that holiday - the rest follows Bailey's long, slow march to depression. Just a devastating piece of work.
Something has always struck me as a little curious about the Arnold Schwarzenegger actioner Red Heat, which is getting a 4K upgrade from Lionsgate Home Entertainment. It's not the film's surprising relevance to the U.S. and Russia's oft-fraught relationship. See, back in 1988, Red Heat gained notoriety for being the first American film that the then-Soviet Union allowed to shoot in Red Square. You might expect that a legitimate historical footnote like Red Heat would aspire to some level of geopolitical commentary, but you would be wrong. The Russia stuff is largely set dressing, a frame to establish Schwarzenegger's tough militia captain before whisking him off to Chicago and pairing him alongside Jim Belushi's American cop. The film plays all the hits: the Sleazy Drug Kingpin (Ed O'Ross, just one year after watching Mr. Joshua's party trick in Lethal Weapon), the Bickering Odd Couple (Schwarzenegger is a by-the-book battering ram; Belushi is an amiable schlub; so it goes), and not one, but two rotations of Avenging the Hero's Partner (O'Ross kills both of Schwarzenegger and Belushi's former partners). That said, I'm of the mindset that buddy-cop adventures are like pizza - even at their worst, they're still generally digestible - and Red Heat ranks at the "average-to-just-better-than-average" end of the spectrum, thanks largely to director Walter Hill. According to pretty much all parties involved, Red Heat entered production with a bad script and proceeded with an ever-evolving, never-fully-finished draft (Hill had a rotating set of writers like Harry Kleiner, Troy Kennedy Martin, Steven Meerson & Peter Krikes, and John Mankiewicz & Daniel Pyne), but the reason it hangs together at all is thanks to Hill. Once upon a time, he was one of the greatest genre stylists we had, and while Red Heat isn't on part with Southern Comfort or his iconic 48 Hrs., Hill gives it a certain terse professionalism and a few crackling action setpieces (the big Chicago bus chase is especially nice). Still, the film's connection to Russia and its somewhat shambling nature don't bother me - this was the '80s, after all. No, what's curious is Schwarzenegger. Not the performance - he's predictably charismatic - but his positioning: this is one of only two or three buddy pictures that the former Arnold Strong ever made. It's easy to see why. He is so striking that it's hard for anyone in a two-hander to register against him (Belushi, who isn't bad, almost seems to evaporate when the two share scenes). Maybe that why only Twins stands as his most memorable buddy vehicle - the only way to beat Arnold is to go weirder than him. Red Heat, bless its heart, is just too normal.
Finally, Kino Video is celebrating the great Martin Scorsese with two features from the GoodFellas auteur: the 1989 triptych New York Stories and 1997 Dalai Lama biopic Kundun. If we're judging cinema on structural merit alone, then New York Stories is a misfire. To wit: it's an three-story anthology film where two of its three stories are not very good. Francis Ford Coppola whiffs it the hardest with his whimsical "Life without Zoë," which follows its titular character (twelve-year-old Heather McComb) on a series of misadventures in a hotel. Coppola is shooting for whimsy - this feels like his take on an Eloise or Madeline-type fable - but as anyone who has seen One from the Heart can attest, Coppola has issues when it comes to unleavened whimsy. "Life without Zoë" feels somehow both too busy (Zoë comes into contact with stolen jewels and Middle-Eastern Princesses, all while trying to get her divorced parents back together) and somehow interminable, and Vittorio Storaro's honeyed cinematography doesn't help. Woody Allen's "Oedipus Wrecks" fares a little better - at least it's funny, particularly in the early goings when Allen's put-upon lawyer suffers the thousand small indignities of his overbearing mother (a wonderful Mae Questel). But the second half gets away from him. After staging a dark little twist at the midpoint, Allen drops another, far more absurdist surprise that might work in a New Yorker short story but overstays its welcome on screen. So why even bother with New York Stories? Easy - Scorsese's entry, "Life Lessons," damn near redeems the whole affair. I have never seen an American film so insightful about the inner realms of the creative mind, represented here by Nick Nolte's shambling artist Lionel Dobie. Through his use of music (I adore the "Whiter Shade of Pale" needle drops) and Thelma Schoonmaker's fleet editing, Scorsese makes visceral Dobie's craft, the ways inspiration hits Dobie in spurts and flashes...and how his commitment to his paintings makes him pretty much useless as a functioning person in every other way. Nolte has never been this good, and the Richard Price script is funny enough to keep the proceedings from drifting into navel-gazing. In just under an hour, Scorsese gets you to see the world in a different way. That's an achievement in its own right. Pretty much the whole of Kundun functions in a similar fashion. I have no idea how this film became an also-ran in the Scorsese catalog: it uses the Dalai Lama's story to examine faith in just as probing and unsettling a fashion as The Last Temptation of Christ or Silence. And like "Life Lessons," you experience this one in your gut. Scorsese is striving for maximum sensory overload, and he finds it through Philip Glass' pulsing score and Roger Deakins' luscious widescreen images. Not even a minor classic - Kundun is a masterpiece, full stop.