For the week of December 2nd, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing the horror-comedy Ready or Not to Blu-ray. The majority of the characters here are borne of (or married into) the Le Domas line (led by Henry Czerny and Andie MacDowell's sneeringly contemptuous twits), a board-game empire that gained its fortune after an ancestor ostensibly challenged the Devil (here called "Mr. Le Bail") to some games of chance. Now the Le Domas clan lives in gilded luxury, but their status comes with a price: whenever someone marries into the family, the new bride/groom picks a game at random and is forced to play it all night. Most people get Chess or Go Fish. But when the spirited Grace (Samara Weaving) draws "Hide and Seek," she's got to evade the Le Domas clan (including her own husband, played by Halt and Catch Fire's Mark O'Brien) as they stalk her with guns and crossbows, hoping to offer her up as a sacrifice to Mr. Le Bail. In the film's most inspired conceit, Grace is a former foster kid, and the social irony of the rich literally preying on the poor is not lost on us. In the film's *second* most inspired conceit, the Le Domases are so coddled and distant that they're pretty incompetent when it comes to attacking Grace. Emilie (Melanie Scrofano) has a coke addiction and keeps absentmindedly shooting the wrong people; Fitch (Kristian Bruun) has to go on YouTube to figure out how his crossbow works. The message couldn't be clearer: the rich are venal, bloodthirsty, and utterly unworthy of their vast privilege. Yet the movie keeps idling when you want it to go for the jugular. I rather enjoyed the first high-profile gig from Radio Silence (the pairing of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett); they did the "10/31/98" segment from V/H/S, but here, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett favor instead a lot of indistinct handheld coverage and medium shots. We don't get one memorable setpiece or kill, which wouldn't be an issue if the movie were funnier, but it mostly bungles all its comic potential. Czerny and MacDowell hit exactly the right notes (they seem like walking New Yorker parodies of the rich), and there's a ghoulish running gag where the family keeps killing their maids instead of Grace (all of Said Maids are young, hot, and scantily clad); minus those exceptions, it's lots of funny premises and no follow-through. Most disappointing is the ending. All throughout the film, there's an open question as to whether or not the Le Domases are in thrall to Satan or just crazy. The big finale gives us a brutally funny answer to that question...and then quickly shifts gears into something bloodier but way less amusing. If anything is exceptional here, it's Weaving, who's got a surprisingly goofy grin and a host of oddball mannerisms that make Grace interesting to watch even when the movie around her isn't doing much. I first noticed Weaving in <Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri ; she plays John Hawkes' dim teenage girlfriend, a problematic role that Weaving makes memorable the same way you remember Brad Pitt from True Romance. The best moment in Ready or Not comes when Grace catches a glimpse of herself in a bloodstained wedding dress holding a shotgun and sporting ragged Chuck Taylors. She looks like a bonafide horror heroine, but Weaving plays the moment for disgust. It's a neat little subversion in a movie that desperately craves more of them.
Speaking of horror-comedies: the pinnacle for many folks (this writer included) is John Carpenter's kung-fu/slapstick/supernatural buddy picture Big Trouble in Little China, which Shout Factory is upgrading for a new special edition. Carpenter has ruefully lamented being "ahead of his time," in that his best films tend to flop horribly upon release only to find widespread approval on home media years later. I imagine that in 1986, Big Trouble in Little China must have felt like a bait-and-switch. The marketing materials sold it like an Asian-inflected Indiana Jones, with Kurt Russell's brash trucker venturing into San Francisco's supernatural underworld in order to save a missing woman (Suzee Pai) from an undead Chinese emperor (the great James Hong). And sure, that logline fits the movie, which is chock-a-block with monsters and magic and high-wire martial arts: Carpenter has joked that if he released this same movie right after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Big Trouble would have been a huge hit. But most Big Trouble plot synopses won't convey how the film deeply, gleeful subverts all expectations as it's racing along. Chief among those subversions: Russell's Jack Burton, who is less Indiana Jones that he is Ron Burgundy with even less self-awareness. Russell plays Burton as a caricature of conventional masculinity. Sure, Burton swaggers like John Wayne and spends most of the movie in a white tank top in order to show off his muscles, but he's also incredibly stupid (there's a wonderful supercut of all the times he has to ask someone what the hell is going on) and way less capable than his cocksure attitude suggests. More often than not, he's getting beaten up or knocked out, leaving the actual heavy-lifting to his "sidekick," who, as played by Dennis Dun, is 1000 times braver, stronger, and more intelligent than our nominal hero. As always, Carpenter has gotten the last laugh; now audiences are used to the action hero who's mostly useless (Martin Lawrence has made a whole career out of the practice). Still, watch Big Trouble in Little China and marvel at how tall Carpenter still stands above his imitators. A genre masterpiece.
Warner Home Entertainment's long-awaited Goldfinch adaptation should have been the film to beat this year. Take one of the most celebrated novels of the 21st Century - Donna Tartt's 2014 Pulitzer Prize Winner - bring in Brooklyn's John Crowley, assemble an almost ludicrously over-qualified cast (Denis O'Hare, Luke Wilson, Sarah Paulson, Finn Wolfhard, Jeffrey Wright, and Nicole Freakin' Kidman), and have ace DP Roger Deakins burnish them all to an Oscar-worthy sheen. And to be fair, this film version certainly conveys the requisite prestige to which The Goldfinch aspires. For all the high melodrama of its subject matter - a disturbed young man (Angel Elgort) spirals into drug addiction and violence in the wake of his mother's death - the film never seems anything less than An Important Piece of Serious Art. It's very much of a piece with its titular painting - Deakins crafts immaculate frames, weighty with psychological import - and the actors approach the material in the hushed registers you'd bring to a museum showing. Yet the film is so concerned with its own significance that it never engages you emotionally or intellectually. There's no forward momentum here, just this inert reverence to Tartt's source material. Part of that, I blame on Peter Straughan's screenplay, which presents the bracing incident of the text - a bombing, a murder or two, an art heist, a number of failed romantic couplings - with the dutiful formality of a checklist. Still, I'm a little aghast that Crowley, whose Brooklyn was so immediately empathetic and heartfelt, couldn't wring any emotion out of The Goldfinch's deep reservoir of trauma. Those elements that connect do so almost despite the film. No one is better at finding humanity in the emotionally reserved than Kidman, and Wright is even better as Elgort's de facto guardian. But by and large, you spend the vast majority of The Goldfinch waiting to feel something, and then the credits roll.
Randy Miller III found more to like in the film, writing that "while it's possible that my semi-appreciation for The Goldfinch might simply be due to arriving late and with lowered expectations, I just can't understand what all the hate is about. It's certainly not on the level of a film that deserved to earn back only 20% of its production budget; the poor returns made Warner Bros. cancel the 4K release, and this Blu-ray was even on the chopping block for a short time. Luckily its arrival in 1080p means that Deakins' cinematography gets some much-needed support, and boy does it: this is easily one of the year's best-looking Blu-rays, while the audio and mix and extras - both a bit limited, but in different ways - are enjoyable in their own right. It all adds up to a solid overall package that, with any luck, will earn The Goldfinch more love that ticket sales ever did."