For the week of January 20th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Pedro Almodóvar's semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory to Blu-ray, and with it, its astounding lead performance from Antonio Banderas. As leading men go, Banderas has made his name off his emotional vibrancy: even when he's playing a conventional tough guy (like the Mariachi for Robert Rodriguez or the title character in Martin Campbell's great The Mask of Zorro), he's so emotionally voluble that every expression plays like a grand aria. But I don't think he's ever been as quietly staggering as he is here. Like Almodóvar himself, Banderas' Salvador Mallo is an iconic Spanish director, yet as Mallo enters late middle-age, he finds himself increasingly racked with physical agonies, not least of which are a wrenching cough that leaves him unable to eat or drink much and a lingering back complication so painful that the very act of movement seems an arduous punishment (in a nice touch, Mallo has started wearing moccasins because it's too painful to tie shoe laces). You might expect Banderas, then, to assay Mallo's discomfort with all the fire he brought to his early collaborations with Almodóvar (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down). Instead, Banderas retreats inward, letting his frustrations seep out as nearly imperceptible micro-expressions. Part of that decision, I'm sure, comes from Mallo's late-stage pivot into heroin usage. To my surprise, much of Pain and Glory functions as a wry, almost wholly nonjudgmental drug movie: Almodóvar has never been a moralist, and he sees no crime in letting his on-screen proxy self-medicate with illicit drugs if it means a few hours relief from excruciating pain. But Banderas also seems liberated by his own restraint, like he's testing how much he can convey with the absolute minimum of physical and emotional signifiers. It's the best performance he's ever given. Throughout the film, we see Mallo navigating the emotional minefields studding his past - his fraught relationship with his mother (played at different times by both Penelope Cruz and Julieta Serrano), the addiction struggles of his former lover (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and leading man (Asier Etxeandia), and the pressure he feels as such a lionized figure in Spain's cultural history - and we soon see this restraint as a shield, like he's trying to withdraw from as much of this heartache as he can and still remain human. To Banderas and Almodóvar's great credit, they make both the struggle and the retreat seem fully human and something more - as heroic as any screenwriting convention.
Speaking of Sony: you can tell me that the studio is releasing a Blu-ray of Ruben Fleischer's long-belated Zombieland: Double Tap sequel, but to that, I will respond, "Incorrect - such a film does not exist." And I saw it in theaters! That's because, in theory, I was excited about another Zombieland entry. The 2009 original remains a low-key delight. We don't have many hangout movies set in the zombie apocalypse, and this one was content to downplay the menace and coast off the ample chemistry between stars Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin. Zombieland plays like a great TV pilot, and had the whole cast and crew immediately churned out a spate of similarly ambling adventures set in the same universe, we'd have had a lovely little stealth franchise. But it's been ten years, and after a series of false starts (a whole host of abandoned sequel drafts and a doomed Zombieland TV show on Amazon Prime) and career dead ends (let's just say Fleischer never became the A-Lister he wanted to be - you can blame the underwhelming 30 Minutes or Less and the terrible Gangster Squad), Double Tap feels more like a contractual obligation than a fully formed idea. I like that we open ten years later in the Zombieland universe, only the characters are behaving as if we're joining them six months after the first movie: Tallahassee (Harrelson) has become an overbearing de facto father to Little Rock (Breslin, visibly unhappy), while Columbus (Eisenberg) and Wichita (Stone, who's too big a star to be backsliding into cruddy sequels) are having the kinds of commitment issues that plague first-time lovers, not partners with a decade's worth of shared experiences. Still, we might be able to derive some enjoyment from watching the four banter, yet the movie perversely splits the group up at the end of the first act. Cue a whole lot of irritating pop culture gags (courtesy of The Expendables' Dave Callaham and Deadpool scribes Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick) and some sporadic zombie carnage, albeit staged with little of the zip that made the first movie such a treat. The end battle, which is set in a hippy commune, has neither stakes nor exciting action choreography. And then the movie just kinda stops, but not before a post-credits sequence that brings back the funniest person from the first movie for some more gags. This sequence has more laughs than anything else in the film, and it's probably on YouTube right now, so you can save yourself ninety minutes and skip right to it. I guess you can watch this for the little things. Rosario Dawson is supernaturally charming during her fifteen minutes of screentime. Zoey Deutch turns an irritating stereotype (the ditzy valley girl) into a not-unentertaining comic foil. And the post-credits bit works like gangbusters. But doing your taxes is ultimately more engaging than the "Hey, we tried" energy of this non-entity.
Speaking of pristine cult features: I don't know if you can do better than Blue Underground's immaculate presentation of the Lucio Fulci chiller The House by the Cemetery. For decades, people associated Fulci with the grimiest of the grindhouse: not only do his works traffic in lurid gore and violence (especially eye trauma...), but the extant copies also came marred with print defects and picture damage. A midnight screening of something like The House by the Cemetery or The Beyond might not look dissimilar from the affected missing reels and warped frames of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse double feature. However, what Blue Underground has done is to reveal Fulci as an aesthetician of considerable power and beauty. This 4K restoration is miraculous. Yes, the film is still gross, but it has the lush, dreamlike quality of a Hammer thriller or a Mario Bava chiller. Fulci put a lot of care into his visuals, and Blue Underground deserves all the credit in the world for restoring some of the intent to Fulci's efforts. That said, you'll notice I've talked more about how The House by the Cemetery looks, and that's because the narrative is patent nonsense. There's some stuff with a family moving into a cursed New England manse, but really, it's all just scaffolding for Fulci's camera and twisted imagination. Little about the plot or character work is all that distinctive, either by itself or in comparison with The Beyond, The New York Ripper, or Zombi 2. These movies are little more than gruesome art installations. If that sounds tedious, stay far away. For everyone else, I'll be hitting replay on my House by the Cemetery disc.
In his The House by the Cemetery Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that this "is a film of two halves. The first is slightly more coherent and focused on maintaining a strong atmosphere. It is loaded with familiar genre tricks that essentially compensate for the lack of originality in the script. There is a touch of Gothic horror here but also a degree of seriousness that effectively counters its artificiality. The second half is drastically different. It is firmly grounded in the bizarro world that Fulci's best films are known for. Unsurprisingly, there is good dose of kitsch, but the action is not over the top. Even the most explicit scenes here are not as disturbing as those regularly seen in some of his earlier films. Clearly, there is a desire to maintain some balance in the film. The film's most distinctive feature is its sound design. There are long sequences where the audio effects are far more important and far more appealing than the action. This is not to imply that these are advanced audio effects that break new boundaries, rather that they are carefully interspersed throughout the film and have very specific roles."