For the week of February 3rd, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep to Blu-ray. On the page, this Stephen King novel struggles to continue the adventures of Shining survivor Dan Torrance; while King writes thoughtfully about Dan's own struggles with trauma and addiction (you can sense these sections are a bit autobiographical for King), Uncle Stevie full-on loses the thread when he pits Dan and a psychically gifted, thirteen-year-old girl named Abra (as in, "Abracadabra") against a group of energy vampires (they feed off the "steam" those who have the Shining give off, and yes: it's as dumb as it sounds). King couldn't bridge the gap between the psychologically wrenching ghost story of The Shining and this fantasy-thriller premise that plays like X-Men for adults...but Flanagan can, amazingly. The film's (superior) director's cut runs a full three hours, but all of that is essential. Without it, we wouldn't fully understand how alcoholism and a lifetime of abuse have trapped Dan (a terrific Ewan McGregor) in a prison of his own regrets, nor how Dan is now able to eke out a quiet, simple life as a hospice-care orderly. Flanagan includes a number of extended sequences where Dan uses his shine to comfort the elderly before they die, and I was surprised at how thoughtful and affecting these moments are. Even more surprising: Flanagan is able to take something as silly as the villainous "True Knot" and imbue them with menace. Part of that is casting - as ringleader Rose the Hat, the great Rebecca Ferguson delivers a florid, sneering turn that reminds me of Malcolm McDowell from A Clockwork Orange - but Flanagan also brings out the tools that made his Hush and Ouija 2 so menacing. In particular, Flanagan uses horrifying understatement to the True Knot's grisly torture of a kidnapped Little League player (a very effective cameo from Jacob Tremblay). That's the Flanagan touch: moments of supernatural unease and graphic brutality happen almost as if by accident, an interruption in the human drama already at play. Now, is Doctor Sleep as good as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining? Absolutely not. But it also doesn't try to be, and I respected how Flanagan commits to improving on King's source material and pretty much stays out of Kubrick's way, resorting only occasionally to recreations of The Shining's beats and characters. If anything, Doctor Sleep falters the most during the third-act climax, which finds Dan and Abra (newcomer Kyliegh Curran) returning to the Overlook for a showdown against Rose. Some impressive production design aside, Flanagan never exploits that environment as well as Kubrick did. But the film still manages to end in a way that honors fans of both The Shining the book and The Shining the movie: the film's epilogue makes a haunting - and wordless - statement about the nature of trauma and loss. One of last year's best films.
In his Blu-ray review, Randy Miller III wrote that the director's cut "massages a few pacing issues and enjoys a smoother, more refined level of momentum from start to finish. Divided into six chapters, it can't help but feel more literary and even-handed in its overall presentation and, thanks to support from Warner Bros., is presented as a full-fledged alternate experience with completed visual effects, new soundtrack cues, and of course more character moments...as well as a few trims along the way...Assembled during post-production alongside the theatrical cut, it feels like anything but a simple afterthought and, for many, will be the definitive version of Doctor Sleep. Don't get me wrong: there are still fundamental problems that remain...but it's safe to say that if you really liked the theatrical cut, you'll probably enjoy this version even more."
From A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes Trey Edward Shults' bruising family saga Waves. How did this movie get lost in the din of all things Award Season, I wonder? Sure, it's a little unruly and aesthetically showy, and I'm not sold on its conclusion, but minute for minute, I'd be hard pressed to name a more arresting, emotionally dense 2019 release than Waves. Indiewire's David Ehrlich compared the film to Magnolia, and that feels apt, given Waves' operatic approach to human drama. This is a long, formally audacious picture that shifts between no fewer than five different aspect ratios, features impressionistic animations from colorist Damien van der Cruyssen, and thrums to an almost-nonstop soundtrack that alternates between indie hiphop and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' original score. And all in the service of the Williams clan, an upper-middle-class family living in Hollywood, Florida. The film's first half largely focuses on eldest son Trey (the remarkable Kelvin Harrison Jr.), whose ample charisma and physical prowess mask a teenager in crisis. Trey feels pressure all the time - from his father (Sterling K. Brown), from his wrestling team, from his girlfriend (Euphoria's Alexa Demie) - and like a lot of high-achieving kids his age, Trey senses that one misstep could put his whole future in jeopardy. I've never seen an American film as critical of the ways we treat "normal" teenagers as Waves is, but Shults never resorts to facile speechifying. No, Shults simply drops us inside Trey's head, until his protagonist's anxieties overwhelm us. Long stretches of Waves play like a mounting panic attack, and maybe that's why the film never caught on as it should have. For all its expert technical craft, Waves does not care if it makes you feel awful. I wanted to close my eyes during the wrenching midpoint setpiece, when all of Trey's bad decisions aggregate and splinter his family, but thankfully, Shults starts downshifting tonally, transitioning us from Trey to his younger sister Emily (Taylor Russell, all subtle, wounded power). With the same specificity, we get to experience Emily's perspective, one of great sadness and pain, yes, but also of cautious optimism. Shults knows that sometimes, when the worst thing in the world happens, it can liberate the lives of those suffering the fallout - there's literally nothing left to fear. Parts of Emily's section remind me of David Gordon Green's early work. Her lovely, understated relationship with one of Trey's former teammates (Lucas Hedges) has the delicacy of Green's All the Real Girls. It's in Shults' sensitivity, or his unforced approach to human behavior. We're so enthralled watching these people exist that we almost don't register a key pivot in the last half hour, one that shifts the focus from Russell to Hedges, and if I've any major concerns, it's that Emily ends the film almost as a spectator in her own story. Still, there are moments here I'll never forget. Whether folks saw Waves or not, this is the moment that announced Trey Edward Shults as a major filmmaker. Highly recommended.
From his 1986 breakout She's Gotta Have It to his socially provocative heist movie Inside Man twenty years later, there was no American filmmaker more electrifying than Spike Lee, and Kino Video upgrading four of his most interesting pictures with new Blu-ray editions. First - and best - is his masterful 1994 dramedy Crooklyn. Ostensibly - and this detail is bonkers if true - Spike's siblings Cinque and Joie developed Crooklyn as a pilot for Nickelodeon, and when that didn't pan out, Spike helped them retrofit their pilot script into a feature film. That improbable origin story might explain Crooklyn's best quality: its episodic approach to character and plot as it follows a summer in the life of the Carmichael family, right around 1973 or 1974. Like any great memory, the movie is hazy on the exact details, and it gains power through accretion of incident. The Carmichaels' lone daughter, eight-year-old Troy (Zelda Harris, giving one of the great unsung child performances), guides us from vignette to vignette, and in the process we gain what feels like a scattered-but-accurate picture of the family as a whole. Troy is always squabbling with her four male siblings, with Carlton Williams' Clinton her main nemesis: in retaliation for him making her watch the Knicks instead of The Partridge Family, she steals his buffalo-nickel collection to buy ice cream and hides his Knicks Vs. Celtics tickets. And all of this happens under the watch of Troy's exhausted mother (the great Alfre Woodard) and her sweetly feckless father (Delroy Lindo, all kind, deluded charm). That approach feels so honest - I was reminded of The 400 Blows or Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection in terms of how evocatively Spike captures being young, the way your ignorance functioned simultaneously as your greatest limitation and your greatest bulwark against the evils of the world. I could watch Crooklyn again tomorrow.
Almost as good are 1991's Jungle Fever and 1995's Clockers, which, taken together, offer some of Lee's harshest critiques of those ills plaguing the black community. The sneakiest is Jungle Fever. Lee sold the film as a study of interracial relationships, primarily the way society thumbs the scales against Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra's clandestine lovers (we even get a bouncy title song from Stevie Wonder announcing Lee's intentions). But while this part of the movie is good (Snipes and Sciorra are touching, and John Turturro is even better as Sciorra's sweetly optimistic ex-boyfriend), it can't compete with the B-plot. Circling the periphery is Snipes' crack-addicted brother Gator (Samuel L. Jackson), who enters an almost Biblical conflict with the brothers' judgmental father (Ossie Davis). Jackson is so magnetic that he keeps overtaking the main narrative - not for nothing, but the Cannes Film Festival basically invented an award so they could give it to Jackson. The scenes where Gator trawls New York's mean streets have a Stygian pallor, and you leave Jungle Fever feeling like you've gotten an essential glimpse into America's drug epidemic. Lee tries to expand on this idea in Clockers, albeit to more limited effect. The film began its life as a Martin Scorsese picture, and when Scorsese dropped out to make Casino (he still retains an "Executive Producer" credit), Lee took over, transforming Richard Price's source material from a battle of wills between a homicide detective (Harvey Keitel) and a vulnerable teen drug dealer (Mekhi Phifer, in his film debut) into a statement on how the drug war hurts only the most marginalized of American citizens. Lee isn't wrong, but the scenes in Clockers where he addresses this issue head-on are among the film's most didactic and cloying - we could be watching Upton Sinclair updated for the 1990s. Luckily, the crime movie stuff still plays like gangbusters. Lee has such a specificity for the vagaries of urban life – at times, we feel like we're watching a prototype for The Wire - and he does a hell of a Scorsese imitation.
You sense that Lee had Scorsese on the brain when he made 1999's Summer of Sam, a violent melodrama that bristles with the energy of Mean Streets or Who's That Knocking at My Door. For years, Lee's detractors had branded him a chronicler of black stories, and he responded with this, an epic look at how an Italian-American neighborhood in New York crumbled under the threat of the 1977 "Son of Sam" killer. That said, even if Lee attempted the project on a dare (there are only two African-American characters of note, and they have very small roles), he's so good at conveying the tone of the Bensonhurst locales that you quickly forget the provocation. Lee saturates himself in 1970s culture, from the music (including the definitive movie use of The Who's "Baba O'Riley") to keen observations of the neighborhood's varying sociological divisions: there's a hierarchy, starting with Ben Gazzara's genial mob boss and moving down, past John Leguizamo's hapless hairdresser and his wife (Mira Sorvino), their angry circle of friends (personified by Michael Rispoli), and ending at Adrien Brody's idiosyncratic, sexually ambiguous rocker. When tensions finally explode, it starts at the bottom, as the already downtrodden lash out to make themselves feel less oppressed. In its fine-grained detail, in its cataloguing of milieu, Summer of Sam is as good a screen representation of New York City as Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon and Lee's own Do the Right Thing. The problem is, Summer of Sam runs a punishing two-and-a-half hours, and you really feel the length in the backend when things grow increasingly ugly. It isn't just the Son of Sam killings (though what we see of them is gory and unpleasant), but as the collective paranoia begins to drive Lee's cast of characters to desperate actions, the film devolves into a never-ending spate of angry sex, rampant drug use, and brutal beatings. The Twilight Zone's "The Monsters Are Due on Main Street" achieved a similar effect, and using far fewer grisly details.