For the week of March 9th, A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment are bringing the Safdie Brothers' masterful Uncut Gems to Blu-ray. Other than Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I can't think of an American film released in 2019 as consistently arresting as this one. Between this and their terrific Good Time, Josh and Benny Safdie have crystalized their ability to create character studies that play like white-knuckle thrillers. Uncut Gems immerses viewers in the life of Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler, phenomenal), a Manhattan jeweler who wears his gambling addiction as ostentatiously as his many gold chains or his frightening white teeth (the fake set Sandler sports probably deserved a Best Supporting Actor nod). If there's anything that Howard excels at, it's leveraging one debt against seventeen others. He's constantly hustling in search of The Next Big Score, and he thinks he's found it in the form of a rare African opal that he's valued at over a million dollars. But before Howard can get his big payout, he's got to evade about half of New York's bookies, large and small. And placate his way-too young mistress (NYC artist and socialite Julia Fox). And suffer the emotional and verbal indignities of his understandably long-suffering wife (a terrific Idina Menzel, who might have the film's best scene). And not piss off his scheming assistant Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), who doesn't know Howard has fleeced most of his stolen merchandise. And charm NBA power forward Kevin Garnett (excelling in a genuine supporting performance - this is no winking cameo). Oh yeah: and not get killed by a brutal enforcer (Keith Williams Richards) working for the city's biggest loan shark (Eric Bogosian) who's been dogging Howard for a still-unpaid loan of over $100,000. The complications against Howard pile up so furiously that Uncut Gems takes on the tenor of a full-fledged panic attack. I'd say that the Safdies let us catch our breath during the very funny Passover Seder sequence right at Uncut Gems' midpoint, except we quickly learn that Bogosian's character is also Howard's brother-in-law, thus turning every side-eye and muttered remark over matzo and gefilte fish into some kind of veiled assault. It is a lot, and if there's one constant about the reception to the film, it is that you will either love its manic energy or you will want to destroy the negative so it can't hurt anyone anymore. But love it or hate it, you also can't deny the Safdie's uncompromising vision. At its best, Uncut Gems merits comparisons with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The two films have the same savage, jaundiced perspective into how greed corrupts the human heart, with everything - including Ronald Bronstein and Benny Safdie's propulsive editing, Darius Khondji's claustrophobic widescreen lensings, and Daniel Lopatin's anxious electronica score - working overtime to create a corrosive pall over the proceedings. No amount of success will ever satisfy a guy like Howard, and I don't think it's spoiling much to suggest that things don't end great for our hero. But dammed if we aren't rooting for him all the same. That's the brilliance of the Sandler performance. As much as he openly courts our disapproval (there is a sequence, that the Safdies kick off with Billy Joel's "The Stranger," where Howard deliberately makes a choice that could potentially demolish the fragile peace he tried to broker with his family not ten minutes prior), Sandler uses his innate likability to turn Howard's need for more into something tragic and even a little heroic. Like Willy Loman or Shelly Levene, Howard has this unshakable optimism in the American Dream. It might be deluded, sure, but a person has got to have an ethos. Just an unstable masterpiece through and through.
Who, exactly, is Bombshell for? That's the question I kept asking myself during Jay Roach's docudrama exposé of the scandals that rocked Fox News during the 2016 election season. Except, you see, exposé suggests a certain insider perspective that the film never fully provides. Did you pay any attention to the news cycle when Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) entered a very public feud with then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump? Then you won't find that much new content in this part of the film: Theron is very good (and her award-winning makeup from the great Kazuhiro Tsuji is even better), and I do like the warmly flinty interplay she has with John Lithgow's Roger Ailes (even if his makeup makes him look like one of the Valkenheisers from Nothing But Trouble), but the Charles Randolph script largely parrots soundbites we already heard on TV. Still, this part of the film is better than the Gretchen Carlson section. Nicole Kidman struggles to embody any part of the former Fox anchor (they're both blonde, I guess?), and the narrative seems just as uncertain about how to make Carlson's legal battle against Fox News seem exciting. Once again, we know how things turned out for Carlson, so we don't share any of her mounting panic as Ailes turns against her. That leaves the Margot Robbie third of Bombshell to pick up the slack, and here's where things get momentarily interesting. Robbie's evangelical Fox intern takes us inside the inner workings of the studio, and the actress does yeoman's work at tempering her character's initial zealotry with mounting concern at the workplace...only she isn't playing a real person (the character is a composite, ostensibly), and that fictionalized aspect undermines any sense of larger historical accuracy. What we're left with, ultimately, is a series of vaguely familiar scenes, a whole lot of distracting cameos (everyone is played by someone famous: we get appearances from Richard Kind and Connie Britton and Mark Duplass and Lennon Parham and Rob Delaney and D'Arcy Carden and Liv Hewson and Allison Janney and Malcolm McDowell and Kate McKinnon and Robin Weigert and Holland Taylor and Stephen Root and about a dozen more great character actors you'll recognize from prestige TV), and an agenda that stands to move no one. If you believe Fox News is the Devil, then Bombshell offers no new ammunition. If you support the network, then the movie won't change your mind. It's just empty agit-prop: Roach's first Austin Powers movie had more to say about the world than this one.
Jeffrey Kauffman had a far more positive assessment of the film, noting that it "is filled to the brim with what some may perceive to be a glut of 'stunt' casting, not necessarily only with regard to the three main stars, two of whom (Theron and Kidman) do rather amazing impersonations of their real life characters (the film did win an Academy Award for its makeup and hair). But on the sidelines here are all sorts of little sidebars with Alison Janney as Ailes attorney Susan Estrich, Richard Kind as Rudy Giuliani, and 'bits' featuring a number of other notables as recognizable Fox personalities (the film 'helps' things, identification wise, by providing on screen titles announcing a lot of the characters). In fact, while the film understandably concentrates on Megyn, Gretchen and Kayla, it might have arguably done a better job of delineating the 'split' within Fox News, where some on air personalities (notably Jeanine Pirro, Greta van Susteren, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Geraldo Rivera) went public with their disparagement of Carlson after she sued Ailes. Perhaps surprisingly given its 'touchy' (in more ways than one) subject matter, Bombshell is often bracingly funny, and it presents a rather jaded view of what working for a major media company can be like. The film has another fictional character played by Kate McKinnon whose story won't be spoiled here other than to say it kind of spills into Kayla's at various points, and this aspect, too, might conceivably have been further developed. The film does engage in one bit of willful misdirection which will probably be obvious to anyone who followed this story closely and knows the ins and outs of Carlson's 'strategy' with regard to taking down Ailes. Suffice it to say, her 'secret weapon' is only revealed almost at the end of the story."
I have nothing against the idea of a Charlie's Angels movie. Matter of fact, not five months ago, I waxed rhapsodic about McG's 2000 iteration, calling it "kind of a miracle...one of the most sheerly enjoyable studio pictures of the Aughts." This formula can be great, and when I learned that Elizabeth Banks was going to be helming a new reboot, I expected she'd do great things with the Aaron Spelling property - she's got such a sly, sharp sense of humor. What a pity, then, that her new Charlie's Angels is the worst kind of failure: a listless, inert exercise in forced jocularity that evaporates from your consciousness as you're watching it. Almost from the jump, it hits the exact wrong note: we open with Kristin Stewart's undercover op Sabina on a mission, only she's looking right into the camera and declaring that she "think[s] women can do anything." She then proceeds to deliver a wannabe TED talk, practically, about the pleasures of first-wave feminism to some anonymous baddie, thus establishing the approach that Banks will take for the remaining hundred minutes or so: a lot of studio-noted empowerment babble that never coheres into anything a) meaningful or b) exciting (Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey and Leigh Whannell's The Invisible Man do far better jobs of nestling feminist manifesto within genre filmmaking). From that point on, we're jumping around the globe with Stewart, Elsa Balinska's badass brawler, and Naomi Scott's tech geek as they try to figure out how a Mark Zuckerberg-like billionaire (Sam Clafin) factors into a plot to bring down all of the Angels, but we couldn't care less. The banter is tired, and the action scenes vary from functional (that opening monologue ends in Bourne-esque combat) to incoherent (a car chase in Hamburg looks like it was shot on green screens with all the human participants in different countries). Not even the great Patrick Stewart (as the oldest Bosley) can muster up any enthusiasm - it doesn't help that the film telegraphs his arc from the jump nor that the script weirdly inserts him into the Bill Murray part from the first Charlie's Angels. If there's anything to appreciate here, it's the work of Scott (who's just as likeable as she was in Disney's Aladdin remake) and especially Stewart, who keeps mumbling her lines and tossing off non sequiturs like she's beamed in from a different planet, let alone movie. But two charming performances cannot alone support an aspiring franchise tentpole. Between this and Underwater, I'm concerned about Stewart's charisma being stretched too far inside projects that don't deserve her.
In addition, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is streeting a new, 4K edition of the animated classic Beauty and the Beast. Watching the film now, it's easy to forget what a critical film this was for the Mouse House. With the critical and commercial success of The Little Mermaid lining Disney's coffers, the studio wanted to solidify its reputation as the "Broadway of Animation," and this dark fairy tale about a young woman's burgeoning relationship with a savage beast seemed to be the perfect fit. But it was almost not to be. Disney had tried bringing this story to the screens many times, including just before The Little Mermaid in 1987, and every time, the creative team would scrap their ideas after extensive pre-production development. However, The Little Mermaid ultimately provided the missing ingredients: Mermaid lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken, whose musical stylings would prove so vital to Beauty and the Beast. They helped inspire the project, and today, it's their music that lingers far longer than any element in Linda Woolverton's fine-but-conventional script or the animation team's accomplished-but-too glossy designs (on one end of the spectrum: the Beast, who remains a marvel of traditional cel animation. On the other end: some early CGI landscapes that have the soulless polish of a computer-animation test reel). Ashman and Menken wrote pieces that defined the major characters in ways both concise and imaginative. The song from which the heroine takes her name ("Belle") suggests her spunk and independent spirit just as "Gaston" perfectly conveys the deluded self-absorption that would make that particular antagonist so hateful. "Something There" lets the Beast be both regal and charmingly lovesick, while "Be Our Guest" humanizes a bunch of literal inanimate objects better than a lot of live-action characters are. Often times, you have to suffer through the songs to get to the juicy plot stuff, but in Beauty and the Beast, the reverse is true. The music is a shot of adrenaline that the rest of the feature, successful as it might be, can't really replicate.