For the week of April 6th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's Oscar-winning (for Best Costume Design) Little Women arrives on Blu-ray. The best thing one can say about the film is that writer/director Greta Gerwig has managed - improbably, delightfully - to surprise viewers with her interpretation of the Louisa May Alcott novel. As I noted just three weeks ago when I reviewed the 1994 Gillian Armstrong version, there are at least nine different Little Women adaptations (including two released in 2018 alone!). You would think, and not unwisely, that no one could re-imbue the material with the shock of the new. But from the first frames, Gerwig announces her intent to do just that. Unlike every other adaptation (I think...?), she begins near the end. No longer do we start with the March sisters (Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Eliza Scanlen, and a tremendous Florence Pugh) hunkered down as children in their Massachusetts home: here they've aged into adulthood and gone off into the world. Jo (Ronan) is trying to make it as an author in New York City. Meg (Watson) has stayed closer to home, but the demands of married life clash against her desires to become an actress. Amy (Pugh) is in Paris, traveling Europe with the family's irascible Aunt March (Meryl Streep, who does exactly what you expect from her and no more). And Beth...well, I won't say, even though the contours of her struggles should be so familiar to Little Women fans by this point that they barely count as spoilers. By splitting up her heroines and telling the story of their youth through flashbacks, Gerwig adds this ineffable sense of nostalgia. The good times are already over, made memory by time and Yorick Le Saux's haze-tinged cinematography. Yet if this Little Women is the most melancholy of the different adaptations, it's also the funniest. Recall that Gerwig also made Lady Bird, and she carries that film's screwball sense of timing and build over to Little Women. How else to account for the ways that Amy upends every scene she's in by sheer force of will (Pugh is as much the star of this film as Ronan is), or every dry, barb-tinged exchange between Jo and her nonplussed editor (a wonderful Tracy Letts)? Even the story's famed love triangle (between Jo, Amy, and their admiring neighbor Laurie) feels like it's unfolding differently than we think it will. As played by Timothée Chalamet (the spelling of his name is as affected as his acting often is), Laurie is an immature boy who's having just as much trouble growing up as everybody else, and Gerwig makes you question if either March sister should end up with him. By the time the film's rollicking, gently postmodern conclusion arrives, we experience a curious sensation: we're not quite sure where the movie's going. I can't wait to see what Gerwig does next.
Martin Liebman wrote that "the film's production values are resplendent. But it's not just costumes and set dressings that do the work. Rather, it's the way Gerwig and Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux frame it, making the world a living, breathing character in its own right, a home for the story and a world for the girls to explore, not to simply act within. For example, the March family home tells the story all its own and in its own way, furnished with shabby yet tasteful decor revealing the societal struggle the family faces as part of the fringe upper class: too rich to be poor, too poor to be rich. Contrarily, the Lawrence mansion offers a nice visual juxtaposition that exudes wealth but also the coldness that exists within. The performances are superb, with the cast expressive and fully fitting into character even beyond the excellent work done by the collected cast in the 1994 film. Ronan is a revelation as Jo, the film's focus who is an aspiring writer and who is torn between what is popular -- women expanding their roles and demonstrating their abilities to the world -- and what is, in her time, proper: not signing her name to her stories, for example. The other girls are fantastic, each intimately involved with their character arcs but understanding the greater role of family, togetherness, and division in their ranks as sisters and burgeoning women both."
Still, good as Little Women is, it can't hold a candle to Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows, which makes its triumphant return to the Criterion Collection this week. Few movies can - this is one of the great films of the twentieth century, and the best thing Melville ever made. Most of Melville's films unfold as genre exercises: the hitman thriller (Le Samouraï), the heist caper (Le Cercle Rouge), the gangster movie (Le Doulos) And so on the surface, Army of Shadows seems to share more in common with Melville's more fact-based, humanist dramas like Léon Morin, Priest or Le silence de la mer. Using French freedom-fighter Joseph Kessel's novel of the same name, Melville recreates France under Nazi occupation, focusing on a cell of desperate resistance fighters (led by the great Lino Ventura) that are working to undermine the German military engine. You can imagine the straight docudrama version of this movie - maybe it's a cross between the melodrama of Defiance and the action-pulp of The Train. But dammed if Melville doesn't approach this story with the same chilly, austere minimalism of his best films. Both German and French Resistance are blanks, and necessarily so. Melville sees the Nazis as impersonal automatons, and so the French have to adopt that same cold inhumanity to stay alive. Too much emotion betrayed could destroy their cover and jeopardize their entire mission for the Allied. As such, every scene in Army of Shadows is almost agonizingly tense. We spend the whole movie hoping the heroes keep their cool as opposed to breaking into action-movie theatrics (you wonder if Quentin Tarantino "borrowed" some of this vibe for his own resistance epic Inglourious Basterds). And when Melville releases some of the tension, the effect is devastating. I'm thinking of the mid-movie setpiece where Ventura and his confederates have to murder a traitor in their group as quietly as possible, and Melville hangs over all the desperate flailings and grunts as the killing commences (like the only good scene in Torn Curtain, Melville underscores how difficult it is to kill someone). Or the heartbreaking moment near the end when Ventura faces certain death: Melville picks that instance to go inside Ventura's head, and for the first time, we hear all the panic and anxiety he's been suppressing for two-and-a-half hours. Just a masterpiece, through and through.
In his Blu-ray review of the OOP 2011 edition, Svet Atanasov noted that the film "is about real heroes who look like real people. They are men and women from various social classes and cultural backgrounds. Many of them are weak and indecisive. Almost all of them are afraid to die. The focus of attention is on their thoughts and feelings, rather than their clashes with the enemy. Naturally, the best scenes in Melville's film are dialog-free - these are the moments where the heroes question themselves or begin collapsing under the enormous pressure of the environment they have been placed in. Some become traitors; others opt for the cyanide capsule. The film is dark, cold, and infused with fatalism...It is also firmly controlled - everything happens in a methodical fashion and for a good reason, though not everything immediately makes sense to the viewer. What does is that the heroes are fighting a strange war, and at least for the duration of the film their side isn't winning"
Scorpion Releasing is offering a reissue of its 2K Terror Train restoration. Even during its release in 1980, critics and audiences were quick to brand this 1980 slasher (which first hit Blu-ray on a now-OOP Scream Factory disc) as a Halloween rip-off. I'm sure producer Harold Greenberg would have welcomed the comparison. At the time, Halloween was one of the most successful independent releases in screen history, and the presence of star Jamie Lee Curtis (who's engaging but largely passive here) plays like a shrewd media calculation, a way to capitalize on that John Carpenter classic's already-iconic stature. Yet as Terror Train fans will tell you, beyond Curtis and the whole slasher milieu, the film isn't all that similar to Halloween. Halloween works because of its simplicity - a masked killer stalks teenagers on Halloween night - while Terror Train adds a number of interesting wrinkles. If Michael Myers was chilling because of his mask's blank menace, then the Terror Train psycho scores points for variety: since the film unfolds over a New Year's Eve costume party, the killer's gimmick here is to grab a new mask from each victim. That mutability lends the film a bit more unpredictability. Everyone is already rocking a disguise, so the attack could come from anywhere, and director Roger Spottiswoode structures the kills to keep us off-balance and unsure. Furthermore, Terror Train tries to average the difference between three genres: the slasher movie, the whodunit, and the teen melodrama. Despite a prologue that spells out more exposition than we probably need, the mystery of the killer matters here in a way it never does in Halloween. As much as it's aping that film's moves, it's also looking even further back to something like Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (we even get a monologuing villain scene at the end). And the teens getting butchered here have a bit more personality than you might expect. The great Hart Bochner (Ellis from Die Hard) walks away with the film as a preppy douche who completely falls apart once bodies start dropping. All of that, and captured under the curiously beautiful lensings of Shining DP John Alcott. The '80s sure spawned a lot of dispensable slashers, but Terror Train isn't one of them.
It almost feels unfair to bag on Stephen Gaghan and Robert Downey Jr.'s misbegotten Dolittle, which arrives courtesy of Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Even before its first trailer arrived (in October, a mere three months before the film's January 2020 release date), the film was already accumulating a rich patina of failure, thanks in large part to an anonymous Redditor who claimed to have served on the Dolittle crew and who told one wild, unsubstantiated story after another about Dolittle's ostensibly calamitous production. Heck, the film only played in theaters for two weeks before The Hollywood Reporter delivered the kill shot: a scathing accounting of how Universal and a small army of creatives (led by Downey, Chris McKay, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Jonathan Liebesman) tried to salvage the movie through reshoots, rewrites, and desperate improvisations. Maybe I'm sentimental, but at a certain point, you start rooting for the underdog, and I began hoping that Dolittle would emerge a minor charmer: maybe something on the level of Disney's similarly futzed-with The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (which is great for an hour before the reshoots kick in). And certainly, Dolittle begins promisingly enough, filling in the backstory of the title character (Downey, obviously) and his wife (a briefly glimpsed Kasia Smutniak) with surprisingly grace and economy: it's a gorgeously animated sequence, and it portends just the right amount of whimsy and animal-talking fun. Unfortunately, the second we cut to live action, Dolittle starts living up (or is it down?) to its bad reputation. I almost hesitate to call it live action. There is so much distracting CGI plastered across the screen that nothing feels real, and while you might expect a fair degree of digital magic in a movie where animals can talk, even that's a studio note - apparently the first cut lacked any significant digital creations, so the finished film overcorrects to the degree where Dolittle's dog (voiced by Tom Holland) is CGI for no discernible reason. Scenes begin and end as if at random. We might get some glimmer of a compelling premise - Michael Sheen's unctuous court physician, or Antonio Banderas' striking pirate king - but the movie is so desperate to keep moving (it's barely over ninety minutes) that it abandons any and everything in the name of forward momentum, trying to create cohesion through beyond-awkward ADR'ed exposition. So many key plot/character points are delivered off camera or when you can't see the person speaking's mouth. And at the center of it all: Downey, giving a performance that is all business, from his Tim Burton-on-a-budget costume/hair design to his awful Welsh accent. Downey has always been a tic-loving actor (it's part of the reason we love him), but this is the first time he's assayed a series of eccentricities in search of a person, and not the other way around. Dolittle is so dispiriting that when it does stumble into something perplexing or even mildly outré (like the long sequence that finds the character dealing with a...ahem...a constipated dragon), we're too beaten to care. The film's tagline brands Dolittle as "not much of a people person." Based on this bizarre, mirthless spectacle of ego and greed, I'm not sure he belongs to any species. A singularly awful film experience.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "while the visual effects are quite good, the filmmakers have forgotten that there are other elements necessary in a good modern film, like plot and heart. The story is jumbled and unfunny, a period piece built around exaggerated emphasis on production, its shortcomings exacerbated by a reliance on those same overextended components. The film offers little reason to emotionally invest in it. To its credit it avoids a few cliché components that were surprisingly left out of the script, but the whole is nevertheless devoid of draw. Disinterest will run high, and quickly, as the story flounders and the film can't come up with any compelling reason to care about the characters or the world in which they operate."