For the week of June 1st, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing the new restoration of Steven Spielberg's Jaws to 4K Blu-ray. One of the most beloved titles in the studio's back-catalog, the film's reputation has become even greater than itself. It made a generation scared to go swimming; it inspired a global interest in sharks; it ushered in the type of broad-appeal summer blockbuster that all major Hollywood studios now use to pad their coffers. Jaws made such an impact on the zeitgeist that it is easy to forget what a genuinely terrific movie it is. As a horror film, it's without peer. That opening scene (which you can watch below) plays like the best cold open you could ever want in a slasher film. We watch Susan Backlinie's unsuspecting teen cavort happily during a night-time swim, and all the while, Spielberg's camera adopts the POV of the shark circling beneath her, getting closer, with John Williams' iconic score crescendoing during a murder scene that is, in its own way, as cinematically important as the shower attack in Psycho. It jars us and keeps us off balance through the film's (many) other grisly murders. Yet Jaws still maintains this lightness of spirit. Part of that is just the Spielberg touch. I don't think he's ever made a movie as human scaled as this, so attuned is it to the rhythms of small-time life over the summer months, and so viscerally does it propel us through six or seven crackerjack suspense sequences. But Spielberg is also not afraid to leaven the scares with different genre infusions. At times, we could be watching a great buddy picture. Once Richard Dreyfuss' Matt Hooper enters the film as the oceanographic consultant to Roy Scheider's frazzled Chief Brody, the two men develop this immediately warm, compelling rapport - I can think of no better an exposition dump than when Brody and Hooper get drunk on wine and talk shop about sharks and their feeding habits. It's a completely different vibe from, say, Robert Shaw's maniacal shark hunter Quint, who takes Brody and Hooper on a merry chase through the Atlantic, squabbling constantly and sailing into almost certain death. I have to imagine that this portion of the film - its last hour, practically - felt like blockbuster overkill in 1975. In 2020, it plays like Stagecoach: just elegant, formally rigorous filmic craftsmanship. It's like a pop Moby Dick. Just a stone classic, through and through.
Speaking of 4K, Universal is also offering a UHD Blu-ray of Bong Joon-ho's Best Picture-winning social satire Parasite. If you can, go into the film with as little advance knowledge as possible. It's not so much that Parasite hinges on narrative twists and revelations (although there are a couple of doozies). Rather, the very nature of the storytelling involves Bong slowly, patiently drawing you into an increasingly untenable situation alongside his four protagonists (Song Kang-ho, Jang Hye-jin, Choi Woo-shik, and Park So-dam). See, Bong's social agenda is such that he wants to implicate all of us, which means being able to see yourself in the main characters. Even as far back as his serial-killer procedural Memories of Murder, Bong has been a stridently political figure, often melding high-concept genre premises with political agit-prop (U.S. chemical in Seoul creates a mutated fish monster; a futuristic train literally partitioned off into the haves and have-nots). And Parasite grounds itself into the disparity between rich and poor. [READ ON FOR MINOR SPOILERS] It's no accident that this film's first big "setpiece" involves the search for Wi-Fi as Bong's four leads scramble around their basement apartment trying to leech off an unprotected wireless network. The stakes are human-scaled and all the more dire for it. Our heroes can't afford Wi-Fi, but they also won't be able to look for work to pay their bills if they can't use the Internet, so their bumbling search masks life-or-death desperation. It's the whole movie in microcosm, and if you can access the panic in this opening, then Bong's got you for the remaining two hours. What else can I tell you? The filmmaking command has the precision of people like Alfred Hitchcock or David Fincher. Plus a little Tati just for sport: Bong loves breaking the frame into precise frames-within-frames, only to let the viewer sort the relationship between all the different elements. And like those filmmakers, Bong succeeds at mining just as much humor from tension. This is one of the funniest movies of the year. And if you're familiar with Bong's movies, you'll know they're willfully insane. Parasite uses that expectation against you. Bong knows you're waiting to see if and how far he will go, and as a result, he imbues the most placid seeming of circumstances with roiling dread. After a certain point, I had no idea where the hell Parasite was going. I covet that feeling. You should, too.
From HBO Home Entertainment comes the first - and likely last, if showrunner Damon Lindelof is to be trusted - season of Watchmen. The reasons for dreading a Watchmen follow-up would seem to far outweigh the reasons for making one. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel is so specific to the comic-book medium that a filmed version would seem to miss the point. Just check out Zack Snyder's expensive-but-hollow adaptation from 2009, which managed to balance a too-slavish devotion to the source text with an almost total misreading of that book's larger themes. And when I learned that Damon Lindelof would be developing this new Watchmen, I felt sick. As good as something like The Leftovers is, Lindelof's work on Lost and Prometheus favors the kinds of glib puzzle-box mysteries that could smother all of Watchmen's allegory. So what did Lindelof end up doing? Whatever I was expecting, it wasn't this: a blackly comic, exciting, and deeply political miniseries that recalls what might happen if Spike Lee decided to direct Westworld. We open in the world of the comics, thirty-plus years after the "squid" attack that leveled Manhattan and ended the nuclear showdown between the USA and the then-Soviet Union. The world is at peace, with an ultra-liberal President (Robert Redford, believe it or not), a host of environmentally friendly regulations, and no superheroes at war with one another. Yet to quote Dr. Manhattan, nothing ever ends, and the more we look, the more we realize that this country is on the brink of catastrophe. It is hard to watch this new Watchmen with images of Minneapolis and George Floyd on the news - as the show sees it, racial tensions have escalated past any point of sensible arbitration, and the Klan-like Seventh Kavalry is committing savage acts of violence (and doing so in masks inspired by the late Rorschach). Only the cops stand between order and total anarchy, and they've been forced to disguise their identities lest they risk incurring savage retribution. It's through the eyes of Oklahoma cop Angela Abar (Regina King, in the star-making performance she should have gotten a long time ago) that we enter the fray, and Angela acts as the nexus between faces old (Jean Smart's hardened Laurie Blake; Jeremy Irons's deranged Adrian Veidt) and new (Tim Blake Nelson's police interrogator; Hong Chau's gazillionaire industrialist). How Lindelof and his team weave together all these elements - from the conspiracy that threatens to destabilize the world to Angela's family history to whatever is happening with Veidt - proves witty and consistently thrilling. This Watchmen is discursive and playful in the same ways that the comic book was. But Lindelof also freely adapts Watchmen to the television medium. That means balancing careful serialization with formal experimentation. One episode unfolds as a noirish mystery that offers a corrective to the uneven BlacKkKlansman. Another has the serio-comic misery of an Alexander Payne movie. And in the series' high-water mark, we get a deep dive into the Watchmen universe's most visually iconic character that begins like fan service and ends as a grand romance. It's only in the finale that Watchmen stumbles, if only a little; Lindelof and company set up a technically audacious endgame on a TV budget, and their resolutions for a number of story lines are a little too pat. But I have to hand it to Lindelof. Just when I started to wonder if he had dropped the ball again, he has [REDACTED] deliver a heartbreaking monologue and then ends on a final shot so perfect that John Carpenter would applaud. I might want more Watchmen, but considering this is the best thing Lindelof has ever done, I'm perfectly happy with him quitting while he's ahead. Simply essential viewing.
Finally, Shout Select is giving David Mamet and James Foley's wonderful Glengarry Glen Ross the special-edition treatment. Many of Mamet's plays have made the transition from stage to screen, but this 1992 comedy-drama stands above all the other film adaptations of his work. Yes, it's working from the best stock (Glengarry Glen Ross won the Pulitzer), but with Mamet, it's all a question of calibration. Look at something like Edmond or American Buffalo; for all of their strengths, they're often so bound to the text that they forget to establish any kind of cinematic identity. Not so here. Glengarry Glen Ross looks like a movie, full stop, with Foley and DP Juan Ruiz Anchia shooting in hyper-wide 2.39:1 scope that visually opens up the world of the film even as it respects Mamet's signature economy of location (we're largely bouncing back and forth between two locations: the office room where the film's real-estate sharks cold call prospective marks, and the Chinese restaurant across the street where they strategize and fail to unwind). Foley and Anchia give the two halves of the film different visual identities. The first fifty minutes take place on one night that's awash in neon blues, reds, and greens, and then the following day explodes in harsh light, the camera tracking and moving constantly to reflect the unease each salesman feels after the office gets robbed. At times, you'd think you were watching the greatest Scorsese movie Scorsese never made. Best of all is the film's all-star cast, which lends legitimacy to Glengarry's big-screen qualities AND makes the most of Mamet's profane, linguistically challenging dialogue. Ed Harris and Alan Arkin are a great Mutt-and-Jeff duo as, respectively, the office's most and least unscrupulous salesman. As loathsome as he's become in real life, Kevin Spacey is a revelation as Williamson, the office manager whose feigned objectivity hides a deep well of contempt for his fellow employees. But they all play support staff to Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, and Alec Baldwin, all of whom do close to career-best work. I don't think Pacino has been more carefully modulated on screen before: his Ricky Roma is a venal opportunist who works with studied, almost gentle patience. His slickness exists in marked contrast with Lemmon's Shelly Levene. Levene lets Lemmon deliver a masterclass in pitched desperation, as Levene keeps trying to sell to somebody - anybody! - if it'll get him out of the hole he's in. In lesser hands, this role could become grating (Pacino learned that the hard way when he stumbled his way through the Levene part during the terrible 2012 Broadway revival), but Lemmon gives the character the tragic grandeur of Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. And then there's Baldwin, who delivers one of the great single-scene performances that I've ever seen. Mamet wrote him a honey of a monologue just for the film - he plays a motivational speaker dispatched to put the fear of God into the salesman - but even still, Baldwin mines it for both black comedy and a kind of breathtaking cruelty. I'd say it's the whole movie in microcosm, but almost every scene is that good.
In his Blu-ray review, Brian Orndorf wrote that "the thespian pleasures of Glengarry Glen Ross are obvious, with legends such as Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon (in one of his finest performances, which is saying something), Ed Harris, and Alan Arkin handed Mamet's cutthroat writing to interpret. It's tale of struggling real estate salesman facing the end of their careers, but the writing transforms such stakes into a study of masculinity and desperation, and Mamet also has a sharp ear for business world animosity. The ensemble offered here is near-perfect, with special Mamet-fu reserved for Alec Baldwin, who manages to turn a simple eight minutes of screentime into the highlight of the movie, and perhaps the 1992 film year, bringing down the house as an arrogant salesman sent in to threaten the troops, and doing so with a delicious, darkly comedic level of malice."