For the week of June 15th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Volume 1 of their 4K Columbia Classics series to Blu-ray. The set offers a cross-section of acclaimed features from Sony's backcatalog, all remastered for 4K. It's a interesting batch: I'd rank the features as one glossy dud, three populist classics that weren't necessarily clamoring for UHD treatment, a masterpiece that looks about as good as it could ever hope to despite imperfect source materials, and a stunning restoration that pretty much alone justifies the $112-purchase price. First, the dud. I get that the 1982 Best Picture winner Gandhi is a culturally important film. It's big and it's serious and it pretty much codified the modern biopic template. And it deservedly made Ben Kingsley a star - as the title character, Kingsley is able to convey the man's iconic stature without losing sight of his quiet, human foibles. But my oh my, this is a boring movie. It never justifies its three-plus-hours length, especially given how ponderously director Richard Attenborough drags the narrative along. A Bridge Too Far aside, Attenborough always seemed to believe that if his subject matter was important, he didn't have to worry about things like pacing or excitement. You won't find any of those lacking in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, A League of Their Own, or Jerry Maguire, all of which remain about perfect examples of absorbing, guilt-free populism. Ostensibly, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the most serious minded - it covers graft and corruption in the U.S. Senate - but really, it's a delivery system for the irresistible pairing of Frank Capra's fable-like storytelling and Jimmy Stewart's warm, homespun charm. A League of Their Own works in a similar fashion. Director Penny Marshall takes the story of the WWII-era's female baseball league and spins it into an exceptional hangout comedy about a ragtag baseball team (including Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Madonna, and Rosie O'Donnell) and its irascible, alcoholic coach (Tom Hanks, in one of his finest comic performances). By comparison, Jerry Maguire is just a romantic comedy about a sports agent (Tom Cruise) having either a nervous breakdown or a moment of clarity, and the idealistic secretary (Renée Zellweger) who loves him. But it might also be the great romantic comedy, so insightful is filmmaker Cameron Crowe's attention to human behavior. As charming as his leads are, Crowe knows, to quote his underrated Vanilla Sky, that the sweet is so much sweeter with the sour. By comparison, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is like a master class in making a comedy from nothing but the sour parts. This ferociously bitter farce traps us with a coterie of self-destructive, stupid madmen (Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens, George C. Scott, and Peter Sellers' demented Nazi war criminal-turned-U.S. scientist) who lead the planet towards nuclear devastation basically out of spite and incompetence. Dr. Strangelove is as unsettling as it is funny, but Kubrick's command of the material is so precise and hostile that we regard its almost-encompassing nihilism with a kind of awe. And then there's David Lean's thundering Lawrence of Arabia, which commands our awe through sheer scope and majesty. The biggest criticism to watching this film at home is that David Lean and Freddie Young's vision demands to be seen on as big a screen as possible. The pyramids feel life-sized; the extras seem to drag on forever. Yet this restoration is so sparkling, you can still appreciate the quality of the 70mm photography. And that Peter O'Toole performance! The movie itself might have the look of a conventional biopic, but O'Toole keeps us perpetually off-balance when it comes to T.E. Lawrence. Even after almost four hours, he remains an enigma, albeit a fascinating one. That's something even a good restoration will never fully reveal.
From Paramount Home Media Distribution comes steelbooks of two 4K remasters: the Best Picture winners Braveheart and Gladiator. It's very easy to pick on these films in the afterglow of their Oscar victories. In many ways, Braveheart and Gladiator helped solidify the fortunes of a certain Oscar contender: technically immaculate genre fare with nothing substantial on its mind. Despite its basis in history (the legend of Scottish warrior William Wallace, upon whose life screenwriter Randall Wallace liberally extrapolated), Braveheart is just a war movie, while Gladiator plays like a pulpier version of Spartacus (its revenge plot is straight out of Rolling Thunder, with Russell Crowe's disgraced Roman general (Russell Crowe) seeking revenge against the emperor who killed his family). Certainly, Braveheart and Gladiator aren't the only two shallow movies to win Best Picture (The Artist. Titanic. Terms of Endearment. The Greatest Show on Earth. There are many more), but I guess I expect AMPAS to reward films that are more than just high-toned Jerry Bruckheimer pictures. Of the two, Braveheart is the least defensible, but look at its director-star! We're dealing with Mel Gibson, after all, and if Braveheart isn't as immediately off-putting in its sociocultural attitudes as The Passion of the Christ, it still shares that latter film's abiding love of sadism (Gibson loves violence, and never more so than when his Wallace endures a ghastly, Christ-like torture session) and cultivates its own uncomfortable streak of homophobia (everything that transpires between Longshanks and Prince Edward is so culturally insensitive). Is Braveheart exciting and well made? A thousand times yes. But the entertainment comes at an uneasy cost. Ironically, Gladiator's even more pronounced lack of substance makes it the more palatable of the two. Director Ridley Scott had come off a run of expensive underperformers (White Squall and G.I. Jane, anyone?), so you can understand why he styled this one as a bloody four-quadrant epic. Scott needed everybody to like Gladiator, and fast. But his hunger to not fail gives this film such energy, whether we're discussing the kinetic action sequences or the full-throated embrace of melodrama, and so Gladiator sweeps you along even when you're aware it's just junk food. He also benefited from two actors who, though they'd be better elsewhere, knew what a high-profile opportunity this was. Russell Crowe might have won over critics with L.A. Confidential and The Insider, but he wanted to be a movie star, and he gives one of the screen's most confident leading-man turns as Gladiator's proud hero. And Joaquin Phoenix strikes this perfect mix of Method affectation and Hollywood import as the sniveling heavy: you feel for this neglected kid even as you wish Crowe would rearrange his facial features with his boot. That's an interesting combination, and tougher to blend than you might think.
Also from Paramount: another in their premium "Paramount Presents" series with the release of Pretty in Pink. Even though filmmaker John Hughes didn't direct this one - he just co-produced and wrote the screenplay - it has the same kind of instantly iconic storytelling devices that mark his best work. Tonally, this is more in line with The Breakfast Club than with Sixteen Candles. It's a lightly comic teen melodrama, focusing on - as so many of Hughes' films do - on Molly Ringwald's winsome heroine. Unlike Ferris Bueller, Ringwald's Andie Walsh doesn't go home to some McMansion inside Hughes's fictional suburban enclave of Shermer, Illinois: no, she and her father (a terrific, if underused, Harry Dean Stanton) hail from the wrong side of the tracks, and Andie is perpetually aware of the sociocultural barriers separating her from the other kids in her high-school class. Hughes caught a lot of flack throughout his career for his supposedly shallow subject matter, but I can't think of another populist filmmaker - who largely made movies for kids! - that spent as much time on class differences as he did. Hughes captures Andie's world with such specificity, whether that's her relationship with Annie Potts' cool older hipster or the ways Andie delicately weaves in and out of her best friend Duckie's obvious affections. It's Duckie who unbalances this movie, so good is Jon Cryer at conveying the character's perpetual yearning for Andie. A lesser performer might seem creepy, but we're rooting for this glorious weirdo to win Andie's heart...which is why her crush on Andrew McCarthy's Blane never quite draws our focus in the manner that Hughes and director Howard Deutch want. God love McCarthy, but he's so dull here, and his world – that of the privileged snobs - is so much more clichéd than Andie's (it does not help that James Spader turns in another one of his patented "elitist jerkwad" turns as Blane's heel of a best friend). Still, none of that makes Pretty in Pink any less engaging. It's as close to a classic as the '80s ever produced.