For the week of July 13th, the Criterion Collection is bringing the Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits set to Blu-ray. You'd have to go back to Criterion's Armageddon and The Rock DVDs in order to find movies that are as nakedly populist as these. During his incredible short film and television career, Bruce Lee was a consummate performer, and he overstuffed his work with secret agents and evil drug lords and opulent villain lairs and bloody revenge and international gangsters. Best of all, he used all of these elements as filigrees for his lightning-fast martial-arts skills. Movies like The Big Boss or Fist of Fury endure not because of their lofty philosophical or thematic goals. No, we keep coming back because it's so much fun to watch Lee deliver one epic beatdown after another. And to some extent, we're both processing these films exactly as intended AND missing the point entirely. Lee is making pulp entertainments. His 1973 masterpiece Enter the Dragon fuses a James Bondian narrative (Lee tries to infiltrate an island keep to take down Shih Kien's vicious criminal Han) to a sports movie, of all things - it just happens that Lee's means of subterfuge is to enter Han's illicit martial-arts competition, which puts him at odds with a cast of fighters as diverse as John Saxon's degenerate gambler, Jim Kelly's Vietnam vet, and Bolo Yeung's fearsome Bolo (it's practically the template for Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter). And for many people, The Way of the Dragon is like Godzilla vs. King Kong, in that we get to see Lee take on Chuck Norris, of all people. However, Lee's physical prowess is such that he alone elevates all the films in this set (minus one - Game of Death, which was released after his death, ghoulishly uses doubles and alt takes to try and bring Lee back from the dead) to the level of great art. Lee is the human version of bullet-time from The Matrix or wire-fu from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. His moves defy conventional norms of gravity and physics, and he yokes that physical skill to the kind of charisma we only see in movie stars from the 1930s and '40s. He's a singular element, and kudos to Criterion for preparing this sterling Blu-ray showcase.
Also from Criterion: filmmaker Preston Sturges' delirious The Lady Eve. If you are not already familiar with Sturges' small-but-distinguished crop of masterpieces (this, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Great McGinty, Unfaithfully Yours, Hail the Conquering Hero, and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek), then you should prepare yourself for two things right off the bat. One: they are often very sexy. Sturges was a consummate troll of the then-nascent Hays Code, and if he could find an opportunity to let his leads perv out on one another, he'd take it. The Lady Eve is nominally a movie about a grifter (Barbara Stanwyck, in maybe her best performance) setting her sights on a sweetly dim millionaire (Henry Fonda), but it's more concerned with how badly Stanwyck and Fonda want to sleep with one another. She barely has to work to seduce him. When she leads Fonda into her stateroom on a cruise ship, he starts staring at her legs for a beyond-indecent amount of time, and then she reciprocates in kind during a virtuoso, unbroken monologue where she gets all flustered imagining him taking her like a "burglar" in the night. And two: everyone in a Preston Sturges movie is moderately-to-majorly crazy. Both Adam Sandler and the Coen Brothers are huge Sturges fans, and you can tell why. Like Sturges, they root their comedies in realms overstuffed with lunatics and the deranged. Both Fonda and Stanwyck certainly qualify (vide Stanwyck's insanely half-assed disguise in the film's third act, as well as how thoroughly Fonda convinces himself she's actually a different person), but so do William Demarest's glorious moron of a bodyguard or Eugene Pallette's psychotically hungry ale scion or Eric Blore's unctuously sleazy conman-turned-nobleman. A movie like The Lady Eve feels like it's only millimeters from spinning off its axis and launching into space. The Sturges touch is that you want to go crazy with it.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "The tremendous praise the two leads have received over the years is unquestionably deserved because they are both great in very different yet equally impressive ways. For example, Stanwyck's personality switches are crucial for the dramatic shifts in the story and she does all of them with an easiness that actually has a very positive effect on a number of supporting actors. (As good as Palette [sic] is, for instance, he actually looks even better around Stanwyck). Fonda does not overdo his clumsy bachelor either, which is another reason why the film remains genuinely funny, sweet, and fresh in places where some of the material quite easily could have turned sloppy or dull. Also, like Stanwyck he engages various supporting actors in ways that make their contributions appear essential, especially during the mass sequences where so much has to be done right so that it works as intended. (See the reception where he encounters Stanwyck's foreign visitor for the first time and changes multiple jackets). The other really big star in this film that once again makes everyone better is the script. Sturges apparently wrote it specifically for Stanwyck, but there is such tremendous quality in it that everyone benefits."
The common refrain I've heard about Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles' surreal, enchanting Bacurau is that it's unclassifiable. Narratively, nothing could be further from the truth. If you wanted to be cynical about it, you could spend your viewing fieldstripping out all the different homages and tropes from which Filho and Dornelles construct their film. Here's their Jim Jarmusch homage. Their Terrence Malick nod. Their ode to Sergio Leone. Their reheated John Carpenter vibe. None of this is a slight. Like Quentin Tarantino, they delight in gathering as many filmic references as possible and remixing them into something singular and unpredictable. And it's that particular alchemy that gives Bacurau the flavor of the unclassifiable. Even as you're clocking its component pieces, you can't tell how the damn thing is going to fit together. I mean, from the start, Filho and Dornelles keep us off-balance. They roll credits in the vastness of space, and then they slowly pan around, filling more and more of our view with a beautifully rendered version of Earth until we're wondering if we've stumbled into a Contact remake or something. When they dissolve into a desolate road just outside of the titular village, their mission statement slams into focus: here's a film that's obsessed with the gulf between the macro and the micro. Bacurau itself is so small that it barely seems to exist - in a running gag that slowly turns menacing, the local elementary-school teacher (Wilson Rabelo) complains that Bacurau is no longer showing up on a map - yet its inhabitants have this presence that's expansive, iconic, whether we're talking about the violent outlaw (Silvero Pereira) roaming the countryside, the local hippy who keeps everyone fully dosed on psychotropic drugs, or the fearsome doctor (Sonia Braga) who's just as likely to break into fits of rage as she is to prescribe palliative care. The first hour of the film lets these outsized personas dominate the screen, and it's just as we start grooving on this being a plotless hang that ominous narrative strands start enveloping Bacurau. The area's slimeball mayor (Thardelly Lima) drops off a parcel of sedatives disguised as vaccines. A fleet of horses thunders into town under dead of night. At one point, it even seems like a flying saucer is monitoring the town...and that's before things get really weird. The whole movie ultimately pivots on a shock lifted straight from one of John Carpenter's favorite movies, and the rest of Bacurau follows suit, albeit in its own strange, idiosyncratic way. I'd soon not reveal more, but the film's political agenda gets sharper as it goes. Suffice to say, this is a picture that sides with the marginalized and the downtrodden, and has nothing but contempt for anyone who might exploit them.
You'd have to go back to John Landis' An American Werewolf in London to see a filmmaker who delights in foreshadowing his characters' grisly fates as much as director Ari Aster's does in his ghoulish and mordantly funny Midsommar, which hits Blu-ray in a special director's cut courtesy of A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment. Frame 1 of Werewolf plunked our heroes into a truck full of sheep (lambs to the slaughter, you see); Midsommar saves its nastiest shock for the cold open, a seven-minute aria of pain that finds young Dani Ardor (the brilliant Florence Pugh) at odds with her oafish boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor, in what feels like a Barry Lyndon-esque example of weaponized typecasting). It is clear that these two people should not be dating - he is breathtakingly indifferent to her emotional needs, and she, to be fair, is more than a little clingy - and Aster mines so much agony from how Christian's self-absorption sends Dani into Ativan-seeking bouts of anxiety. And all the while, Aster keeps cutting back to Dani's childhood home in wintry Middle America, her parents slumbering under the night sky even as Dani frets over the "dark" email she got from her sister, and...well, if you've seen Hereditary, you'll have a sense of the brutal sting that kickstarts the opening credit sequence and obliterates any sense of security we might have had. Horrible things continue to occur at a steady clip - Dani, Christian, and his three grad school buddies (Vilhelm Blomgren, William Jackson Harper, and a magnificently douchey Will Poulter) head to Sweden for a mid-summer festival that's adjacent to the one that ended The Wicker Man - but we're never surprised at the violent chaos because the movie has already primed us to expect the worst. What we get, then, is a slow walk to the gallows. Yet Midsommar retains this feverish, almost antic sense of tone. Midsommar represents a major leveling-up for Aster in pretty much every regard. Along with his ace production designer Henrik Svensson, Aster built the whole village in camera - the aesthetics keep you on edge as much as the gory plot twists or the Haxan Cloak's droning, insidious original score. When all hell does break loose at the film's hallucinatory "ättestupa" setpiece, Aster uses surrealism to cut the tension, giving us a fever dream that's part Sergio Leone, part Alejandro Jodorowsky. That most of the horror unfolds in full daylight only adds to Midsommar's pitched derangement. Aster makes no attempt to hide how bad things are getting, staging abhorrent depravities under sunny skies and in placid green fields. It's more than a little funny. Aster's characters encounter one ominous, brightly lit harbinger of doom after another, and still they bumble closer to destruction. Especially the men, who are so consistently, staggeringly dumb. Watching the film subject these stupid, stupid boys to the worst kind of pagan horrors proves satisfying and richly amusing. Like David Robert Mitchell did with Under the Silver Lake, Aster wants to filet a very odious type of toxic masculinity. This new director's cut provides an interesting experience. It's definitely a long sit, and intentionally so. To paraphrase Aster, you feel even more like you're watching some bizarre sociology study. Aster has largely added scenes fleshing out or lengthening the ritual ceremonies. But he's also added a wrenching argument between Dani and Christian (it makes his ultimate fate all the sweeter) and has recontextualized the Härga tribe's motivations. Before, Midsommar provided a journey of self-actualization for Dani, who finds community and love in this most horrific of places. But now, in the director's cut, we clock all the calculations that the Härga made to achieve a very particular ending. Suffice to say, it was always going to be the Americans. One of the great films of the last decade.