For the week of July 20th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing the newly restored, 4K version of Stanley Kubrick's gladiator epic Spartacus to Blu-ray. Much as we might venerate the great Stanley Kubrick, it must be said that this is easily the most impersonal film he ever made. Even a relatively straightforward calling card like The Killing evinces touches of his cinematic style. On Spartacus he was a hired gun, a last-minute replacement for Anthony Mann who only got the gig because he was friends with star Kirk Douglas. The two men previously teamed up to great artistic success with 1957's Paths of Glory; by all accounts, they had a falling out on Spartacus and never worked together again. And you can feel Kubrick's interest wax and wane throughout Spartacus's logy 197-minute runtime. The film's breathtaking opening hour, which sees Spartacus training for brutal combat into the gladiatorial arena, is most reflective of Kubrick's jaundiced perspective towards humanity. How subversive it must have been to take Hollywood's biggest star, place him in its most venerated genre (the Biblical/Roman epic), and then reduce him to a violent avatar that stands representative of the ways we humans let our inherent bloodlust leech into our entertainments. And any time Kubrick can cede the screen to Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton's scheming Roman senators, the movie lets loose a sigh of relief. Like Peter Sellers in Lolita or R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick is delighted by Ustinov and Laughton's shenanigans, and he lets them gossip and jest in ways that feel improvised, spontaneous. But Kubrick struggles to engage with Spartacus' rise to heroic status, as well as his romantic connection to Jean Simmons' slave girl. Kubrick might be the cinema's great ironist, so he's completely out to sea when he's expected to care about unambiguous nobility. It makes for a schizophrenic experience: one minute, we might be watching Lawrence Oliver hungrily seducing Tony Curtis' idiot servant boy, and the next, Douglas is delivering tired clichés about heroism and struggle. Never again would Kubrick have anything less than total control over one of his productions, which makes Spartacus maybe the most fascinating movie in his oeuvre. The film might lack a consistent dramatic thrust, but it's never uninteresting watching Kubrick negotiate between his own whims and the vagaries of studio filmmaking. And frankly, even half-engaged Kubrick is better than 90% of contemporary American filmmakers. He might not care, but he still gives Spartacus 70mm scope, especially in the thrilling battle sequences. If this is slumming, then I'll take it.
It occurs to me that Scoob (I can't stand writing the "!" in the middle of a sentence), which arrives courtesy of Warner Home Entertainment, might be one of the most tonally confused animated features that I've seen in a long time. It feels like the creative process here involved one thousand studio notes. At any given moment, there are at least five different movies here, all fighting for dominance. The first one is the best. We open with the fateful meeting between a preteen Shaggy (voiced as a kid by Iain Armitage) and a pup named Scooby Doo (Frank Welker). While I'm never a fan of prequel territory, this material hits a pretty good balance between fan service (it will not surprise you that Shaggy and Scooby first bond over food, or that they quickly make the acquaintance of the other Mystery Machine crew members, and on Halloween night, no less) and honest sentiment. I can't know for sure, but I think I feel the hand of Kelly Fremon Craig, who penned the Scoob draft that formed the nucleus for this feature film. Craig wrote and directed the lovely teen comedy The Edge of Seventeen, and that film shares some of Scoob's affection for lonely, sensitive outsiders. Scooby and Shaggy grow so close so quickly because they really don't have anyone else who gets them. And had Scoob stuck with the younger versions of these characters and kept developing their shared humanity, we might have had something special. But you may notice that Craig no longer has a writing credit in the end credits (that honorific goes to the committee of Adam Sztykiel, Jack Donaldson, Derek Elliott, Matt Lieberman, Eyal Podell, and Jonathon E. Stewart), which makes sense, given the time jump at the end of the first act that ages the characters up (into Zac Efron's Fred, Amanda Seyfried's Daphne, Gina Rodriguez's Velma, and - in the worst case of Matthew Lillard erasure I've ever seen - a terrible Will Forte as Shaggy) and rockets the movie into directions uninspired and irritating. Here's where the studio's meddling becomes all the more apparent. It's not enough to make a prequel about nice kids and their dog; no, we've got to take a cue from The LEGO Movie and turn every CGI entertainment into pop-culture Bingo. That means that the movie keeps serving up a bizarre assortment of celebrity voice talent (Simon Cowell? Maya Erskine? Henry Winkler? Ken Jeong? Christina Hendricks? Kevin Heffernan? Tracy Morgan?) and - because shared universes are all the rage now - a heaping helping of Hanna Barbara characters, with Blue Falcon (a bland Mark Wahlberg) sharing co-lead duties and little nods thrown to Muttley, Jabberjaw, and Jonny Quest. And to amuse the parents? Pop culture references designed to please everyone - dabbing and Instagram and Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Wonder Woman - while never feeling appropriate to what is, essentially, children's fare (the Tindr and "Bombs Over Baghdad" invocations were borderline tasteless). Individual elements work (Jason Isaacs is incredible as Dick Dastardly), but nothing coheres. It's the movie as cultural jukebox.
Let's get this out in the open: I am very glad that Marriage Story - which arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Netflix and Criterion - has seemingly vaulted Noah Baumbach to the forefront of indie auteurs. Since 1995's acerbic Kicking and Screaming, Baumbach has excelled at assaying the inner lives of a very specific type of American man: the deluded pseudo-intellectual, who's smart enough to recognize the difference between a faculty art installation and a solo gallery show but is almost totally ignorant of anyone else's emotional realms. And part of the reason that Marriage Story has brought him such crossover appeal is in how it yokes that longstanding interest to a more sensitive, universally human story. Baumbach's protagonist, theater director Charlie Barber (a phenomenal Adam Driver), wouldn't be out of place in something like The Squid and the Whale or Greenberg. For all his creative brilliance - this is one of the rare films where the snippets of art within the main feature seem provocative and interesting - he's also monstrously selfish and breathtakingly, casually cruel; note the ways he treats his starry-eyed stage manager (Brooke Bloom) as an extra-marital indulgence he can dip in and out of whenever he so chooses. But he's also a father, and a relatively good one at that, and as his marriage to his troupe's former leading lady (Scarlett Johansson, in her second great performance of 2019) implodes, Charlie finds himself wading into divorce proceedings torn between his enmity towards his soon-to-be-ex-wife and his desire to preserve something resembling a normal relationship with his son (Fisher Price's "Wells for Sensitive Boys" star Azhy Robertson). Many have already speculated on the degree to which Baumbach is riffing on his own divorce (he used to be married to Jennifer Jason Leigh before meeting Greta Gerwig on Greenberg). Regardless of how semi-autobiographical Marriage Story may be, it has the sting of truth, particularly every time Driver and Johansson's characters wade into legal proceedings. As much as they might tell each other they want to have as clean a break as possible, their lawyers (on her side: Laura Dern's cheerfully brutal lawyer; on his side: first Alan Alda's sweetly outgunned family lawyer and then Ray Liotta's terrifying legal bulldog) have different ideas, and the different depositions and hearing transform Marriage Story from melodrama to Kafka-esque nightmare. The rules and technicalities feel more reminiscent of The Trial than they do Kramer vs. Kramer, particularly the draconian living arrangement Charlie must maintain between New York and L.A. if he's hoping to win joint custody. Whenever Marriage Story is drilling into the bizarre legalities behind the divorce process, it ranks as one of Baumbach's finest films. But when it's focusing on Driver and Johansson's difficulties together, well, that's a slightly different story. Both actors are terrific, but the material is a little more pedestrian, a little more routine, and never more so than in the much-celebrated, ten-minute argument the two have in Driver's shabby L.A. apartment. For all their fire and emotional vibrancy, the material itself plays like stock drama: you can imagine Driver and Johansson doing this same scene as an acting exercise at Julliard. As such, I can't help but find Marriage Story a little diffuse, like Baumbach is oh-so-gently sanding off his other films' thornier edges to make something more immediately palatable. And hey: after six Oscar nominations this year (including Best Picture!), I can't say his strategy didn't work. But I miss the Noah Baumbach who couldn't care less about making us love him.
In his Blu-ray review, Brian Orndorf wrote that "Baumbach's aim to navigate the legal minefield of divorce is fascinating, detailing the brutality of the system, which greatly complicates communication between Nicole and Charlie. She's working through an identity crisis and he's faced with control issues, and there are sharp scenes of soured interactions, including a red-faced, running-nose blow-up between the couple as they finally have it out inside Charlie's empty apartment. It's a stunning scene of honesty and combat, but the true brilliance of "Marriage Story" remains in anxious observations, finding Charlie absorbing his diminished role in the lives of loved ones, and Nicole finding her confidence through denial. Johansson locates surprising areas of honesty for the character, working wonderfully with Baumbach's observant screenplay, also generating an authentic relationship with Driver, who's absolutely crushing as Charlie, delivering the best performance of his career. Driver is expressive and raw, welcoming an appreciation for Charlie's complexity and an understanding of the man's hesitant action when it comes to the fragility of his future. Driver is masterful, moving from a silent scream to a climatic Sondheim purge, never losing the essence of a man blindsided by the sum of his mistakes and unintended neglect."
Finally, Criterion is also bringing Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry to their collection. Among the many film reviews in Roger Ebert's storied career, his piece on Taste of Cherry ranks as one of his most infamous. Here was a film that garnered immediate, universal praise - it was the first Iranian feature film to win the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, after all - yet Ebert's excoriating take in the Chicago Sun-Times called Kiarostami's picture "excruciatingly boring...[and] such a lifeless drone." Almost from the jump, Ebert's peers rushed to the film's defense (Jonathan Rosenbaum deliberately name-checked some of Ebert's claims in his own glowing take)...but twenty-three years removed, it is a little easier to see where Ebert was coming from. Do I find the film to be as enervating as Ebert does? Absolutely not - Kiarostami is a filmmaker of such craft and purpose that even if you don't find Taste of Cherry all that compelling, you'll certainly respond to it as a technical exercise. Here is a film that could function as high-concept, inspirational twaddle: the story of a man (Homayoun Ershadi, in a genuinely enigmatic performance) desperate to find someone to bury him after he commits suicide, Taste of Cherry isn't all that narratively distinct from something like Gus Van Sant's loathsome Sea of Trees. In his telling, though, Kiarostami leeches out all the overt sentimentality. Ershadi's tortured stranger comes off as creepy and odd, more often than not (the way he repeats needing exactly "20 spadesful of earth" tossed on his corpse suggests an almost inhuman, programmatic reaction to his own death), and that's when we're even allowed to connect with him through conventional character development. Long stretches of the film play out in a series of tight shot/reverse shots - of Ershadi in close-up as he drives his car, and then of his passengers in close-up as the two talk and drive - with little in the way of medium or establishing shots to vary the rhythm (I believe we go about twenty-five minutes before the camera leaves Ershadi's car). The effect is alienating, strange. It's like Kiarostami is trying to abstract traditional plot down to its barest essentials, and that's when he isn't dispensing with conventional technique altogether, as we see in the film's audacious, fourth-wall-breaking ending. I've been thinking about this one quite a bit since I watched it; that's more than I can say for most traditionally "entertaining" movies. Still, it is something that I appreciate having watched more than the actual experience of watching it. Kiarostami is definitely testing his audience's patience in seeing how much he can withhold and still maintain some semblance of the relationship between viewer and screen, and I confess I prefer how he wields his post-modern sensibilities in something like Certified Copy. But to dismiss Taste of Cherry outright? That's something I dare not do.
Brian Orndorf's Blu-ray reviewcalled the film "a deliberately paced endeavor, mixing probing questions and profundity with scenes of stillness...a decision that evolves as the picture unfolds, creating some dramatic tension...Kiarostami aims for screen poetry here, and he mostly achieves it, only really stumbling with the controversial ending of the feature, which suddenly assigns creative ownership through some cultural breaking of the fourth wall. However, as with any offering of screen art, some viewers will delight in such playfulness, giving the picture an ideal level of interpretative appeal the helmer has embraced throughout his career."