For the week of July 27th, HBO and Warner Home Entertainment are bringing The Outsider to Blu-ray. This crime thriller represents a meeting of the minds, as it were, between two very different novelists. Clockers author Richard Price developed The Outsider for television, and its (superior) first five or so episodes showcases Price's love for police argot and procedural rigor. We open right after the brutal murder of young Frank Peterson; thankfully, Price is less interested in recreating the incident on camera (which would be damn near unendurable, given some of the more salacious details) than he is in working the case. Price's cops - led by a fantastic Ben Mendelsohn - all conduct themselves with the world-weary understatement of his Sea of Love or The Wire investigators. Only here, Mendelsohn's Ralph Anderson finds himself sifting through an orgy of evidence, and all of it points towards the otherwise beloved English teacher and baseball coach Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman). The specificity with which Price conveys the investigation, arrest, and subsequent incarceration of Maitland recalls his phenomenal pilot episode for The Night Of. And that setup alone would be enough for a solid prestige drama...except here's where that other author comes in. See, Price is adapting a Stephen King novel, and the King influence starts asserting itself almost immediately when Anderson finds just-as-compelling evidence placing Maitland at a conference during Peterson's murder. Literally - we have video footage of Maitland in two places at the same time, and the supernatural elements only grow more pronounced from that point on, particularly once Cynthia Erivo enters the picture as a P.I. with a far more fantastical understanding of good and evil. I'm conflicted about this Price/King mix. On one hand, I've never seen anything quite like this. Not to spoil too much, but The Outsider ultimately plays like True Detective with an honest-to-goodness monster circling the peripheries, and one that isn't at all dissimilar from King's most iconic ghoul. Yet the series does get sillier the more it leans into the King components. Price just doesn't seem all that comfortable with, say, the world of shape-shifting demons and the actual boogeyman, and it doesn't help that he's trying to elevate a narrative that finds King gleefully cannibalizing his own back catalog. Ultimately, The Outsider proves an interesting experiment more than anything. You can't square every circle, I suppose, but it's certainly diverting to watch Price try.
From Kino Lorber comes George Miller's docudrama Lorenzo's Oil. Whatever you're expecting probably won't prepare you for how Miller keeps upending the conventions of the genre. We assume he'll offer lots in the way of bromides and life-affirming platitudes in telling the story of how the Odones (Nick Nolte and an incredible Susan Sarandon) became amateur doctors trying to cure their son Lorenzo (played primarily by Zack O'Malley Greenburg) of the ALD plaguing his body. Instead, much of the film plays like a horror film. Miller renders Lorenzo's neuro-degenerative with agonizing specificity (Rick Baker built a horrifying full-body prosthetic to better depict Lorenzo's muscular spasms and atrophied limbs), and that level of detail carries over to the medical language, too. Rather than trying to Hollywood-ize the Odones' struggles, Miller and co-writer Nick Enright overload us on complicated jargon and technical procedure until we're as dizzy with all the complications as they are. So, too, does the film eschew the clean lines and broad outlines of the typical biopic. Lorenzo's case unfolded as a maddening series of dead ends and bureaucratic setbacks, and Miller is faithful to the stop-and-start process that the Odones endured for over four years. At times, this moves like the Zodiac of medical dramas. Furthermore, rather than adapt a more austere aesthetic to reflect sober reality, Miller pushes the expressionism he'd been developing over three Mad Maxes and one Witches of Eastwick to ever-more surreal dimensions. This movie is all Wellesian wide-angles and noirish shadows, the camera lurching into motion like the POV Deadite shots from Evil Dead. It is a lot, and between the aggressive style and Nolte's accent work, it takes maybe thirty or forty minutes to key into the movie's rhythms (you can be forgiven for thinking you might be watching the first trainwreck of Miller's career). But his strategy pays off. Miller wants you to feel as off-balance and under siege as the Odones, to process the existential threat of ALD on a visceral level. It's one of the most relentless sensory experiences I've had at a movie in a long time. After a point, you don't watch Lorenzo's Oil. You just try to survive it.
In fact, I found this story of medical struggle and research more intense than Mel Gibson's ultra-violent Apocalypto, which is making its return to Blu-ray after rights issues kept it off the format (and streaming!) for thirteen years. I really want to like Apocalypto. Every time I revisit it, I'm struck by Gibson's attention to detail and epic scope. The only reason Gibson got $50 million to make an R-rated thriller set in sixteenth-century Mayan culture - and largely conveyed through either silence or subtitled Yucatec Maya! - is because his controversial The Passion of the Christ became an unlikely box-office juggernaut. Gibson doesn't squander the opportunity, bringing ace DP Dean Semler and his digital cameras to the jungles of Veracruz, where Gibson recreated Mayan culture at a level that recalls Cecil B. DeMille's work on The Ten Commandments. The sweep of this thing is overwhelming; you understand why Gibson's hero Jaguar Paw (a very good Rudy Youngblood) would respond to his surroundings with a mixture of awe and terror. And had Gibson constructed a narrative on par with the technical worldbuilding, we'd have something special. Unfortunately, Gibson has used his considerable skill to make the best-possible-looking version of First Blood, essentially. After a lovely opening act that sketches Jaguar Paw's life in his small village, he's kidnapped and brought to a depraved Mayan city, where Gibson stages one manner of horrifying, torture-adjacent carnage after another (at one point, a person is decapitated in ritual sacrifice, and at the chop the camera rolls down a flight of stairs to simulate...well, you know). I don't think Gibson has ever been so unrestrained in his depiction of graphic violence, and this gory sensibility only intensifies after Jaguar Paw escapes and has to hunt down his pursuers before they kill him. The third act is basically a slasher movie, overstuffed with snake attacks and impalings and arterial spray and PANTHER MAULINGS. Is it exciting? Undeniably. But it's also crass exploitation, done up in prestige garb. There's something fundamentally disingenuous about Apocalypto.