For the week of August 24th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Judd Apatow's The King of Staten Island to Blu-ray. If you are familiar with any of filmmaker Judd Apatow's other raunchy dramedies, then you know the drill: take one comedy star (Steve Carell, Seth Rogen, Adam Sandler, Paul Rudd, or Amy Schumer), craft an R-rated-but-narratively conventional premise that plays to their respective strengths, and then let it all play out at an indulgent two-plus hours. How does The King of Staten Island distinguish itself, you might ask? Well, it stars Pete Davidson. That's about it. Yes, the film pays lip service to Davidson's mental-health issues and fraught backstory - his Scott Carlin also struggles with bipolar disorder and lost his dad in a firefighting tragedy (in the film, the elder Carlin dies in a hotel fire, but in real life, Scott Davidson died in the World Trade Center on 9/11) - but it's also careful not to submerge viewers too deeply in anything that would bum viewers out too much. Outside of the bracing opening sequence, which finds Scott seeing how long he can keep his eyes closed while driving on the Staten Island Expressway, Apatow largely steers the proceedings away from actual trauma. We spend a lot of time on Apatow's favorite subject - watching men-children misbehave! - as Scott and his idiot buddies (including Rickey Velez, Moises Arias, and Lou Wilson) get high and give one another terrible tattoos. At one point, Scott partially inks a nine-year-old, although that's only marginally more immature than the evening Fight Club he attends to win tip money at his cousin's restaurant. Some of this business is funny (I especially liked the college party he attends with his kid sister, who's played by Apatow's eldest daughter Maude - their evening sprawls with great, well-observed details), except these shenanigans are so familiar, and they drag on forever. The King of Staten Island isn't Apatow's longest film (that would be the director's cut of Funny People, which runs 150 minutes), but you feel its 136 minutes acutely thanks to the repetitive nature of most scenes: Scott does something dumb, people yell at him, rinse, repeat. It does not help that the most interesting stories all seem to circle at the peripheries of Scott's existence. As a (mostly) reformed cokehead firefighter, Steve Buscemi is all gruff, rough-hewn charm - he has a rambling monologue about Scott's dad that's as compelling as anything I've seen this year. Pamela Adlon comes in and kills three scenes as a boozy divorcée who loves and hates her children in equal measures. Bel Powley is great as Scott's sorta girlfriend, a brassy Staten Island gal who's about a hundred times smarter and more ambitious than her party-girl demeanor suggests. Best of all, we've got Marisa Tomei (as Scott's mother) and Bill Burr (as a firefighter who becomes his unwitting mentor), who completely hijack the film. I'd watch a whole movie of these two cautiously circling one another as they navigate the realities of a new romantic relationship deep into their fifties. Apatow has never quite covered this territory before. Pity he had to fall back on old habits.
Shout Factory is offering steelbooks of two Hayao Miyazaki favorites. We're thirty-five years removed, and still Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind looks like his densest, most narratively ambitious feature. In some ways, that's no surprise - Miyazaki had to condense seven volumes of manga content into two hours - but even without the expansive source material, we'd feel the scope and import of this one. From the first frames, Miyazaki creates a richly imaginative dystopian world that feels equal parts Wizards, Mad Max, Star Wars, and Dune. It is a lot. I wasn't fully clear on the importance of the other dead princess Nausicaä meets after the massive plane crash that kicks off the film's second act. And by the midpoint, the film has accumulated so many characters and details, Katamari Damacy-style, that Miyazaki pretty much has to stop the movie dead for an exposition dump, courtesy of Pejite warrior Asbel. But even hustling to fit in all this plot, even working under the constraints of a more reduced budget than he'd come to enjoy, Miyazaki creates a sensory experience like little else in his career. When we watch Nausicaä try to calm a stampeding Ohm or keep a plane from crashing into her village, there's a kind of horrified wonder - we see how easily the world could obliterate these small, fragile humans - and this feeling carries over into the steampunk air battles or the astonishing finale, where Nausicaä breathlessly has to try and save a wounded baby Ohm to keep the other Ohms from destroying her home, and all while a gruesome melting Giant Warrior sets the horizon ablaze with apocalyptic hellfire. So, yeah: Nausicaä is messy and indulgent and confusing and bizarre. It's also visionary and daring and challenging and melancholy. It's a Miyazaki movie, through and through.
By comparison, His 1989 fantasy Kiki's Delivery Service is more conventionally "kid-friendly." The plot, as it were (like most of Miyazaki's works that are aimed exclusively at younger audiences, Kiki's Delivery Service is far more interested at ambling along in a fairly conflict-free zone as opposed to drumming up a lot of busy action), follows young witch Kiki (voiced in the American dub by Kirsten Dunst) as she lights off on her own to make it in the big city. And that's about it. We get some minor heartache as Kiki adjusts to life away from her parents, and the second half goes a little Spider-Man 2 when Kiki loses her powers – Miyazaki uses this development to gently weave in subtext regarding the attendant perils of teenage maturation – but for the most part, this is a hangout picture. Miyazaki is far more interested in watching Kiki and her sly talking cat (the late, great Phil Hartman) interact with the eccentric baker who helps her start her own courier service or Kiki's lightly flirtatious/antagonistic banter with a free-spirited local boy (Matthew Lawrence). It's a film of small pleasures, and one big one – the still-amazing sequences that show Kiki flying all over the city to deliver packages. As anyone who has seen Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Porco Rosso, and especially Castle in the Sky can attest, Miyazaki has a great, abiding love for the sky (and a healthy respect for its dangers) and these sequences here give Kiki's Delivery Service an electricity it might not otherwise have. It's not one of Miyazaki's masterworks or even his best film about growing up (the right answer for both those categories is Spirited Away), but what it does, it does very, very well.
Also from Shout Factory comes a special edition of the wonderfully grisly Tales from the Darkside. In the annals of the horror-anthology film, if Creepshow remains the gold standard and V/H/S is...well, whatever the pejorative opposite of gold is (lead, maybe), then Tales from the Darkside rests comfortably in the middle. Maybe even a few degrees closer to Creepshow: of its three short features, you won't find a stinker. I credit the surprising variety on display. Each story is after a very specific horror vibe. The first, "Lot 249," could be the spiritual sequel to Creepshow's "The Crate," what with its vengeful grad student (Steve Buscemi, again) employing a very specific Egyptian artifact (I'll give you a hint: it's terrorized both Brendan Fraser and Tom Cruise) to lash out at the bullies (Robert Sedgwick and Julianne Moore) who stole his scholarship funds. Beetlejuice scribe Michael McDowell wrote the screenplay (from an Arthur Conan Doyle short story), and he gives it the same kind of manic energy as that Burton classic, particularly once Christian Slater starts going toe-to-toe with Buscemi. By comparison, "Cat from Hell" plays like Stephen King adapting Edgar Allan Poe. King's original short story (which George Romero adapted) starts with "The Black Cat" and adds in ever-more lurid complications, up to and included a brutal hitman (Buster Poindexter himself, David Johansen), a whole lot of anti-feline action, and a spectacularly bloody denouement that has to be seen to be believed. Finally, "Lover's Vow" recalls Bram Stoker's Dracula in its brooding, Gothic quality. This story veers into melodrama and never looks back. We have a dejected artist (a very good James Remar) desperate to make a name for himself, until one night irrevocably changes his life; a ravenous gargoyle (yep; you read that right) spares his life, after which Remar almost stumbles into the love of a good woman (Rae Dawn Chong). As their love grows, so do our hero's fortunes, except he can't quite shake the memory of that supernatural creature, to tragic results. "Lover's Vow" is so arresting that it's almost a drag to shift back into the jokier wraparound story, wherein a little boy uses these stories to distract a witch (Debbie Harry) that wants to eat him, but again: the variety is ultimately a feature, not a bug. What holds this film back from the upper echelons of anthology filmmaking is the direction itself. John Harrison provides steady, workmanlike craft, yet I kept yearning for the Technicolor mayhem Romero brought to Creepshow (or Joe Dante and George Miller gave their Twilight Zone installments). Still, a gory good time.
In his Blu-ray review, Brian Orndorf wrote that "co-writer/producer George A. Romero and producer Richard Rubinstein brought their interests in small bites of horror to the small screen in Tales from the Darkside, a syndicated series that began its four year run in 1984. The show was a minor hit with a loyal audience, and some willing to stay up very late to catch the program, where its twisted sense of terror was best appreciated. 90 episodes were completed before the itch to take the brand name to the big screen was scratched, resulting in the creation of 1990's Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, an anthology feature that doesn't stray far from the essentials of the original show, offering more in the way of style and gore to help it compete with other cinematic nightmares filling the multiplex...[The film] isn't an electric viewing event, but it manages to retain some appealing oddity and surprise, avoiding a hostile take on anthology film offerings with a small screen adaptation that preserves the appeal of the original show and provides some gruesome highlights of its own."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering up Jean Renoir's 1935 picture Toni. While not one of Renoir's undisputed masterworks (you're still safe at the top, The Rules of the Game and La Grande Illusion), this offbeat character drama provides ample evidence of what made Renoir such a singular talent. You watch Toni, and you see Renoir inventing what would become fundamentals of the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism movement; shooting largely on location in the South of France, Renoir infuses his film with the tenor of the local farming and mining communities. The prologue, a joyous sequence that sees the title character (Charles Blavette) arriving by train and looking for lodging, creates such a natural sense of multiculturalism. As people trudge past the train tracks and along the nearby shore line, we become aware of French, Italian, Spanish, and Muslim travelers all co-mingling, all laboring off what itinerant work they can find. This kind of interaction sweeps us along, turning what could be rote melodrama - Toni is seeing Marie (Jenny Hélia) but loves Josefa (Celia Montalván), who's already promised herself to Albert (Max Dalban) even as she carries on with Albert's cousin Gabi (Andrex) - into an unforced study of human behavior. Now, Renoir doesn't commit as far to neorealism as, say, a De Sica or a Visconti (who actually AD'ed on Toni). Renoir loves a great deep-focus camera shot too much (and Toni has one of his best: in the foreground, we watch as Toni and Édouard Delmont's Fernand talk about Josefa, and in the background, an explosive charge detonates the entire rock face of a quarry), and if he can pull off a showy dolly track, he's going to, as in the thrilling moment when the camera swoops around Josefa and Albert while she's hanging up her laundry. But that tension - between documentary realism and cinematic brio - ends up galvanizing Toni. Renoir uses his command of the medium to make these quotidian proceedings feel larger than life. And this same tension exists at the film's narrative core. Slowly but surely, a plot emerges, and we realize we're watching a sort of proto-noir, one that isn't at all dissimilar from James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. Let's just say that Albert proves more loathsome than we might expect, and that Toni's desire for Josefa leads him to some fairly dark corners of the human souls. Yet when Toni arrives there, he does so not with a shock, but with a kind of low, aching sadness. Toni might be trapped in a genre construction, and what stings the most are the all-too human foibles that got him there. Renoir never lets us forget that.