For the week of August 31st, Arrow Films is offering a 4K edition of David Twohy's wonderful sci-fi thriller Pitch Black. You can't really ask for a better B-movie than this: stylish, gory, and relentlessly paced. As in his similarly compelling The Arrival and A Perfect Getaway, Twohy proves uncommonly facile at blending different tones and genre beats into a cohesive whole. At the start, you might think we were in for a sci-fi take on Flight of the Phoenix. Twohy throws us into the action as an intergalactic transfer vessel crash-lands on an alien planet. The ship's in ruins, the planet is boiling hot (Mad Max DP David Eggby uses blown-out exposures and yellow filters to create this omnipresent sense of heat), and the survivors are so disoriented that they can barely focus on repairing the ship...and that's before they start revealing secrets that threaten to destroy the group from the inside out. The docking pilot (Radha Mitchell, who gives great Ellen Ripley), for example, who almost jettisoned the passenger quarters in order to save herself. The space marshal (Cole Hauser) whose stoic façade masks a crippling drug addiction. And then there's Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel), the brutal convict who was being sent to a prison outpost on the far side of nowhere, and who now runs free. It's Riddick who gives the film its unique charge and who's responsible for one of the great starmaking performances of the past thirty years. As much fun as he is in the Fast & Furious movies, I don't think Diesel has ever been this magnetic on camera, this compellingly unpredictable. He never tips his hand that he's a hero - to the rest of the crew, he's practically Hannibal Lecter, and Diesel plays Riddick accordingly - and so Twohy is able to convince us that everyone is at risk here, that no one is safe from this universe's casual savagery. That goes double when the planet gets thrust into a lunar eclipse, and…well, let's just say that Riddick learns he might not be the most dangerous game any more. I love how Twohy reinforces and subverts the tropes of an Alien picture in the second half; I love how he lets these characters maintain their integrity even when lesser movies might slather them in clichés and tropes. What I don't love are the film's much belated follow-ups, which only serve to dilute what made Riddick so special, but hey: I'll always have Pitch Black.
I am no fan of Guy Ritchie's films, so I still remember the shock I felt watching Sherlock Holmes (which gets a 4K Blu-ray release this week from Warner Home Entertainment) for the first time in 2009. Here was the umpteenth iteration of a character who'd long outstayed his welcome, given self-consciously twisted energy from Ritchie, who never met a show-offy cinematic device that he couldn't beat into the ground, and it was...fine? Enjoyable even? Don't get me wrong - I still think the film is too labored by half, and I hate, hate, hate all the ways Ritchie tries to convince you that this isn't your grandfather's Sherlock Holmes (he's a bare-knuckled brawler like Brad Pitt in Snatch who can also anticipate with precision logic what moves his opponents will make and how he can best defeat them, not unlike Neo at the end of The Matrix), but all the speed-ramping aside, Sherlock Holmes goes about its blockbuster agenda with a cheerfully blithe approach to character and plot. Ostensibly, we're looking at some kind of pulpy Chinatown-meets-From Hell scenario wherein Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law) investigate a seamy underground cult (led by Ritchie's once-favorite Big Bad, Mark Strong) and discover a conspiracy extending into London's highest levers of power, but Ritchie doesn't get too bogged down in the details. No, what he's interested in is the banter between Holmes and Watson, and the film is better for it as a result. Dodgy British accent aside, Downey is as delightful here as in the Iron Man movies - it's a credit to his performance that Holmes seems as odd as he is genuinely cool - and Law is even better, pivoting expertly into the role of ace character actor. They spar and joust with the verbal dexterity of a screwball comedy. At times, we might be watching a stealth reboot of His Girl Friday: Holmes seems less perturbed about the death cult than he does the possibility that Watson might get married (to the lovely Kelly Reilly) and abandon Holmes on his adventures, so every one of his famed deductions and machinations becomes a stratagem to separate Watson from normal responsibilities and drag him into the fray. Ritchie pulled off a similar trick in his underrated The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which went even further in terms of ignoring the tenets of action-movie filmmaking to focus on the characters, and if he approached all his for-hire sessions like these two, I'd be a happy boy.
Cut to 2011, and oh, what a difference two years makes. By this point, the BBC had cornered the Holmes market with the first season of its beloved Sherlock series; it's still too early to tell, but one could make a case for Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman's modernized takes on Holmes and Watson as the definitive versions of the characters. And on the other side of the pond, Downey had gotten tick-deep in the inner workings of the MCU, with two Iron Mans under his belt and an Avengers on the way. Don't get me wrong - I adore Downey's tenure as Tony Stark - but he'd clearly gotten hooked on franchise saturation. Why settle for one when three will do, right? Which brings us to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. If ever a sequel screamed "financial obligation," it's this one. Gone is the nicely rollicking interplay between Downey and Law, the cheerfully derisive attitude towards world building. No, as Michele and Kieran Mulroney's screenplay sends our heroes throughout Europe in search of Holmes' iconic nemesis Moriarty (Jared Harris), we realize that we, too, are being led into a whole lot of dutiful scaffolding to support at least a trilogy for the Brothers Warner and Team Downey. Ritchie ramps up the speed-ramping (see what I did there?) and overstuffs the proceedings with mayhem and "comedy," except nobody's acting like they have anything to prove. New leading lady Noomi Rapace seems particularly lost (the film dispenses with Rachel McAdams in the early goings), although I found myself more irritated with Downey and Law. They spend the whole movie convinced that a) they're in a hit and b) they need only commit the bare minimum to the screen in order to keep the profits rolling. Everything strikes this note of manic lethargy so that by comparison, Harris' icy underplaying seems all the more threatening. But who knows? Maybe he was just bored. I will say this: Game of Shadows is one of the most successful movies that, to paraphrase Blank Check with Griffin and David, almost doesn't exist. It has left no cultural footprint, no lasting legacy, and despite threats of a third movie, no subsequent installments, to boot. Oh well. Maybe the first Sherlock was just a pleasant fluke.
They say you can't go home again. For proof, see The Goonies, which also arrives courtesy of Warner in a gorgeous 4K restoration. To say that this film mattered to me would be a grand understatement. Between the ages of three and twelve, I watched The Goonies easily a hundred times (one year, I was averaging a viewing a month). And I get it - here's this rollicking adventure that lets a veritable Travelling Wilburys of great kid actors (Sean Astin, Corey Feldman, Ke Huy Quan, Kerri Green, Martha Plimpton, and an impossibly young - yet still surprisingly beefy - Josh Brolin) reign triumphant over both evil land developers and dangerous criminals (the not-unenjoyable trifecta of Robert Davi, Anne Ramsey, and Joe Pantoliano, who apparently never had hair), and - and! - it's filled with subterranean passageways and deadly traps and PIRATE TREASURE and the stamp of approval from executive producer Steven Spielberg. For children, The Goonies offers an irresistible concoction, and I get why it's a perennial favorite, why parents can't wait to show it to their kids, why so many still pilgrimage to Astoria, Oregon, to see where the film took place. All of which is to say, I kinda wish I'd left myself that glorious memory and not rewatched the new Warner restoration. The first thirty minutes are kinda sublime. Our young heroes have such wonderful chemistry together, and director Richard Donner brings this nice sense of melancholy to the proceedings. It's always raining, and that makes sense; it's like the weather is an extension of the anguish the Goonies feel about getting forced out of their homes. If I were being really pretentious, I'd say there's almost something Kurosawa-esque about how Donner lets the environment reflect these very human emotional states, but I'll refrain from that. And when Astin's Mikey finds the treasure map that will send them on their merry way, well, that's the dream, isn't it? That though you may be small and young, you, too, will find yourself in possession of both the means and the gumption to enter the unknown and save your future (not for nothing, but Astin kinda (does this a lot). It's the actual adventure that underwhelms. As anyone who's seen his Lethal Weapon movies or Ladyhawke can attest, Donner has a wonderful eye for location shooting, a skill that he absolutely can't indulge in when the Goonies make their way into the underground sets that comprise most of the film's second half. There's little verve to the action sequences, whether we're talking about the traps or the extended fight on the pirate ship that conclude the picture. And all the while, we have to endure so. Much. Screaming. Part of me respects that The Goonies lets its kids be kids, with all the screaming and swearing that accompany such an age, but another part - a bigger part - just wanted Advil at the ready. This last screening of The Goonies was wearying, and I have no one to blame but myself.
Still, my favorite film of the week might be Tim Burton's 1988 horror-comedy Beetlejuice. As a conventional narrative, Beetlejuice arguably shouldn't work. Its protagonists, the Maitlands (Alec Baldwin and a wonderful Geena Davis), don't so much drive the plot as drift through it; after dying in a car accident and returning to their Connecticut home as ghosts, they try for a bit to scare the new family (Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O'Hara, and Winona Ryder) and then, almost nonchalantly, decide against the whole matter. And the title character (Michael Keaton, who starts at ten and only ratchets things up from there) doesn't really show up until the movie's half over. And it doesn't have a larger point. You can sense some threads at the peripheries that might unify the film into a more cohesive thematic whole - the Maitlands want kids but can't have them, and Ryder's Goth teen hates the parents she's got, so these three misfits form a surprisingly functional family unit - except they're never more than threads, and rarely the center of the action. Yet I think this is a perfect movie (or very close to it), and for the best of reasons: you get to watch a master filmmaker in full possession of his gifts. Burton would make better films after Beetlejuice (his lovely biopic Ed Wood, or the surrealist meditation on trauma and alienation that is Batman Returns), but never ones that feel so tailored to his very particular sensibilities. Visually, the whole movie looks like one of his sketchbooks. It's an expressionistic nightmare in full color, where every plane of reality hides some bizarre quirk. For a film that largely takes place in one location (the Maitlands' house), Burton keeps stretching the frame until it includes a underworld bureaucracy straight from Brazil, a scale-model of the nearby town that becomes Beetlejuice's prison/playhouse, and the sands of Saturn itself, where polka-dotted sandworms roam the land looking for spirits to eat. And none of that is even as strange as what happens to the house itself when O'Hara's terrible sculptor turns it into a...I dunno, production stage for some suburban The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari remake? You can always sense Burton's background as a former Disney animator - the Mouse House's ethos was, the more jokes, the better, and Burton never misses a chance to throw in some weird sight gag or aesthetic curlicue. That logic even justifies why the film takes its name from a supporting character. Keaton is so perfectly in sync with Burton's tone (even though he first turned the role down, claiming he didn't get it) that he acts as the personification of the film's morbid, frenetic energy. We need more special effects extravaganzas like Beetlejuice. It's so refreshing to watch all this time and energy in service of, essentially, ninety minutes of Edward Gorey cartoons. Burton is having too much fun behind the scenes, and he makes that energy infectious.
Finally, we end with the recent comedy Irresistible, which arrives courtesy of Universal Studios Home Entertainment. If you are of a certain age and sociological disposition, then you will recall there was a time when Jon Stewart was maybe the preeminent political satirist in American pop culture. He turned The Daily Show from a fratty evening hang (it paired well with The Man Show) into something essential. For four nights a week, Stewart and his correspondents dissected our political system's inherent structural flaws, and they did so in a manner that was consistently, trenchantly funny. And I mention all that because I think about that Jon Stewart, and I wonder where he was during the entire Irresistible production process. Nothing about this toothless diatribe works. The story of a hotshot Beltway strategist (Steve Carell, indulging in all his worst comic tendencies for his old Daily Show boss) who puts the full muscle of the DNC behind a taciturn rural farmer (Chris Cooper, giving the film's lone unobjectionable performance) as a means of firing up the base, Irresistible already starts from an already faulty premise: gosh, aren't both sides just the worst? Carell's Gary Zimmer is a leering cad (he lusts after Cooper's daughter, played by Mackenzie Davis) with a staff full of stereotypical elitist poseurs - an IT staff consisting almost exclusively of bearded hipsters, a obsequious pollster (Topher Grace) who brags that he correctly predicted the outcome of the 2016 election "if that election had been held ten months later" - while his rival, RNC fixer Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne, doing a shallow, obvious riff on Kellyanne Conway), is a dead-eyed sociopath who starts backing Cooper's opponent (Brent Sexton) just to piss off Zimmer (actually, it's for a slightly more graphic reason than that - Zimmer and Brewster used to sleep together, as the film reminds us constantly, thus literally reinforcing the old canard that Republicans and Democrats are in bed with one another). Long stretches of this movie pass without actual jokes (Irresistable is bizarrely, weirdly quiet for a mid-budget studio comedy), leaving Stewart to slather the proceedings in a thick slurry of irony that, frankly, went out of style when South Park turned the 2000 Presidential Election into voting between "a turd and a douche." The movie wheezes along on its hostile, decidedly unpleasant way, pausing for newscaster cutaways that would have been too obvious for a bad SNL sketch, before arriving at...and here's where I should tread lightly. See, Irresistable has tricksier designs than you might expect. Suffice to say, a) I didn't expect for the movie to hinge on an honest-to-goodness twist, and b) I certainly didn't expect that twist to plagiarize, and almost in full, maybe the best bit from the halcyon days of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. But in a weird way, even that makes a strange kind of sense. Stewart has so little of value to say here that he has to resort to stealing from himself. The worst American film of the year, bar none.