For the week of September 21st, Warner Home Entertainment is offering a new 4K pressing of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, either as a standalone release or as part of the Stanley Kubrick: 3-Film 4K Collection. Did anyone handle the antiwar picture as well as Kubrick did? François Truffaut famously remarked that "there is no such thing as an anti-war film" - he believed that cinema, by its very nature, rendered the most harrowing atrocities as entertainment - but I'd be curious to read his takes on Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, or this Vietnam War-set drama. What Kubrick seizes on, time and time again, is this sense of pervasive, unfathomable absurdity during wartime, whether it's the catch-22 facing Paths's hapless WWI soldiers (death by German bayonets or by French military tribunal) or the way the fragile male ego dooms the world to nuclear holocaust in Dr. Strangelove. You feel like you're going a little crazy watching a Kubrick war movie, and that's doubly true about Full Metal Jacket. Nothing about this film moves the way you expect it to. Familiar with the three-act structure? Kubrick tosses that into the waste bin, choosing instead a diptych format. We get a lengthy, standalone prologue and then about an hour in country with some of the characters from the first part. What about the kaleidoscopic verisimilitude of an Apocalypse Now or Platoon? Nope - while Kubrick and his skilled production team create a sufficiently crumbling vision of War as Hell, they also shot the whole movie in England, and it shows. You're always aware you couldn't be further from the real locations. And as for traditional audience identification, the opening scene sets as clear a mission statement as I could imagine: a military barber shaves the heads of one new recruit after another (to the strains of Johnny Wright's twangy country ballad "Hello, Vietnam"), rendering them all largely indistinguishable grunts. To Kubrick, that's the most frightening thing about combat, that it can take scores of people and firebomb away their humanity until they're little more than violent, affectless husks. And Kubrick has a very generous definition of what connotes "the enemy." Yes, a Vietnamese sniper proves a horrifying opponent in the film's final twenty minutes, but the most fearsome character is R. Lee Ermey's Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, a drill instructor prone to baroquely ornate feats of verbal degradation and a yen for breaking down the weakest of his Marine recruits. Early on, he targets Vincent D'Onofrio's Private Pyle, and if there's any sense of tragedy in Full Metal Jacket, it's watching this sweet, awkward boy brutalized until he...well, let's just say he ends up rivaling Jack Nicholson for most memorable bearer of the "Kubrick Face." It doesn't matter what side you're on in a war - no one has any use for humanity. That's the most absurd turn of all.
In Blu-ray review, Randy Miller III wrote that the film "is one of Stanley Kubrick's most brutally effective films and perhaps one of the best ever made concerning the Vietnam War. Whether you prefer one 'half' over the other, this is an intense viewing experience with unforgettable scenes and performances. Warner Bros. released the film on Blu-ray three times, with the two most recent editions offering the same A/V presentation and bonus features. While this 4K/Blu-ray combo pack includes one of those recycled discs rather than a newly mastered one, the 2160p transfer itself is a terrific effort that breathes new life into the film's visceral atmosphere with improved detail and tasteful use of HDR enhancement. It also restores the original mono as an optional audio track, albeit in compressed Dolby Digital format. It's still a very fine effort that die-hard fans should enjoy, although the lack of a new Blu-ray will repel those who haven't upgraded to 4K yet."
Also receiving a 4K upgrade: Damien Chazelle's Oscar-winning Whiplash. This small, spare psychodrama about the fierce battle of wills that erupts between a promising young drummer (Miles Teller) and his band instructor (J.K. Simmons) remains Chazelle's best film. It's also, hands down, one of the exhilarating movie experiences I've had in a long time. Whiplash might be writer-director Damien Chazelle's second full-length feature, but he conducts with the skill of a far more seasoned filmmaker. He structures the film as a 100-minute suspense exercise, with Tom Cross' razor-sharp editing perfectly complementing Sharone Meir's roving, insistent camerawork, and all the while Chazelle turns the screws on his hero: the film gets more claustrophobic as it goes along, both aesthetically (Chazelle keeps pushing in tighter and tighter on Teller until the film is alternating shots of him with tight close-ups of his drums) and dramatically. The more Simmons pushes him, the more Teller begins to jettison everything that could stand in the way of musical genius, be it his well-meaning-but-ineffectual father (Paul Reiser) or his sweet, unremarkable girlfriend (Melissa Benoist). I thought of Martin Scorsese more than once while watching this, and Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg, too, and like those filmmakers, Chazelle's grounds his technical virtuosity in depths of character and theme. He gets career-best performances from his leads, using Teller's innate prickliness to keep his character from seeming like a wide-eyed innocent. One of the most interesting things Teller conveys is his simultaneous awareness and indifference to the fact that his frenzied practice schedule is tearing him apart (a point Chazelle reinforces with Raging Bull-esque shots of Teller sinking his bleeding hands into ice baths after grueling drum sessions). Best of all is Simmons, who gets the actor's showcase he's always deserved. Simmons is so relentlessly, creatively profane that you're wonder if he's channeling R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket (synergy!), but the part never feels like mere imitation. The scary thing is, Simmons never lets you forget that there's a human being under all that psychological torment, that his conditioning of Teller is, in some elemental sense, an act of love. At its core, Chazelle is dealing with an irresistible, disturbing question: to what degree do we excuse the pursuit of genius? To his credit, he never provides an answer, choosing to end the film on the perfect note of blistering ambiguity, and we are left shaken.
Of the 2K Blu-ray release, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "pushes the audience to a breaking point but never the whole way beyond, leaving viewers in a state of emotional upheaval through most all of it but at the end more in a state of awe considering how fundamentally pure the movie proves itself in terms of pitch-perfect construction and delivery of some of the most challenging material ever to appear on the screen. Damien Chazelle's script is mesmerizingly rich and detailed, and his direction is fully absorbing, both finding intricate, nuanced details that elevate not only the drama but the performances that make the movie work. Miles Teller is terrific as Andrew, finding an inner obsession and evolving from a state of unflinching determination to multiple breaking points and beyond in a performance that's not only physically challenging but emotionally wrecking through the entirety, from the conflicted emotions of his first run-in with Fletcher all the way through to their final meeting. Yet the film benefits most from an absolutely dominating performance from J.K. Simmons who shapes a deep, mysterious, almost wounded character in the instructor who is so complex that even right to the very end one cannot tell if his methods are mad or whether there's some almost evil genius to the way he goes about his business, the way he pushes, and pushes, and pushes some more with seemingly no care for the individual on any level. Does he break with the intention to bring back his student stronger than before, or is he simply a man whose past has somehow brought him to a point of no return where his only satisfaction comes not from molding the next great musician but identifying the top talent and breaking the person to ensure he or she fails to meet their potential? Whatever the case may be - wherever the movie and actor does or does not take the character - Simmons absolutely makes the movie and embodies the film's dual strengths as an outwardly intense drama and an inwardly fascinating exploration of the human condition."
Shout Factory is offering Hayao Miyazaki's staggering The Wind Rises as its latest Studio Ghibli reissue. Even though Miyazaki is working on a new film (How Do You Live?, about which little is known), The Wind Rises plays like a career summation. Although the film is nominally a story about aviation designer/engineer Jiro Horikoshi (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Miyazaki deals with Jiro's life in ways that directly reflect on his own existence as a filmmaker. It hardly feels like an accident that Miyazaki chose Jiro as his protagonist, given Miyazaki's own love of flying, and Jiro's achievements in that field – particularly his dream-bound relationship with legendary designer Giovanni Caproni (Stanley Tucci) – allow Miyazaki to animate the finest flying sequences of his entire career. Some reviewers have complained that The Wind Rises is too earth-bound to qualify as a great animated movie, but there's no way to achieve what Miyazaki does in the sky on a live-action budget. Martin Scorsese tried with The Aviator, and even his striking flying sequences don't approach the majesty of the traditional animated methods found here. We get horrifying dream sequences (that are reminiscent Howl's Moving Castle), impressionistic design beats (my favorite scenes takes viewers inside Jiro's head as he sketches a plane - the vehicle warps and crackles as he works out the kinks), and moments of simple, human awe, like the paper-airplane "test run" that binds Jiro to his one true love (Emily Blunt). It's such a full encapsulation of Miyazaki's art, and that level of artistic achievement also connects Jiro to the director. If Jiro has a fault, it's that he is devoted to his art to a fault. Anyone who's familiar with Miyazaki's obsessive, perfectionist tendencies when approaching his own animation will be able to see the two as kindred spirits who went after two separate paths: one made movies, and the other helped make planes, but the creative spark in each situation is the same. In fact, Jiro's spark has made The Wind Rises easily Miyazaki's most controversial effort. At the end of the day, Jiro's passion for flight led to the creation of the Japanese Zero, and some critics have accused Miyazaki of whitewashing Jiro's labors to free him of the culpability he may have had in any of the deaths associated with that instrument of aviation warfare. That argument seems to be missing the forest through the trees. Part of what gives The Wind Rises its unique edge is the lurking subtext of these war-related deaths (which Miyazaki doesn't completely elide), that Jiro is so focused creatively he doesn't grasp the real-world implications of his actions. Furthermore, as Jiro moves further and further away from the people he loves in pursuit of his obsession, we're reminded of Miyazaki in his twilight years: his viability as an artist comes at the expense of his interpersonal connections (watch the phenomenal documentary The Kingdom of Dreams & Madness for an unvarnished glimpse at Miyazaki at work). It takes a special kind of talent to get under people's skin the way Miyazaki has, for better or worse. Sometimes, they call it genius.
Kenneth Brown's review of the Disney Blu-ray calls The Wind Rises "Hayao Miyazaki's stunning, heartaching farewell to animation; a film so moving, personal and affecting that it's hard to imagine a more fitting project capping the Studio Ghibli co-founder's illustrious career. Though some will no doubt suggest a sweeping fantasy epic would have been more appropriate (something more akin to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away), Miyazaki's largely fictionalized account of aircraft designer and engineer Jiro Horikoshi (1903-1982) is all at once an absorbing period drama, a captivating romance, a jaw-dropping piece of deftly executed hand-drawn animation, and a glimpse into the mind of a man of invention, innovation and wondrous imagination. And it's in that regard that Miyazaki's Horikoshi and Miyazaki the filmmaker are almost inseparable. Where one begins and the other ends is only known to Miyazaki, a revered icon here and abroad whose animated films have inspired and influenced more animators, directors, screenwriters and illustrators than could ever be counted. The Wind Rises is both fiction and non-fiction, biographical and autobiographical, surreal and real, dreamlike and grounded, hopeful and haunting, beautiful and simple. It's a fascinating, multilayered masterwork that's one of Miyazaki's finest films and greatest achievements."
A few weeks ago, the Rob Zombie Trilogy hit home media as a Target exclusive; it's now available at many other retailers. I noted that these pictures will ultimately cement Zombie's peculiar screen legacy. That's mostly a good thing. Across the board, they represent some of his most consistent and engaging horror efforts. I'd rank the first feature - House of 1000 Corpses - as the worst one. Zombie is all over the place in terms of his aesthetic, throwing in splattery gore and wildly varying film stocks and shock cutaways (this looks like the most expensive music video he ever made, for better or worse), and I suspect that's because what he's ultimately up to isn't all that revolutionary. He's riffing on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - some unlucky teens face off against the Firefly crew (Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie, and Karen Black) and mostly die horribly - and outside of the look, he doesn't have that many surprises in store. Somewhat famously, Zombie's original cut was so gruesome that Universal (before Lionsgate picked it up) made him hack it down to what we have here, but since the excised footage has never resurfaced, we're left with grindhouse pastiche. However, with the film's 2005 follow-up The Devil's Rejects, we move from grindhouse pastiche to honest-to-God grindhouse thriller. It's a smart move - this is easily Zombie's masterpiece. This time around, Zombie doesn't even bother mediating our experience through the lambs he's sending to the slaughter. His protagonists are the Fireflys (minus Karen Black, replaced by Lesile Easterbrook), and that shift in audience association lends The Devil's Rejects discomfiting power. When the gang brutalizes a family in a roadside motel, we almost can't watch. The violence becomes as luridly personal for us as it is for the killers. But in Zombie's universe, no one is all that innocent, and by the film's transcendently bloody climax, we've forged this disturbing alliance with the Family Firefly, especially given the depredations of the Sheriff (William Forsythe) ready to kill any and all between him and his quarries. Which leads us to 3 from Hell, and if you're wondering how the Firefly clan might return after their violent death by gunfire (to the strains of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Firebird." It's actually much cooler than it sounds), then fear not. 3 from Hell begins with the news that the Fireflys survived that hail of bullets and are now imprisoned for their crimes. While I'd never say that Zombie has gotten nostalgic in his older age (he's too big a fan of juvenile vulgarities), he's more cognizant of the passing of time than I would have expected. It's been fourteen years since The Devil's Rejects, and that amount of time has passed in the movie, so the Fireflys are a little wearier, a little more desperate. That worry gives them some interesting notes to play (especially Moseley, who's terrific), and Zombie puts them through the ringer by changing 3 from Hell's tone every few minutes. My biggest problem with the movie is how piecemeal the whole endeavor is. You get the sense Zombie shot what he could when he could, gathering whatever actors were available (Haig is basically an extended cameo, and the movie suffers from his absence), but Zombie compensates by structuring the film as four or five genre exercises in one. For ten minutes, it's a deranged media satire; then it turns into a prison escape movie; Baby's stuff transforms the movie into a more lurid "Women in Cages" vibe. By the end, we could be watching a low-rent Peckinpah entry, especially once Emilio Rivera's fearsome Big Bad enters the picture. Zombie treats 3 from Hell as a genre playground, and if you're in on his wavelength, you'll have almost as much fun as he's having.