Paramount Pictures makes a strong HD showing the week, offering Blu-ray releases of both Young Adult and The Adventures of Tintin. Young Adult illustrates the art of defying audience expectations; the studio might have marketed the picture as an off-kilter romantic comedy, but director Jason Reitman's film contains few genuine rom-com flourishes. Eschewing the quirks that made her Juno script so charming, writer Diablo Cody has crafted a bitter, cynical character study - more in line with Greenberg than with My Best Friend's Wedding - that showcases Charlize Theron's flawless lead performance as an all-too human monster.
Even though Young Adult deviates from traditional comedy tropes, it maintains a compelling, twisted integrity. As Martin Liebman wrote in his Blu-ray review, the film is "a welcome reprieve from the traditional comedic or even dramatic structure that aims to hide shortcomings behind walls of music and bustling activity. Young Adult plays openly; it has nothing to hide, exposing its deepest and darkest secrets and every last ounce of its characters' personas for the audience to see, which serves to only enhance the movie and its themes."
The Adventures of Tintin, on the other hand, is as sunny and inconsequential as a summer afternoon, and often just as enjoyable. In his adaptation of the Hergé graphic novels, director Steven Spielberg employs motion-capture animation with little of the uncanny valley creepiness that the format can evince, and - most importantly - he keeps the film's pace breakneck, conjuring up three or four crackerjack action set pieces, including a motorcycle chase through a crumbling Moroccan city that plays as a four-minute-long, uninterrupted camera shot.
Tintin doesn't reinvent action-adventure filmmaking; it just wants to give audiences a good time, and it largely succeeds. Martin Liebman's review praises that quality, noting that, "The Adventures of Tintin defines light, family-appropriate cinema action and adventure on the grandest of scales. The movie's photorealistic animation, quality story, and good characters come together with little effort...Certainly, The Adventures of Tintin may only be a digital and re-imagined take on the world of Indiana Jones, but it works well enough on its own merits, with its own characters, its own ideas, and its own rhythm."
No Blu-ray this week has as singular a rhythm, however, as Lars von Trier's Melancholia. The director dials back on the physical extremities of his previous Antichrist in favor of greater psychological complexities, using the end of the world to examine how two very different sisters (Kirsten Dunst, Spider-Man, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, I'm Not There) adjust to impending doom.
A favorite at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Melancholia finds von Trier operating at the top of his game. Casey Broadwater called the film, "perhaps Lars von Trier's clearest, purest vision yet, a fluid synthesis of stately German Romanticism and the handheld, documentary-style jitteriness of his Dogme 95 days...I've seen the film three times now, and I keep noticing new layers to unpeel...It's always the mark of a great film when it offers much more than you can unpack in a single viewing."
While not as formally experimental, The Last Temptation of Christ shares Melancholia's facility for metaphysical provocation. Hugely controversial when it first premiered in 1988, the film uses Nikos Kazantzakis' novel of the same name to dissect Jesus Christ the Man, viscerally depicting the internal struggle between his divine and human urges. The Last Temptation of Christ also stands as one of Martin Scorsese's most personal works; he recasts Jesus as a brilliant artist terrified of his natural gifts, a theme that runs throughout the director's entire career.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov writes that he "sincerely hope[s] that the controversy that once surrounded Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ is a thing of the past. This is a beautiful, respectful, and enormously moving and thought-provoking film that ought to be admired, not condemned and ridiculed."