Jason Bailey
Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalogue titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This twice-monthly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.
PICK OF THE WEEK:
Thieves Like Us: This 1974 Robert Altman drama (debuting on 4K from Cinématographe) looks, on its face, like yet another Bonnie & Clyde rip-off, a Depression-era tale of lovers on the run—except the lovers themselves never actually go anywhere, which is perhaps the point of the thing, ultimately. The script by (Altman, his Nashville collaborator Joan Tewkesbury, and Rambling Rose writer Calder Willingham) tells the story of Bowie (a terrific Keith Carradine), part of a bank-robbing gang of hoods, and Keechie (Shelly Duvall, never better), the simple girl he keeps coming back to. Altman’s working in a different key than Bonnie & Clyde and its exploitation successors like Big Bad Mama and Boxcar Bertha; its style is laid-back, modest, and subtle, a detailed recreation of a world where the radio was always on and there was nothing better than enjoying a cold bottle of Coke with your best girl. (Includes audio commentaries, new and archival interviews, theatrical trailer, and essays by Mitchell Beaupre, Marya E. Gates, and Carlos Valladares.)
ON NETFLIX:
Logan Lucky: With Channing Tatum currently charming and shocking audiences in Blink Twice, Netflix has wisely started streaming Steven Soderbergh’s 2017 return to feature filmmaking (after a self-imposed hiatus that no one took terribly seriously to begin with). It’s a deliriously entertaining and deliciously well-executed return to his specialty, the heist movie, but with a twist: rather than the finely-tailored likes of George Clooney and Brad Pitt, he focuses on a family of backwoods bad-luck cases, and their plan to rip off a NASCAR speedway. An observer winkingly dubs it “Ocean’s 7-11,” and that’s about right; it’s like a bunch of Coen Brothers characters wandered into a Soderbergh movie, with all the dry verbal wit and visual ingenuity that equation suggests.
First Man: Damien Chazelle’s La La Land follow-up looked like one of 2018’s best bets, both commercially and in the awards race, and its unfortunate failure to connect with either probably has something to do with its refusal to adhere to the lamest of biopic traditions. His dramatization of the journey of Neil Armstrong is not about checking date-and-place boxes; it’s all about perspective, all seen from his point of view, less concerned with history of that mission’s impact than with what it was like to be him. And he doesn’t exactly let you in – this guy was the very definition of the strong, silent type, and star Ryan Gosling leans into that squareness, daring us to peer in to his up-tight close-ups and find the guy inside. This is a moving, well-mounted, and (most commendably) personal piece of work.
ON 4K / BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: The rebooted “Planet of the Apes” trilogy was a perfectly realized story, coming to what seemed a logical conclusion, and the decision to jump-start it is as knee-jerk frustrating as the similarly money-grabbing “Hunger Games” re-launch. That said, this is a fine piece of pop filmmaking, with director Wes Ball (the Maze Runner films) constructing a generations-later narrative that introduces an ape “clan,” its inhabitants, and their rituals and routines before launching into a struggle between our good-hearted heroes and a genuinely scary villain. The sheer how-do-they-do-that factor, a presence since the initial ‘60s and ‘70s installments, remains strong (the sheer emotional force of these creatures is mind-boggling), and while it’s a touch overlong at 145 minutes, this is nevertheless a worthwhile entry in an unexpectedly durable franchise. (Also streaming on Hulu.) (Includes audio commentary, alternate “unfinished VFX” version, deleted and extended scenes, and featurettes.)
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
T-Blockers: This good old-fashioned slice of Oz-ploitaiton does what many of the best exploitation movies do: it uses its genre trappings as gift wrapping for pointed social commentary. In this case, evil parasites unleashed by an earthquake turn their hosts into virulent transphobes, so trans filmmaker Sophie (the charismatic Lauren Last) and her friends must stop them at all costs. Names are named and shamed (including J.K. Rowling, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson), blood is spewed, and violence is plentiful. But director/co-writer Alice Maio Mackay takes the time to establish this community and its likable characters, creating genuine warmth between its heroines, which matters. It’s a genuinely good time, overcoming the shortcomings of its low budget with a gleeful punk energy. (Includes bonus feature film Bad Girl Boogey, short films, interview, and trailers.)
ON 4K:
Real Life: Two more Albert Brooks efforts join the Criterion Collection, both from Paramount, and both leap-frogging Blu-ray to go straight to 4K. First up is his uproarious debut picture, a send-up of the PBS documentary series An American Family that has become a remarkably prescient and trenchant commentary on “reality” culture. Brooks’s script is less personal than his later efforts, more of a wonderfully absurd extension of his SNL shorts, and that’s the right fit; it’s a movie that’s broad and funny and strange and smart, and if all that’s somehow not enough, it’s got Charles Grodin in it too. (Includes interviews, trailer, and essay by A.S. Hamrah.)
Mother: This 1996 family comedy isn’t typically lumped in with Brooks’s masterpieces, and that’s perhaps understandable; the pacing is a little off, and some of the jokes don’t quite land. But the ones that do, really do; as a newly-divorced and frustratingly-blocked novelist, Brooks decides to move back in with his mom (a pitch-perfect Debbie Reynolds) and figure out his issues with women, and their passive-aggressive sparring is golden. Lisa Kudrow crushes her cameo, Rob Morrow is appropriately unhinged as her preferred son, and only Brooks can turn something as mundane as a dig through his spendthrift mom’s fridge into a fall-down-funny comic set piece. (Includes interviews, trailer, and essay by Carrie Rickey.)
Prime Cut: Michael Ritchie was best known for directing broad comedies (The Bad News Bears, Fletch) and social satires (Smile, The Candidate). But this 1972 thriller (making its 4K debut from KL Studio Classics) finds him working in straight-up crime-movie mode, and slipping into it easily; this is a nasty piece of ’70s pulp, along the lines of Charley Varrick or The Silent Partner. Lee Marvin stars as a Chicago mob enforcer who’s sent out to Kansas City to lean on the improbably-named “Mary Ann” (Gene Hackman, terrifying), a slaughter-house operator with a lucrative sideline in sex trafficking. Robert Dillon’s screenplay is lean and mean (appropriately enough), Marvin and Hackman are beautifully matched, and Sissy Spacek makes a real splash in her film debut. (Includes audio commentaries and trailer.)
Alphaville: Jean-Luc Godard’s bold, stylish 1965 classic is a sci-fi/noir fusion that purposefully discombobulates time and place, eschewing the customary signifiers of futuristic sets and props and focusing merely on concepts, a fascinating approach that strips the ideas behind these genres down to their bones. (His best work tends to mine a similar self-reflectiveness.) Toss in some astonishing black and white photography—which absolutely shimmers in KL’s new 4K edition— the requisite French New Wave tough/cool, and an eye-opening sense of grim romanticism, and you’ve got one of the best films of Godard’s best period. (Includes audio commentary, introduction, interview, and trailer.)
Last Year at Marienbad: Cinephiles have spent over 50 years working through the mysteries of Alain Resnais’s ingenious circular narrative, and not all of them took to the challenge—writers Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss, for example, hilariously chose it as one of the 50 worst movies of all time in their 1978 book of the same name (placing it alongside Myra Breckinridge, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and The Terror of Tiny Town). There’s no accounting for bad taste, but it’s awfully easy for an impatient viewer to get frustrated by the picture’s shifting narrative, enigmatic characterizations, and pensive pacing; some find Marienbad unwatchable, while others call it a masterpiece. This viewer leans towards the latter, as the potentially alienating slowness is central to the picture’s sense of mystery, and its central notions of memory and displacement. (Includes audio commentary, visual essay, featurettes, interview, and Resnais short film.)
Sudden Death: Star Jean-Claude Van Damme and filmmaker Peter Hyams reteamed the year after their smash Timecop for this action bruiser, and its common shorthand as “Die Hard in a hockey arena” somehow feels like an understatement; there are plenty of “Die Hard on a [blank]” movies, but few that so closely parallel their inspiration (and I mean, this one’s beat for beat). Formulaic though it might be, it’s also thoroughly entertaining, thanks to Van Damme’s easy charisma, the villainous turn by Powers Boothe at his oily best, and Hyams’s workmanlike direction and precise cinematography (nicely represented by KL’s new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative). It’s become old hat to compare and complain about the general deterioration of craft, but my god, you can put the filmmaking of this second-tier programmer up against most contemporary blockbusters, and it wins in a walk. (Includes audio commentary, archival interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, trailer and TV spot.)
Hackers: I’m old enough to remember the initial critical reception to this 1995 cyber-thriller (tl;dr: sneers), so it’s been a treat to watch the Gen-Xers it was targeted to push its reevaluation in recent years. And for good reason: it’s a well-paced, zippy slab of zeitgeist, with a loaded supporting cast, a well-curated soundtrack, and a geek-sexy script, wherein the heat between leads Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller (who harnessed their considerable chemistry into a brief offscreen marriage) could melt marble. Shout Factory’s repackaging its 4K from last year in a spiffy new Steelbook, so if you missed it the first time around, you’ve got another chance. (Includes featurette and trailer.)
The Delta Force: Cannon Films head Menahem Golan stepped behind the camera for one of his company’s biggest pictures, directing, co-writing, and co-producing this mash-up of ‘70s disaster movie and ‘80s action flick. It literally begins with a helicopter exploding, which puts its priorities straight from the jump, though there is shockingly little of above-the-title stars Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin in the first half, which primarily focuses on the hijacking of a flight from Cairo to New York City. (The hijackers are Palestinians who specifically target their Jewish hostages, so the timing of Shout Select’s new 4K release is, to put it mildly, inopportune.) To his credit, Golan assembles a hell of a cast, including Shelley Winters and Laine Kazan (having something of a kvetch-off), Martin Balsam, George Kennedy, Joey Bishop, and (oh dear) Robert Forster as the lead terrorist. The carnage and explosions tick up considerably once Norris and Marvin arrive on their rescue mission; some of the stunts are so ridiculous as to veer into comedy (particularly those involving Norris’s rocket-launchin’ motorcycle), the score (by no less than future Oscar nominee Alan Silvestri) verges on self-parody, and the final shots are literal flag-wavers. There’s pleasure to be had here, as long as you don’t take it the least bit seriously.
Devil Times Five: Sean MacGregor’s 1974 killer-kiddie flick, new to 4K from Vinegar Syndrome, was released under multiple titles throughout that decade (including Peopletoys and The Horrible House on the Hill), where drive-in, grindhouse, and VHS audiences came to embrace its absolute amorality and ingenuity. The set-up is simple: a van transporting patients from a juvenile mental hospital crashes on a snowy mountain pass, unleashing the survivors to go on a killing spree at a nearby skiing chalet. Director McGregor, uncredited collaborator David Sheldon, and screenwriter Dylan Jones gleefully refuse to pull any punches, doling out no redeeming or sympathetic features to their killers—or to their victims, for that matter—resulting in some genuinely unhinged kills and a chilling closing tableau. (Includes new and archival audio commentaries, new and archival interviews, featurette, and theatrical trailer.)
ON 4K / BLU-RAY:
The Mexico Trilogy: Arrow Video’s new box set of Robert Rodriguez’s defining action series—El Mariachi (1993), Desperado (1995), and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)—is a bit of a head-scratcher from a format perspective: only the middle film is presented in both Blu-ray and 4K, while the first and third movies are Blu-ray only. This is presumably due to the sketchiness of the source materials; El Mariachi was famously shot on 16mm loose ends for a mere $7,000, while Mexico used early (and still a little dodgy) digital technology, though I’ve seen great-looking 4Ks with similar origins. Nevertheless, this is a top-notch trio of rapid-fire action flicks, displaying not only the director’s frugality (even the two sequels look more expensive than they were) but his sure-handed, energetic approach to Woo-style gunplay and cool-as-a-cucumber set pieces. (Includes audio commentaries, new and archival interviews and featurettes, short film, and trailers.)
ON BLU-RAY:
Bad Company: Robert Benton’s directorial debut (new on Blu from Fun City Editions) did for the frontier melodrama what he and David Newman’s Bonnie and Clyde script did for the Depression-era crime movie five years earlier—demystifying the form, and reveling in the rough edges that decades of filmmakers had sanded off. Set in 1863, it stars Jeff Bridges and Daisy Miller’s Barry Brown as a pair of Civil War conscription dodgers who set out West, with a few other ne’er-do-wells; “We’re gonna have ourselves a time,” Bridges announces, “huntin’ and fishin’, livin’ off the land.” But they’re a bunch of screw-ups, so the picture, which comes on like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, plays out closer to The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. More importantly, Benton looks the brutality and ugliness of this time and place dead in the eye and doesn’t blink, up to and including its sadly inevitable conclusion. (Includes audio commentary.)
Not a Pretty Picture: Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl, Real Genius) made her feature film debut with a very different kind of project—a cinematic exploration of her own sexual assault, combining dramatization and rehearsal footage in an inventive intermingling of fact, fiction, and interpretation. We see her and her cast (including leading lady Michele Manenti, herself a survivor) working scenes and then playing them out, improvising from their own experiences, breaking boundaries and blurring lines. It all feels unsurprisingly and affectingly authentic, and when the camera pans, during a particularly difficult scene, to Coolidge watching her actors work, it becomes a spiky and potent image of trauma processing. Per the title, it’s not an easy sit, but it’s a powerful and provocative experience. (Includes interview, earlier Coolidge film, and essay by Molly Haskell.)
Observe and Report: The ads tried (and failed) to sell it as a slapstick-y Seth Rogen comedy, but this 2009 effort from writer/director Jody Hill (best known for HBO’s East Bound and Down and The Righteous Gemstones) was something else altogether: uncompromisingly violent, dark, and more than a little disturbing, yet frequently, explosively funny. It was one of the more daring films to see a major studio release in recent years, a grubby, dirt-under-its-fingernails effort that is closer to Taxi Driver than Paul Blart: Mall Cop—which it superficially resembles, and which preceded it into theaters by just a couple of months (and out-grossed it exponentially). But it’s found its audience in subsequent years, and this new Shout! Select edition treats it with a respect and reverence that’s long overdue. (Includes picture-in-picture commentary, interview, deleted scenes, gag reel, and feaeturettes.)
Death to Smoochy: Danny DeVito’s pitch-black comedy was received with similar critical venom and commercial indifference upon its release in 2002, and it found a similar afterlife: a slow path to discovery by its true sicko audience, culminating in a sharp new Shout Selects Blu-ray release. Robin Williams nicely mixes his two screen personas—sunny cut-up and scheming psycho—as “Rainbow” Randolph, an amoral, alcoholic kids’ TV host taken down in an extortion sting who sets out to take down his replacement, a Barney-style goody-two-shoes played with nary a wink by Edward Norton. DeVito sometimes overshoots his marks, but the entire enterprise has such a welcome sense of IDGAF that its fumbles are forgivable; this is the kind of gloriously weird and savagely lowlife entertainment that you could never get a major studio to bankroll anymore. (Includes audio commentary, deleted and extended scenes, interviews, bloopers and outtakes, and featurettes.)
Joyride: Even more good stuff from Cinématographe, this time spotlighting a long-forgotten but quite compelling B-movie from director Joseph Ruben (The Stepfather, The Good Son). The cast is a nepo baby buffet, with Melanie Griffith, Desi Arnaz Jr., and Robert Carradine as a trio of friends and (somewhat interchangably) lovers who head to Alaska in search of greener pastures and find nothing but bad luck when they arrive; their turn to a life of crime is narratively inevitable but, to the credit of scripters Ruben and film critic Peter Rainer, somewhat understandable. The working-class ethos is palpable and the character beats land, all while delivering the required set pieces (and wah-wah pedal). (Includes audio commentary, interviews, trailer, and essays by Chris Shields, Adam Nayman, and Brandon Streussnig.)
I Am a Sex Addict: Factory 25 has, in just over 30 Blu-ray releases, carved out a niche for micro-budget, character-driven comedy/dramas, many of them of the mumblecore vintage. This 2005 effort from writer/director/star Caveh Zahedi isn’t quite of that school, but it has several commonalities: a intensely singular voice, inventive use of limited resources, and most of all, an uncommon candor on matters of sex. Zahedi stars as himself—or a version of himself, at the very least—in what amounts to a confessional, explaining and dramatizing both how he succumbed to an obsession with prostitutes, and the hiccups of making a film about that. A little of Zahedi goes a long way, and your enjoyment of the film may hinge on your tolerance for him as a performer. But this is an admirably eccentric and unapologetic picture, in which its star is willing to sacrifice his own likability in the name of truth. (Includes deleted scenes, short films, Gotham Awards acceptance speech, and essasy by Zahedi and Kathy Joyce.)
Scarlet Diva: Coincidentally enough, Film Movement Classics has released another, often uncomfortably forthright cinematic roman a clef, this one the 2000 exploration of sex, drugs, and celebrity from enfant terrible Asia Argento. She plays (no shock here) a rising young starlet trying to navigate her industry and her own addictions, and her performance is a stunner, the kind of intimate acting you can perhaps only extract under circumstances as personal as this. The storytelling is visceral and upsetting throughout, nowhere more so than in her thinly-veiled account of her assault by Harvey Weinstein, here seen in the form of “Barry,” a repugnant but powerful American film producer who asks our heroine for a massage and attempts to rape her. Argento makes the character both a threat and a buffoon—a neat trick, that—and in doing so, created one of the first filmed dispatches from the #MeToo movement. (Includes audio commentaries, interview, featurettes, trailers, and essay by Kier-La Janisse.)
Supersoul Brother & The Films of Rene Martinez Jr.: So the thing we must begin by noting is that Rene Martinez Jr. was a very poor filmmaker, whose low-budget exploitation films are marred by wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and camerawork that somehow makes them look even cheaper than they are. Once that is acknowledged, we can further put his work into the realm of schlock auteurs like Ed Wood and Coleman Francis, directors whose work is so incompetent that it veers into something like surrealism: their films exist in a world that bears only the most passing resemblance to ours, so they kinda have to be seen to be believed. Supersoul Brother is the centerpiece, a 1978 showcase for the dubious talents of “party record” comic “Wildman” Steve Gallon; it’s a hybrid of Blaxpoitation, sci-fi, and action that makes Dolemite look like Superman, both in terms of production value and vulgarity (its original title, burned into the print, will give you a jolt if you’re not expecting it). Two of his other three features are included as special features, including the somehow-even-clumsier 1977 Blaxpoitation snoozer The Guy from Harlem (Rifftrax took that one on, and that’s about its only watchable form) and an especially sleazy 1973 biker flick (and that’s saying something) called Road of Death. Once again, these are not good films, in any objective sense—but they’re surefire objects of fascination for fringe cinema connoisseurs. (Includes trailer reel.)
