Please see the release calendar for releases from countries outside the US.
For the week of March 12th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Justice League to Blu-ray. Many of you already know that genuine tragedy marred the film's production. Before the film wrapped principal photography, director Zach Snyder's daughter committed suicide, and the resulting emotional strain was so great that Snyder left the film to be with his family. In responding to such a crisis, Warner Bros. decided to replace Snyder with Buffy the Vampire Slayer impresario Joss Whedon, and it becomes very clear very fast that Warner cared less about finishing the movie and more about getting Whedon to retrofit Justice League in the style of his own Avengers features. I was, by no means, the biggest fan of Wonder Woman - for all its cultural significance, it traffics in one too many narrative clichés and blockbuster concessions – but it's a marvel of tonal and thematic coherence compared to this one. Fragmented beats reflect Snyder's punishing, brutalist approach: Wonder Woman's first scene, which finds her (Gal Gadot) methodically taking down a London terrorist cell; the Amazons' desperate flight from Big Bad Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds, a talented actor buried under a CGI design schema that would have been cutting-edge in 2003); and the return of Superman (Henry Cavill, in what amounts to an extended cameo), who rises from the dead harboring more than a little ill will towards his superhero compatriots. Not all of these moments work, but at least they feel consistent with the work Snyder did in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The finished film, however, drowns any opportunities for sober reflection in a morass of Whedon quips and forced jocularity. One moment, Batman (Ben Affleck, alternatively driven and bored, depending on if the scene is from the reshoots) is somberly opining on the nature of gods and men; the next, he's wisecracking that his super power is "[he's] rich." Jason Momoa's Aquaman gets a powerful introduction, but the movie loses track of him so quickly that we don't care when Whedon has him sit on Wonder Woman's truth lasso and start confessing all his insecurities. Ezra Miller's Flash is maybe the most frustrating example of Justice League's war with itself. Miller is clearly having a ball, except so many of his jokes (including an admittedly great Pet Sematary reference) have been clearly added after the fact in medium-shot cutaways that they never feel organic to what's happening in the main action. He's most effective when the movie doesn't force him to play the designated comic relief – I loved the brief, heartbreaking scenes between him and his incarcerated father (Billy Crudup, once again doing so much with so little). That schizophrenic approach to tone manifests itself in the filmmaking itself, which actively bears the scars of the film's post-production woes. I almost never notice continuity errors, but Justice League cares so little about masking them that they practically appear in Technicolor. Affleck's weight will fluctuate dramatically within the same scene (vide how he expands and contracts behind a fake beard when he first meets Aquaman), which is almost as distracting as watching Miller's hair jump between his Justice League haircut and whatever hair he was rocking post-Justice League or the utter indifference given to the wig Amy Adams' Lois Lane had to wear during post-production. Still, none of those blunders gall like the CGI treatment applied to remove Cavill's Mission: Impossible 6 mustache. Short version: on a technical level, it's as bad as you might have heard, that uncanny valley space between nose and upper lip rendering the character as terrifying even when he joins the good guys, and it also has the distinction of time-stamping all of Cavill's reshoots. We know what was changed and when, based on how unnerving Cavill looks, and in this regard, I have to imagine that Justice League would make for a hell of a teaching tool for burgeoning film students. They could piece together so many of the post-production edits and story revisions simply by watching Cavill's face from shot to shot. Look, anyone who tells you that Justice League is the worst of DC's recent efforts is, I suspect, stooping to hyperbole. Unlike Suicide Squad, it's never actively hateful, and it jettisons much of the nihilistic portent Snyder has been cultivating through both Man of Steel and Dawn of Justice; Justice League actually provides a satisfying glimpse of Superman, leaning into his deep affection and love for mankind (the film's opening cell phone footage endears us to the character for the first time since Christopher Reeve's warm, iconic take on the Kryptonian). Yet such improvements register limply, so broken is the rest of Justice League. It's a glorified rough cut, rushed into theaters to make a predetermined release date and reverse engineered from test screening comments and the prevailing whims of other superhero epics. You come out of Justice League worrying not only about the future of DC's big-screen lineup but also about the blockbuster genre as a whole.
Michael Reuben wrote that the film "is little more than an extended coda to Snyder's previous movie, in the same way that Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was necessitated by the apparent loss of an essential character in The Wrath of Khan (and anyone who knows their Star Trek films knows that III isn't one of the good ones). The fact that the alien power source used to accomplish Superman's rebirth just happens to be the same one that has drawn Steppenwolf to Earth and is now threatening the planet with destruction is just one more indication of JL's real focus. And the fights that break out after the resurrection between an angry and confused Superman and his future teammates are probably the best conflicts in the film, because they feel like something real is at stake. (Steppenwolf, by contrast, is just another in a line of increasingly generic villains in fantasy franchises from DC to Transformers.) JL does have some memorable moments, most of them courtesy of Ezra Miller's Barry Allen/Flash, who routinely breaks through the formulaic proceedings with an interesting combination of squirrelly hypertension and "gee whillikers!" enthusiasm. By contrast, Jason Momoa's Aquaman is a generic jock and Ray Fisher's Cyborg is a one-note symphony of anger buried under CG cybernetics. Maybe they'll do better in standalone movies, but Miller's performance is the most encouraging sign in JL that Warner and DC may be able to repeat the artistic and financial success of Wonder Woman with their upcoming Flashpoint movie. In JL, however, everyone is ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer number of subplots, origin stories and narrative resolutions that have to be crammed into two hours (less, actually, because the end credits run nearly ten minutes)."
From Sony Pictures Home Entertainment comes the moving coming-of-age drama Call Me by Your Name. As someone who struggled mightily through director Luca Guadagnino's last two features (I Am Love and A Bigger Splash), I found Call Me by Your Name to be his best, most accessible picture. Nominally a story of young love between Italian teenager Elio (Best Actor nominee Timothée Chalamet) and his father's dashing graduate assistant Oliver (Armie Hammer, giving the year's most unjustly overlooked performance - he comes across like some singular mix of Brad Pitt and Gary Cooper), the film adopts a leisurely, achingly sublimated restraint to its central relationship. Guadagnino is in no real hurry to bring his lovers together, luxuriating instead in the Italian countryside as the two eat and chat with Elio's parents (Amira Casar and a heartbreaking Michael Stuhlbarg), bike-ride through the humid surroundings, and - in one awkwardly memorable moment - dance to the Psychedelic Furs's "Love My Way." The way that the environment acts as both embodiment and ironic counterpoint to the leads's simmering feelings recalls a Merchant-Ivory drama from the 1980s (fitting, considering James Ivory wrote the Call Me By Your Name script): tasteful, attractive, and, ultimately, a little too withholding for its own good. When Oliver and Elio do get together, Guadagnino surprises us by cutting away from much of their physical heat like he's making concessions to the Hays Code. Maybe not that chaste - Michael Curtiz could never get away with Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains doing what Chalamet and Hammer do in the second half of the film - but enough that it might take you out of the movie. Maybe it's Guadagnino. Call Me By Your Name is certainly more compelling than I Am Love or A Bigger Splash, yet it also suffers from the same issues that plague those. Guadagnino has no real visual style other than travelogue-chic, and his mise-en-scene feels airless save for what the actors are doing. I know the film is set during the doldrums of an Italian summer, but some of the exterior scenes are so sparsely populated I thought I was watching the most picturesque apocalypse movie ever. Furthermore, Guadagnino struggles to place us inside Elio's head to the degree we need - how I longed to see François Truffaut or Wong Kar-Wai's name under the "directed by" credit. Granted, Call Me By Your Name soars when it has to - I want to like it more than I do simply for Michael Stuhlbarg's heartbreaking monologue and the final long take of Chalamet - except I couldn't lose myself in it, and that, I think, is its greatest sin.
The raucous biopic I, Tonya, which arrives courtesy of Universal Studios Home Entertainment, has no such problems. To its credit, you won't find a surfeit of good taste here. Like most of director Craig Gillespie's movies (Lars and the Real Girl, the Fright Night remake, and Million Dollar Arm), I ended up enjoying I, Tonya so much more than I thought I would. The previews promised a Scorsese-esque riff on the life of figure skater Tonya Harding (played in the film by Margot Robbie); having now seen the film, it's more a riff on David O. Russell circa American Hustle, which is a Scorsese-esque riff itself, leaving I, Tonya in the precarious position of being a copy of a copy. But what a twice-warmed Xerox it is! I, Tonya never stops moving, and it's a tribute to Gillespie and his entire creative crew that not only do we never tire of the frenetic proceedings, but that they also help to sidestep most of the film's biggest potential pitfalls. To wit: there's a version of I, Tonya that's pure miserablism, a litany of tired redneck stereotypes and violent domestic-abuse sequences that plays like a bad History Channel reenactment. Instead, Gillespie gives us the screwball funhouse version, which pings us around so aggressively that, ironically enough, the jokes land harder and the spousal abuse becomes more disturbing, not less. We're so busy yuking it up that we're not ready for when the movie goes full Raging Bull, and the laughter catches in our throat. I also suspect that I, Tonya has a lot to say about gender and celebrity, although I want to see it another time to confirm. Like Michael Bay's similarly satirical/surrealist Pain & Gain, the surface energies at work so overwhelm the senses that you barely notice the cultural commentary. Even still, I can appreciate the pacing, the tonal shifts, and the phenomenal performances. Allison Janney is getting most of the praise as Tonya's breathtakingly callous mother, but I found Sebastian Stan's terrifyingly pathetic Jeff Gillooly to be all the more impactful; Stan burrows so deeply into this deeply weak man who seems even less powerful when he's beating his wife. Robbie's Tonya Harding is less surprising, but only because I've always thought Robbie was an ace character actor masquerading as a supermodel. Even in dreck like Suicide Squad, she's making strong, unpredictable choices (it's not her fault the script and costume department betray her), and this kind of meaty, full-throated star turn only confirms that more than anything, Robbie wants to be Al Pacino, circa 1975. Based on I, Tonya, I wouldn't bet money against her.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "what's kind of fascinating about the mother - daughter dynamic in I, Tonya, though, aside from how factual it may or may not be (and remember, you're getting two versions at times anyway, one by Tonya and one by her mother), is how it's simultaneously horrifying and disturbingly funny, quite unlike the almost Grand Guignol histrionics of Frances. But much like the roiling relationship portrayed by Jessica Lange and Kim Stanley in that long ago supposed biography, the dysfunctions between LaVona Fay Golden (Allison Janney, Academy Award winner for this performance) and her daughter Tonya Harding (Academy Award nominated Margot Robbie for the bulk of the film, though little Maizie Smith and then Mckenna Grace have brief vignettes as well) are front and center from the get go in this film. Steven Rogers' often acerbic screenplay has a whole kind of goofy 'meta' aspect that includes supposed interviews with the major characters, but even within the ostensibly dramatized portions of the tale, characters will frequently break the fourth wall to address the audience, often bringing into question the very scene being played out, especially if it's ostensibly being told from one of the other characters' points of view. In fact one of the more enjoyable aspects to the storytelling here is the disconnect between the various 'versions' presented not just by LaVona and Tonya, but a number of other characters as well."
Finally, we conclude our seriocomic biopic discussion with Lionsgate Home Entertainment's release of The Disaster Artist. The inherent risk with a movie like this is that it becomes a meme in search of a movie; hell, The Disaster Artist exists only because its source inspiration, "filmmaker" Tommy Wiseau's 2003 "drama" The Room, hits a level of awful so transcendent that it became second only to Plan 9 from Outer Space in the "So Bad It's Good" movie annals. And to be sure, The Disaster Artist mines its biggest laughs from The Room's ineptitude, whether it's dramatizing the film's astoundingly incompetent production schedule, reenacting long stretches of the The Room itself (albeit with a far more talented cast of ringers that includes Alison Brie, Ari Graynor, Seth Rogen, Jason Mantzoukas, Josh Hutcherson, Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, Megan Mullally, and Zac Efron, who in one scene again proves himself a master of comic overstatement), or simply reveling in the presence of Wiseau (played by James Franco), who – to the uninitiated – comes off like what might result if Jeff Goldblum tossed James Dean, Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale, and an actual vampire in the Brundlefly machine. However, as funny as The Disaster Artist is, it reminds me of Ed Wood in that, ultimately, Franco (who also directed) wants to praise Wiseau, not bury him. You can tell that Franco feels a deep kinship with the man (their outsider statuses, their often bizarro physical/verbal affectations, their shared obsessions with James Dean), and he finds something touching in this misfit whose dreams exceed his reach. By the end, when Wiseau's delusions lead him to recast his "serious" film as a midnight movie staple, we're left thinking about the heroism of self-reinvention as opposed to something more mocking. It's a strange, wonderful feeling, and I'm willing to forgive many of the film's faults (it doesn't make much sense to anyone unfamiliar with The Room, and Franco still remains a far better actor than a director) for this vein of empathy.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "as a deconstruction of all (or at least part) of what is wrong with Hollywood, The Disaster Artist is fitfully engaging, though I have to say after having to sit through innumerable horrible films through the years to fulfill my writing duties, I simply don't think The Room qualifies as the so-called 'worst film ever made.' It's laughably inept almost every step of the way, and it's filled with some of the most bizarre dialogue non sequiturs ever 'written' (I am assuming they were written), but the film is just kind of silly dreck, at least to my jaded sensibilities. The real allure here is actually the undeniably sweet friendship that develops between Tommy and Greg [Sestero (Dave Franco)], even if that friendship encounters a few hurdles along the way. Tommy himself is such a memorable character, The Disaster Artist might have done just as well to provide more of an overview of his life (or at least what he claims has been his life), perhaps with the same kind of 'Rashomon lite' approach that informed I, Tonya, with the production of The Room simply serving as one of many vignettes."
Ho boy... my wallet is going to hate me big time. The Shape of Water 4K, Justice League 3D, Call Me By Your Name, The Disaster Artist, and Ferdinand 4K.
Another great week with The Shape of Water 4k, I,Tonya, The Handmaid's Tale S1, and Downfall. As for DC the New 52 animated movie series are so much better than the live action movies.
Justice League 4K and Shape of Water 4K at some point for sure. Will likely blind-buy I, Tonya and Disaster Artist on sale as well. And perhaps The Lion in Winter at some point.
Justice League 3D and The Shape of Water for sure. At some point I, Tonya. Already have the Canadian release of Downfall, but I'm curious about the new Shout edition, if it has any new extras. If it doesn't, I'll yell like Hitler in the meme.
The Shape of Water and Downfall, and some combination of The Disaster Artist, I, Tonya, Bird Boy: The Forgotten Children, Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria.
Call Me by Your Name and Romero's The Crazies, for me.
Call Me by Your Name is a blind buy, but it's the only remaining Best Picture nominee that I'm interested in (among the ones I haven't seen already). The Shape of Water was very good but didn't quite love it enough for me to buy it.
For me this week: "Downfall" -- if the video quality is better than the U.K. release -- "I, Tonya" -- even though it isn't particularly original -- and "The Handmaid's Tale" -- !
No mention of this year's best picture winner, The Shape of Water, the Lion in Winter, that was nominated for seven oscars, winner of three, a Scorsese Criterion with Daniel Day Lewis, and Downfall, all Oscar nominated films, but a huge essay on the production of the Justice League. An article could be written just on how they got Hitler's voice down by listening to underground recordings or how one of these were Anthony Hopkins first film. Lion may be Katherine Hepburn's most emotional performance.
There are 3 terrific films this week that should be in everybody's movie collection... "Call Me By Your Name" was by far the BEST film of the year in my opinion. I LOVED it so much... It's a beautiful looking film I just wish it was being released in 4K...Maybe down the road. I loved "I,Tonya" so thats a no brainer for me and lastly The Oscar winner for Best Picture "The Shape Of Water" which I'm sure will look beautiful in 4K. A great week!
Was gonna jump on that Target Exclusive for Justice League, till I found out WB fired the director way before his daughter died, but used it as a cover so they could still make money on the film.
A Trip To The Moon will do. Finally, Meliere’s classic on Blu-ray without AIR’s soundtrack is available. I love AIR’s Moon Safari, but I’d rather hear traditional music accompanying the film than what they made for it.
What a rip! Justice League 3D from WB doesn't come with digital copy? I applaud them for putting out the movie in 3D but come on, even Shape of Water and Three Billboards come with a digital version. Nertz.
Got I Tonya, Disaster Artist, Call Me By Your Name, and Shape of Water. But will probably have to order A Trip to the Moon since no store near me has it, apparently.