Day: August 4, 2014

From Justin Chang‘s Variety review of The Downloadables…I mean, The Expendables 3D: “The previous two movies, although barely defensible, were at least enlivened by a sly awareness of their own awfulness, and got by on the strength of their no-nonsense, R-rated brutality. But that grisly sense of purpose is nowhere to be found in The Expendables 3, which, for clearly commercial reasons, has opted for a more audience-friendly PG-13 rating — a gutless decision that drains the action of its excitement, its visceral impact and its glorious disreputability.

“By the time the movie finally arrives at an incoherent endgame set in some fictional Middle Eastern hellhole, where editors Sean Albertson and Paul Harb try their damnedest to make sense of a whirlwind of action involving rolling tanks, speeding motorcycles and dive-bombing helicopters, it’s at once impossible to follow what’s going on and impossible to care in any event.

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Matthew Weiner‘s You Are Here (Millenium, 8.22) was more or less killed by critics during the 2013 Toronto Film Festival. Then it became Are You Here. (What possible difference could the order of the words make? They could have just as easily called it Here You Are or Shave My Balls or anything in between.) A few days ago I finally saw it. I went in expecting a disaster but came out feeling agreeably diverted for the most part. Are You Here isn’t up to the level of Weiner’s Mad Men at all, but it’s not a calamity. It’s an experimental in-and-outer — a blend of smart, low-key humor with a faint tone of absurdity plus a mild-mannered romance plus a somber inheritance drama involving a fractured family and mental illness, and all of it mixed in with something that feels like a buddy comedy…only it isn’t.

Owen Wilson delivers another one of his laid-back, smooth-ride guys — a booze-reliant, pot-savoring TV weatherman — but he reaches in a few times and digs down and touches bottom here and there. Wilson has been playing this guy for almost 20 years now but I found this permutation to be one of his most likable and poignant ever. (His best since Dignan?) But oh, God…more agony from Zach Galifianakis! I have loathed and despised this fucking animal for years, and it’s profoundly agonizing to sit through another one of his man-diaper performances as a bearded bipolar low-life who comes into a family inheritance. I’ve never found ZG funny, I hate that smug-anal-retard expression he always uses, and I find him physically repulsive. So much so that when he “gets lucky” in Act Three (don’t ask) I made an “ugghh!” sound in my screening-room seat.

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A little more than five years ago Fox Home Video released a handsomely restored DVD of Fritz Lang‘s Man Hunt (’41). Fox’s Schawn Belston made this spooky World War II noir look terrific, and the DVD included a short doc called “Rogue Male: The Making of Man Hunt” plus a commentary track by Patrick McGilligan, a stills gallery and a before-and-after restoration comparison. (My favorable review posted on 4.17.09.) The worth-its-weight-in-gold DVD is selling for $10 on Amazon as we speak, but Twilight Time is charging $30 dollars for a brand-new Bluray version, or a simple high-def rescan of the materials that Belston rendered with such care. That’s what TT does, I realize — charges an arm and a leg for limited-edition Blurays and sometimes with no extras — but fuck them anyway. I bought the damn thing on Screen Archives, but I really resented doing this. I would go for $20 or thereabouts, but $30 effing dollars? Is a 73 year-old thriller that most film scholars regard as somewhere between good and pretty good (but far from Foreign Correspondent-level great) worth all that much? The title, by the way, should be spelled Manhunt — I don’t care how they spelled it in ’41.

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What’s wrong with a 78 year-old ex-movie star running a South Florida arts institute and teaching acting? Nothing. It’s better to teach in the here-and-now than to sit around on a sundeck and say “I used to be big.” Or “I am big — it’s the pictures that got small.” In a piece called “Professor Burt,” Grantland‘s Gaspar Gonzalez describes one of Reynolds’ classes at the Burt Reynolds Institute in Lake Park, Florida (just south of Jupiter, where Reynolds has lived for the last 30-something years), and…well, the particulars speak for themselves.

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