We’re in the “last of the summer wine” phase of the DVD release calendar, with the qualifier that this summer’s harvest was a pretty thin one. Finding Dory (Disney, U) and Jason Bourne (Universal, 12) were hardly the most offensive rehashes of the season, but months on, they already feel like supersized footnotes – capably dotting i’s and crossing t’s on what has gone before, without bringing urgent new ideas to the table.
Pixar’s aqua-bright Finding Nemo sequel at least tries a shift in emphasis, elevating Ellen DeGeneres’s disarmingly addled clownfish sidekick to protagonist status, and neatly reversing the 2003 film’s arc by tracing her search for her long-lost parents. That aside, it’s gentle-natured business as before, mixing home-is-where-the-heart-is sentiment with elaborate pratfalls in the great blue unknown — all of it missing the essential warmth of creative investment and invention.
As for Jason Bourne, the lack of ingenuity that went into the title – Bourne Again and Bourne to Run were right there, people – is dispiritingly in evidence throughout the latest outing for Robert Ludlum’s stoic, limber ex-CIA gunman. The return of Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass to the stable (after sitting out 2012’s The Bourne Legacy) was auspicious, but perhaps it’s been too long. This stern global runaround, adding a moderately topical shot of post-Snowden worry to the usual agency skulduggery, is shot, cut and performed in a tidy, familiar groove. But the propulsive athleticism of the Bournes Supremacy and Ultimatum, in particular, has slowed to a brisk jog.
John Dower and Louis Theroux’s My Scientology Movie (Altitude, 15) has quietly become the UK’s top-grossing documentary of 2016, surprising many who pegged it as an outsize Theroux TV special. Turns out it’s very much a film – and a rollicking one too, as the gangly journalist probes the bizarre layers of security and insecurity surrounding the holy house of Hubbard. Revelations are few, but it’s the machinations of the search that provide the dark comic intrigue here, particularly as the lens is flipped and Theroux himself winds up under the church’s scrutiny.
Also on the curiouser-and-curiouser end of the doc spectrum is Tickled (StudioCanal, 15), which boasts a killer investigative hook as its breezy study of fetishistic competitive tickling morphs into a latently violent conspiracy thriller. But however strange the truth, there’s something contrived about the film’s patchy assembly.
Between Things to Come and the upcoming Elle, Isabelle Huppert may be having the banner year of a banner career. When a performance as finely wrought as her work in Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love (Curzon Artificial Eye, 15) can nonetheless be described as the most disposable of the three, she’s clearly on a hot streak. As grieving parents ambling out their anguish in Death Valley, she and Gérard Depardieu give this metaphysical shaggy-dog tale all the weight it has, but it’s still a wisp.
Silky, existential musing is also the order of the day in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Sony, PG), the Japanese master’s little-discussed 1990 swansong, now lavishly restored for the Criterion Collection. Only moderately admired on release, it stands up rather well as a summation of an ageing artist’s vision, gaining in wistful power as its strange, rapturous vignettes flow into each other. As swirling and bold as Kurosawa’s film is watercoloured, Criterion’s other new addition, Paul Thomas Anderson’s romantic tap-dance Punch-Drunk Love (Criterion, 15) doesn’t require as much reintroduction, but it’s welcome all the same.
Speaking of reintroductions, Mubi is currently screening the much-vaunted, much-expanded director’s cut of 54, Mark Christopher’s 1998 glitter-bomb of disco history that was famously, and fatally, edited to shreds by Harvey Weinstein. It’s fair to say that Christopher’s approved version (36 minutes longer, yet somehow more efficient) is another film entirely: not wholly free of its former incarnation’s gauche missteps, but with a human pulse, and an erotic energy that somehow ended up on the floor the first time. It’s a heady, messy good time – what the tale of history’s most irresponsible nightclub should always have been.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion