Blu-ray Review: Out of the Furnace (2013)

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“Let me make this right,” is more than just a line uttered by one of the main characters near the end of writer/director Scott Cooper’s feature filmmaking follow-up to Crazy Heart. When it comes to the core ensemble of individuals that populate the unforgiving terrain of a blue collar coal town in Pennsylvania, the desire to make things right is more than just something to say – in Out of the Furnace it’s a way of life.

Filled with men who long to right wrongs, regardless of the cost – what the characters onscreen realize far too late is that even if they have the best of intentions, sometimes scores simply cannot be settled since every single person has a slightly different definition of right and wrong in this gritty, existentially driven revenge picture.

Bogged down by wrongs right from the start following the film’s horrific introduction to Furnace’s embodiment of pure evil as played by Woody Harrelson as the unmercifully twisted, sadistic Harlan DeGroat, we encounter a pair of brothers whose lives will be forever changed once they cross his path.

With the deck stacked against them right from the start, it isn't too long before we realize that although they're related, we've been introduced to two very different brothers with two very different ways of coping with the hands they’ve been dealt.

The older of the two, Russell Baze (Christian Bale) keeps his head down and shovels coal in the very same factory that put their father on his death bed. Willing to risk the same fate (before he realizes, the plant is inevitably closed in favor of cheaper foreign labor) in order to put food on the table and pay his bills, Russell has unofficially taken over his father’s role as the family patriarch as the dutiful, good son.

Unwilling to do the same, his restless younger brother Rodney (scene-stealer Casey Affleck) took the first opportunity he could to get out of the dead-end town. Enlisting in the military and stop-lossed into a total of four tours before he finally returns home to stay, Rodney has tried everything to sublimate the pain and reproduce the primal adrenaline rush of battle.

But when gambling only leads to debt (which in the past Russell worked double shifts to keep at bay without informing his prideful, troubled brother), before long Rodney begins taking part in underground fights as an agreement with his money man John Petty (Willem Dafoe).

Tired of the minimal paydays, Rodney forces John to arrange a higher stakes match in order to resolve the outstanding debt once and for all that he not only owes John but John in turn owes to Harlan, which leads to a fateful meet that has a domino effect on every member of the ensemble cast in unimaginable ways. And it’s this key decision that winds up forcing Russell out of his daily grind, leaving him no choice but to put down the shovel and pick up a rifle to fight the war that has been waged in his own backyard.

Incredibly downbeat and emotionally exhausting, although Cooper’s take of brotherly vengeance was initially planned as a vehicle for actor Leonardo DiCaprio and his Body of Lies director Ridley Scott (both of whom still serve as producers), it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Bale in the role, given the way he once again manages to disappear completely into the role.

Filled with character actors as opposed to A-listers that stand out too conspicuously as DiCaprio may have done (through no fault of his own given the way it’s hard to forget who you’re watching in a number of his films), Out of the Furnace is therefore helped by the lack of obvious megawatt star quality. Likewise, since the work owes a great deal to its ambient surroundings which help convey mood and atmosphere, the Pennsylvania town becomes a character in its own right.

While the main theme of the film as well as the arc for our lead character is incredibly straightforward, Furnace makes one fatal mistake along the way by working one too many dubious contrivances into the film’s plotline that call attention to themselves amid the simplicity.

From a cell phone call that transforms into a digital recording at the exact right moment in order to capture audio of a murder and a few too many cruel twists of fate that intersect at the exact same time for Russell with regard to his brother, his girl etc. (that seem better suited to a bad country song), when Furnace tries to get too complex, it loses its way completely.

And with so much affecting Russell, you begin realizing that plot might have been strengthened considerably by sharing some of the wealth of the storyline among the rest of the cast to build up the back-stories and characters played by Zoe Saldana and Forest Whitaker in particular in order to adequately pay off on a narrative revelation that is revealed in the film’s second half.

These shortcomings aside, overall Cooper proves to have an even greater cinematic handle on filmmaking his second time around and uses the various resources at his disposal to rich effect. By calling on multiple senses at once, this technique particularly stands out via a symbolic hunting sequence that is echoed in the movie’s penultimate sequence.

From the effective use of Pearl Jam tunes and Dickon Hinchliffe’s understated score to help punctuate the mood of vital moments to a terrific visualization of the darkness of the color palette (which is virtually free of bright colors) to transport you to the setting, Cooper does an admirable job of externalizing the internal struggle of the characters through the cinematic medium. It’s these smart, subtle touches that stand out even more in Fox’s flawless Blu-ray transfer.

A deceptively simple tale of vengeance, in Out of the Furnace, Cooper weaves a multi-layered tapestry that reinforces at every turn his characters’ desire to try to make things right, even if they risk getting burned in the process.   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013)

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Although filmmaker David Lowery intended his sophomore feature Ain’t Them Bodies Saints to play to audiences like a Bob Dylan inspired folk song, in the end it was The Beach Boys rather than Dylan whose lyrics echoed strongest in my mind.

Yet far from their “Fun, Fun, Fun” era, the tune that resonated most for me was the Pet Sounds epic “I Guess I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” which, had it been left off that landmark album and penned directly for film would have made the perfect theme song for Bodies’ main character Bob Muldoon, as played by Casey Affleck.

A man out of time, regardless of what time he’s in, Bob Muldoon is one of a long-line of fictional dreamers – the kind descended from Heathcliff or Jay Gatsby whose doomed end you see coming a mile away but whose unflappable belief that he will earn his Happily Ever After remains both his ultimate hubris as well as his ultimate strength.

If he’d had more education or was more literate, Bob Muldoon may have been a writer churning out fiction that would fit somewhere in between Steinbeck and Dickens infused with a bit of the Beat Generation’s “go, go, go” lust for aimless adventure.

Dreaming his life away longing for things he’ll never achieve for more than a mere moment, Bob Muldoon understands he’ll never have the same opportunities that educated men have. As he is in love with ideas of what he should do, the kind of life he should lead and the woman he seems to be more in love with in theory than truly connected with, Bob Muldoon does the most with what he’s given until he gets it in his head that he deserves a bit more.

So he embarks on a Bonnie and Clyde-esque crime-spree with a buddy and his true love that culminates the way everyone (except Bob and those he’s seduced with his stories) know it will. For, that’s what stories do, don’t they? – offer the promise of a future that’s much greater than the one at present.

And unfortunately for Bob, his friend Fred and his girl Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara), the story he dreamed up at the start does not have a happy ending – ending instead in a hail of gunfire that leaves his friend dead and a police officer wounded by a bullet fired at the hands of a pregnant Ruth.

But even in the darkest of moments, Bob Muldoon won’t allow himself to drop the thread of the tale he’s written for himself – ensuring the safety of Ruth and his unborn child by confessing to the shot he did not fire so that at least for now he remains in his eyes as well as Ruth’s the hero of the story.

Yet there’s something about Ruth that brings out the hero in everyone as once Bob finds himself behind bars, two more men pick up the torch – from the father (Keith Carradine) of their deceased friend to the police officer (Ben Foster) whose presence at the wrong place at the wrong time caused his fate to be forever intertwined with those that Bob left behind.

 

Feeling a kinship to Ruth and her daughter that he can’t deny, Foster’s good-hearted Patrick – much like Bob had done in the past – takes in upon himself to be her protector. Likewise, idealizing Ruth in the same way that Affleck’s convict continues to do in prison – neither man ever looks past their own narratives to understand that perhaps Ruth is the strongest of them all. And in fact, Ruth is quite capable of looking after herself and the child she’d had after Bob’s incarceration that is now a strong-willed variation of her parents at the tender age of four.

Similarly affected by her father’s sense of heroism, Ruth’s daughter Sylvie applies it to her own life, taking in not one but four stray kittens that – much like her – have lost a parent and fighting any boy who speaks ill of her family.

Although every character takes it upon themselves to serve somebody, nobody takes this belief more seriously than Bob, using his time in prison to put his dreams to paper, focusing all of his new stories on a happy reunion with those he loves at home in a series of letters he pens to Ruth.

 

Believing it to be his destiny to be with her once again, regardless of how many laws he has to break – Bob promises Ruth that the next letter he writes to her will be placed by him directly into her hands and attempts a sixth prison escape, which turns out to work like a charm.

Like an aftershock of an earthquake, the effects of Bob’s escape are felt by everyone but the man who’s put prison in his rearview, as we’ve been made painfully aware by Lowery just how much things at home have changed, which is in stark contrast to Bob’s belief that he can just show up and pick things up where they’d left off.

Unbeknownst to him, alliances have shifted, feelings have grown far more complex and there’s much at stake externally as well as internally and unfortunately, this is precisely where the film begins to lose its direction.

For what had begun so successfully as a Terrence Malick inspired adaptation of an Emily Bronte or Willa Cather novel channeled with post-Hemingway masculinity in the American west suddenly switches gears after Bob begins to venture home.

Tonally uneven, Bodies becomes an episodic crime saga that replaces romance with Cormac McCarthy-like Noir ideas of revenge that raise far too many unanswered questions when it cuts from Ruth’s storyline to follow Bob’s ever-changing journey of subplots.

 

And this startling change of pace is perhaps most evident in an otherwise powerfully acted scene in which Carradine has a major confrontation with Bob that feels like it’s come from a different movie altogether that’s been accidentally edited into the picture before it tries to bring us back to our regularly scheduled program.

While the introduction of thriller elements and some mysterious characters definitely liven up the admittedly slow-moving film, we aren’t provided with enough information to fully process the events that unfold onscreen.

Initially lost in the shuffle with regard to who some of the new individuals are and just what it is that they want – thanks to not just the ambiguities in the writing but the way the edited film deviates from one subplot to the next – Bodies stumbles a bit in its second half before drawing us back into the romantic spirit of the piece in its final moving act.

 

Augmented by the sheer beauty of the work thanks to the luscious Sundance award-winning cinematography by Bradford Young and the lyrical score by Daniel Hart that easily tugs on viewer heartstrings, Bodies may disappoint us by the fall it takes from the greatness experienced in the film’s opening but it’s spellbinding nonetheless.

Further proof of the brilliance of Ben Foster in taking what could’ve easily turned into a clichéd, one-dimensional role as the polar opposite of Bob and coloring it with such complexity that he nearly steals every scene he’s in from the two dynamic leads, Lowery’s Saints is a must-see for fans of the talented cast.

 

Gorgeously transferred to Blu-ray where it makes its home entertainment debut as a fully loaded disc – while it’s unfortunately missing a digital copy or filmmaker commentary, Bodies serves up some genuine surprises including Lowery’s first film St. Nick as well as a number of behind-the-scenes extras.

Overall an ambitious, if flawed, ode to the transformative power of dreams – and the American dream in particular – Bodies celebrates storytelling as if it were its own version of true love, which in Bob’s case, may very well be true as he blends together daydreamed stories of love and life that somehow envelope his own love and life in the process.

While we are never in doubt that this will end badly for Bob as a man who just wasn’t made for these times (and a character better served in fiction than in real life), the strength of Bodies is that we’re so enchanted by the promises of Bob’s stories that we’re taken in by it all the same.    

Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: The Last Kiss (2006)

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Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis adapted Gabrielle Muccino’s Italian film L’Ultimo Bacio for director Tony Goldwyn in this superb remake that does an admirable job of navigating viewers through the often messy and sometimes brutally painful evolution and deterioration of relationships.

Although in one of several making-of-featurettes included on DreamWorks Home Entertainment’s brand-new Blu-ray version of the film, Haggis humbly described his job as essentially translating the film into English with the exception of one major different twist as a character in the American film admits to an indiscretion—one can’t help he’s belittling his material since there's nothing European about the work which still feels remarkably accurate three years later.

While most Hollywood films focus on the good times, not too many filmmakers are willing to go the distance in revealing the bad as well as the good in modern long-term romantic couplings. Whether it's through revealing the things we may think but do not say such as when one character confesses that he believed having a child with his beloved would bring them closer together but instead all it's done is make them feel trapped or questioning aloud that if you love someone, why is it we feel the need to have a photo album filled with snapshots “of drunk people in tuxedos to prove it”-- every single one of the characters in the film (whether or not they’re fully developed is to be debated) feels as though they’re someone we could meet walking down the street, or someone we’ve been at one point or another, or someone with whom we’re involved.

Now seeing the 2006 film again on Blu-ray and thus right around the same age bracket as a majority of the characters—Haggis’ dialogue rings truer than ever and illustrates the promise that was to come for the future Oscar winner whose work with Kiss was sweetened by those involved who helped him during the arduous process of financing his upcoming Million Dollar Baby (eventually directed by Clint Eastwood) and Crash.

In a role that couldn’t be any further from his recurring Scrubs character of John Dorian who is prone to fantasies, silliness and childlike naïveté-- Garden State's Zach Braff is excellent as our uncertain and admittedly selfish lead Michael, who at the start of the film faces three life-altering events. Namely these consist of the pregnancy of his long-time girlfriend Jacinda Barrett and the possible commitment issues that go along with it, his thirtieth birthday, and the beginning of a casual flirtation with a young, bright college student (The O.C.'s Rachel Bilson) whom he meets at a wedding that begins to make Michael wonder if he’s really ready to settle down.

It’s the wedding that opens the film that sets the stage for all of the internal crises that follow as director Tony Goldwyn notes in the “Filmmakers Perspective” Blu-ray extra-- the depiction of the perfect relationship is precisely the right jumping-off point to ask “but what happens when [relationships] don't go that way?”

And in answering that, he introduces us to a group of characters all struggling to make sense of their lives in an age where as Bilson’s character notes, “our metabolism” is faster and we’ve begun “to freak out way before our parents” did.

While the film mostly surrounds Michael and his other equally stressed male friends-- all with varying levels of personal crisis of their own-- there is a surprisingly riveting subplot involving Blythe Danner as Barrett’s mother who is going through a rough patch in her marriage to Tom Wilkinson after she admits to an infidelity.

On a second viewing in fact-- it’s Danner and Wilkinson’s courage in showing the evolution of a marriage that’s reached (possibly one of several) breaking points that feels sharper than ever and their performances are both extremely brave-- and par for the course of the rest of the movie-- highly authentic.

Similar to Braff's Garden State, the wonderful soundtrack of Kiss helps make the admittedly dark, intense and sometimes just excruciatingly confrontational themes and moments a bit easier to bear although it’s probably not the best choice for a date movie or a companion feature for a low-key romantic evening in as this is the type of film that could cause an argument, despite raising some valid, mature, and accurate issues.

Likewise, by the end of the film, even though we’d spent so much time with a majority of the characters over the onscreen events of roughly two weeks, I still found myself feeling a sense of incompleteness as-- although we fully understand the male characters--it would’ve definitely been interesting if the females had been given more screen time to wholly understand their points-of-view.

After all, even though as they sing in “As Time Goes By,” “a kiss is still a kiss,” it can mean two incredibly different things to each participant, since in this film and truer to life—going against the lyrics—a sigh isn’t just a sigh but a deeper indication of a unique perspective and one I longed to explore in greater detail.

Perhaps a more challenging filmmaking exercise would’ve been to not simply remake the film but pull it apart and switch it up so that the same situations could’ve been seen from both genders as Haggis proved so deftly capable of in stringing together narratives and layers of characters and situations for his Oscar winning Crash.

Yet as it stands, The Last Kiss is still one of the braver and truer to life “quarter-life" and "mid-life" crisis works Hollywood has produced in years and one that works as a very welcome antidote to the endless string of films about middle-aged men who act like thirteen year old boys currently in vogue at the multiplex.

As producer Gary Lucchesi acknowledges in yet another behind the scenes extra that shares the last thoughts on the film by those involved, he says that he senses American audiences are yearning for more intimacy and more reality in works that feel a bit rawer.

And despite the fact that these are exactly the films that people are running away from now during our economic recession three years later-- for anyone going through any of the “personal inventory” taking as they reach 20, 30, 40, 50, or up there's something reassuring in the realization that it’s a universal and instantly relatable existential crisis and that it’s one that only evolves with age along with our wisdom and relationships.

Featuring multiple commentaries involving both the filmmaker and also the cast as well as greater analysis of certain scenes and an intensive making-of featurette, along with some of the standard requirements like a less than amusing gag reel, deleted scenes, and the Zach Braff directed music video “Ride” by Cary Brothers, the Blu-ray definitely increases the sense of depth perception however the overall picture and sound leave a bit to be desired.

Essentially, within moments you’ll need to punch up the muddied color by tweaking with the brightness or vivid settings on your television or player as well as raising the volume fairly high since the work is filled with intimate, whispery conversations and quiet confessions (that of course counteract the intense blow-up in your face arguments). Thus, a greater balance should have been achieved in the transfer from DVD to justify the price-tag and decision to move the work to Blu-ray without sharpening up the contrast of the image and up-and-down sound that had this reviewer reaching for her remote far too often, ultimately detracting from the overall cinematic experience.

While it’s recommended for those who were a fan but hadn’t yet made the purchase of the film-- those who already own it on DVD may want to give the Blu-ray a rental test-drive before gambling on an upgrade—sort of like weighing one’s options before you say “I do.”

To Die For

Director:
Gus Van Sant

Nicole Kidman not only earned a Golden Globe for her fierce portrayal of Suzanne Stone Maretto in Gus Van Sant’s masterpiece To Die For but she also became an internationally respected actress stepping out from the shadow of then-husband Tom Cruise to announce that like Suzanne, she's ready to be taken seriously. Although to misquote Don Henley, unlike the film's flash-in-the-pan bubbleheaded blonde Suzanne, Nicole Kidman’s success was fully justified as she proved repeatedly in her impressive roles following To Die For.

Inspired by true events and based on the satirical novel by Joyce Maynard that was adapted into a wicked script by Buck Henry, the overly ambitious Suzanne, who feels that people are nobody unless they’re on TV, decides to do everything in her power to make her "newswoman" dream a reality. She marries the hunky drummer Larry Maretto (Matt Dillon) and changes him from bad-boy to breadwinner in order to position herself for the lifestyle she feels she deserves as she strives to become a journalist.

Feeling overwhelmed by her loving husband who desperately wants to start a family, Suzanne launches headfirst into her career by fast-talking small local channel head Wayne Knight into letting her work for him. Happy in her new position, Suzanne becomes the station’s golden haired, glamorous weathergirl and begins work on a documentary about issues surrounding teenagers at a local high school. Quickly, she befriends the unhappy, unconfident Lydia Mertz (a heartbreaking Alison Folland), amoral criminal in training Russell Hines (Casey Affleck) and the adoring Jimmy Emmett (an impossibly young Joaquin Phoenix) whose hopeless crush on Suzanne is used as currency by the devious diva when they embark on an affair.

Seeing her family conscious husband as an obstacle to success, Suzanne crafts a horrifying plan for her teenage pals to dispatch the narrow-minded Larry to further her goals. However, to again quote Don Henley’s "Dirty Laundry" (which was used in the memorable trailers for the film), the media loves to “kick ‘em when they’re up, [and] kick ‘em when they’re down.” For as we see in the opening moments of the film, her equally narrow-minded belief that nobody will catch on to what was behind Larry’s murder will be her downfall, even without focusing on whether or not the media driven masses will see fit to sentence Suzanne or set her free.

One of the most provocative films of the 1990’s made all the more timely given the O.J. Simpson trial, To Die For not only paved the way for Kidman and Phoenix to move onto a wider range of memorable roles. Even more importantly as IMDb noted, it also led to Van Sant’s biggest hit to date after To Die For wrapped and young Casey Affleck handed his director a copy of the screenplay his brother Ben had worked on with his good friend Matt Damon, which would earn the two writers an Academy Award for their little film called Good Will Hunting.