Full transparency: all Blu-rays reviewed were provided by Kino Lorber, Fun City Editions, and the Criterion Collection.
This month’s cavalcade of carefully curated content is mostly some near-and-dear favorites of mine and a new certified slapper in my arsenal of “dad movies” I’ll be revisiting on many Sunday afternoons to come. From Kino Lorber, we have the single feature-length directorial effort from music video and commercial director Kinka Usher with the Flaming Carrot adaptation/spin-off titled Mystery Men. KL also brings us another hit collaboration between Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood in the form of Escape From Alcatraz. Fun City Editions aims straight for my heart, having picked up the rights to the wholly unique and warm Married to the Mob. Wrapping things up is Criterion with my pick of the month and their delivery of a long-asked-for release of what is debatably Spike Lee’s most totemic film, Malcolm X.
Warm blanket movies for the bitter winds and premature nights of the late fall.
We’ve long since passed the point where the term “oversaturated” could even be considered an understatement to describe how much superhero movies have dominated the conversation around cinema. Yet, in the late 20th century, in the doldrums between the unfairly maligned Batman and Robin putting the genre on hold and X-Men and Spider-Man putting them in a whole new echelon of mainstream popularity, you would get the parodies and off-kilter attempts at satire (back when the satire actually meant something instead of winking with one eye and staring laser-focused at the money in your pocket with the other).
Enter 1999’s Mystery Men. Technically a spin-off of Bob Burden’s cult comic The Flaming Carrot, featuring rag-tag misfits in which the running joke was that they all had mediocre power sets and mostly loved hanging out between fighting crime,t he film lovingly translates that concept to the big screen well by having the heroes be played by a loaded deck of Gen X ’90s alt actors/comedians and character actors: Stiller, Garofalo, Kinnear, Rush, Reubens, Studi, Azaria, Kel (yes, that Kel), my girl Eddie Izzard, Tom Waits, and WILLIAM H. MACY! *gasps for breath* It’s so star-studded, it’s almost funny how casual it all feels. The bits and patter would be right at home in an indie film from about three years earlier, but it’s got the gloss and high-dynamic range you tend to get from music video directors making big-budget films (the ’90s was a wellspring of that phenomenon). It’s funny, it’s strange, Macy runs away with the whole thing, The Goodie Mob have cameos as the “Not-So-Goodie Mob,” Michael Bay plays a frat boy… You know what type of movie this is (a great one).
You can pick up Mystery Men on glistening 4K from Kino Lorber.
Nothing gets me going more than a good “nuts and bolts” procedural. I love process, and in a procedural, process is where all the magic lies. It is the drama. It informs the relationships. It is the craft. And wouldn’t you have it, Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood are very “nuts and bolts” guys. You’d be hard-pressed to find an ounce of gristle on a Eastwood x Siegel collab in the ’70s. They’re obviously great at making layered examinations of masculinity and hollowed hearts (The Beguiled, Two Mules for Sister Sara, and Dirty Harry speak to that), but even in those films they left unsaid what can be seen or worked through visually. A procedural like Escape From Alcatraz is a perfect demonstration of that ethos.
Based on the real story of the prison escape of Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers from the maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island, Eastwood plays Morris, the highly intelligent criminal who’s busted out of every stronghold that failed to hold him and his two-year plan to get off the so-called “Rock.” With the help of the Anglin brothers (the late Fred Ward and Jack Thibeau) and additional assistance from inmate English (great performance from Paul Benjamin of Do the Right Thing fame), they decide to get out of dodge before the sadistic warden strips them of what little humanity they have left. It’s as taught and tense as a thriller can get and about the most physically communicative performance I’ve seen from Clint.
Grab Kino Lorber’s gorgeous 4K restoration while you can.
Was there ever a more human and eclectic director than Jonathan Demme? Maybe so, but I’d feel hard-pressed to name them. What always struck me about Demme was his ability to turn stories of people in danger into these empathetic pieces of actual entertainment, be it the horror of Silence of the Lambs or the off-kilter drama and comedy of Something Wild. There’s a real care for his characters and the worlds they occupy are just so colorful. The world of Married to the Mob is so hard to describe but so fun to live in.
It’s equal parts romantic comedy, mob movie, live-action cartoon, and drama, the story following Angie (Michelle Pfeiffer, who is in contention as being possibly the most beautiful woman to ever walk this planet) as she starts her life over after finally freeing herself from the shackles of life in an organized crime family when her husband (Alec Baldwin) gets knocked off by his boss Tony “The Tiger” Russo (Dean Stockwell). However, this doesn’t stop her from being put under investigation by the FBI and followed by Agent Mike Downey (Matthew Modine) and his partner Ed (Oliver Platt), which in turn does not stop Mike from falling in love with Angie. Married to the Mob has the unique texture you find in Demme films, a texture where a man literally hopping into his clothes can share the same space as a woman pleading for a job simply to show she’s capable of being more than an accessory. You feel for these people, and you smile and laugh while you do it.
You can find Married to the Mob through Fun City Editions.
I’ve done a lot of handwringing over biopics in my time as a film writer. If I were to sum up the things I keep coming back to as criticism, it would be too much focus on the hagiography introduced when structuring someone’s story as cradle-to-grave — i.e. every moment in their life is a one-to-one parallel with something they will do later on — and not enough cinematic stylization that complements the subject’s whole vibe.
Leave it to Spike to be one of the few directors in history to understand these pitfalls and leap over them with the confidence of the Incredible Hulk.
When I used the word “totemic” to describe this movie earlier, I was not kidding. It so easily captures the whole essence of one of history’s most complicated and misunderstood figures — and at a time when it was so easy to read him as only Martin Luther King Jr’s “dark ally” (a narrative that was perpetuated by the American government, to say the least). Adapted from the famous biography written by Alex Haley, Malcolm X is an odyssey not just into the levels of awakening a man goes through to find justice for himself and his people but how every new level of awareness paints you as someone dangerous and delusional, someone to be stopped, even if the long line of history will prove you right 100 times over. I’ve been watching this movie since I was 11 or 12 years old (I had a very militant uncle who guided me to this with quickness) and it’s so fascinating to feel how deeply I’ve evolved every time I pop it on every few years, going from thinking his philosophies were “morally complicated” to flat-out knowing he was right all along. I’ve been on the parallel journey Denzel’s Malcolm goes on in this movie as he has to deprogram himself from levels of control he is stuck under but also realizing the horrors of an insidious system that almost seem impossible to fight.
It’s a dazzling movie, featuring career-best work from the players (not simply Denzel; everyone, including Spike himself, shows up ready to deliver) to the direction, which addresses the stylization gripe I have with biopics. Every new chapter of the movie evolves with Malcolm himself. Nothing is static. The movie changes tones and looks so effortlessly, you don’t realize it’s happening — but that’s a whole essay in itself.
Featuring a 4K restoration and an entire second disc of supplemental material, pick up Malcolm X from the Criterion Collection.
That’s gonna do it for this month’s round-up. I’ll be back next month with a holiday gift guide and a special message 🙂
Created in a dark room after being exposed to images from infinite worlds, Aja Essex seeks to engender thought, conversation, and possibility through film. Co-founder of Establishing Shot as well as co-founder and co-operator of Bloomington’s own Cicada Cinema, she has always aimed to spotlight the underseen, underscreened, and underappreciated. She hosts, edits, and produces the IU Cinema podcast, Footage Not Found, with the same haphazard but enthusiastic zeal as her writing. She loves getting lost in a song and despite her namesake being her favorite Steely Dan album, she has probably listened to Countdown to Ecstasy more.