Mission: Impossible - trying to catch up with all the new movies

We've opted to do the home viewing news bi-weekly so as not to clog the feed up with lists of product. Some weeks are awfully spare. But here's what's new or newish on DVD/BluRay and streaming if your TV is big.

New DVD or BluRay
• Ant-Man -In which Paul Rudd steals a magic suit and Becomes a Better Man. (Tim's review)
• Downhill Racer -The 1969 Robert Redford / Gene Hackman skiing drama gets the Criterion treatement
• Fantastic Four -If only it were streaming because everyone deserves the opportunity to see how terrible this is ...without paying for it. My only "F" of the year and that is not a cute play on the title. (Tim's slightly more generous review)
• He Named Me Malala -Currently seeking a Best Documentary Oscar nomination.
• Maze Runner The Scorch Trials -Please don't tell me that there are a ton of books and they're going to split the last one into two movies
• Minions -Despicable Me sure created a monster. Well, millions of tiny yellow pop culture devouring monsters. (Tim on the phenomenon)
• Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation -one of the year's most enjoyable surprises. Although we shouldn't have been surprised since Ghost Protocol was also topnotch. (Tim's Review)
• Speedy - Harold Lloyd's last silent comedy gets the Criterion treatment
• Ted 2 -Mark Wahlberg makes a sequel to his magic teddy bear blockbuster and curiously, despite slobbering all over the first one, no one cared

TV Seasons
• Hannibal (S3 Final) in which Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen draw bloody hearts around each other's names in their notebooks
• Extant (S2 Final) Can someone please stop the casting of Halle Berry in genre fare. Genre acting is not remotely within her acting skill set. Ladies and gentlemen, I present as evidence: X-Men franchise, Catwoman, and S1 of Extant. I rest my case.
• Transparent (S2 on Amazon Prime Streaming) In which we return to the emotional chaos of the Pfefferman children and their trans father Maura (birth name Mort) played by Emmy-winning Jeffrey Tambor. Have you watched S2 yet? I'm trying to slowly savor it after loving every second of Season 1.

The endearing emotionally slippery family of Transparent

New Streaming on Netflix
• Phoenix - One of the biggest German hits in recent years. Weird that they didn't submit it for Oscars last year instead of Beloved Sisters. Read Jose's Nina Hoss interview
• The Ridiculous Six -- the first film in Netflix's mega multi-picture deal with Adam Sandler
• Tangerine - the best comedy of 2015, regardless of what the Globes or Critics Choice claim. Watch it with friends and donuts over Christmas. You'll be so on trend. (Nathaniel's Review)
• Xenia - Greece's LGBT Oscar submission about two brothers searching for their birth father

Review: Fantastic [sic] Four

Tim here. The best and maybe the only compliment I can pay to the new Fantastic Four, the third unsuccessful attempt at bringing the oldest of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's creations at Marvel Comics to the big screen, is that it's not obviously the worst one yet. Its insipidities, and it is very insipid, aren't inherently worse than those of the ghastly 2005 big-budget version. That film heralded the end of the "brightly colored larks that are wholly insubstantial but also not much fun" era of comic book movies; time alone will tell if its 2015 sibling will similarly ring down the curtains on the "ludicrously dark and serious-minded exercises in bitterness and misery" era, though I think we should be hopeful.

How much of the film's misery and internal confusion is due to the awkwardly visible fencing match between director Josh Trank and the executives at 20th Century Fox is beyond our ability to say for certain. It does feel like a movie that wants to be anything other than what it is. There were rumors that Trank was hoping to make PG-13, summer-friendly body horror, and there are vestigial traces of that conception; it would have been better for the film to have gone all the way, for at least then the bleakness of tone would have felt like it had some actual purpose. [More...] 

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Links

BuzzFeed Netflix not legally responsible for your 'viewing history' - it's so funny that people thought they were
The Hairpin Mission: Impossibly Silly "I Still Don't Understand How Tall Everyone Is"  
Interview Director Marielle Heller talks about the ratings and sexuality of her daring debut The Diary of a Teenage Girl 

Towleroad George Takei once asked Gene Roddenberry about including gay characters on Star Trek. Interesting historical response but what's their excuse now since that franchise is still alive?
IndieWire How to apply for a Women of Color directors and screenwriters 10 day retreat
This is Not Porn Cute. Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg take a break during Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 

Tim is the Best
Antagony & Ecstasy revisits Dog Day Afternoon... (great films often generate great writing about film)
Antagony & Ecstasy also revisits the very first unreleased Fantastic Four (1994) and claims its still the best adaptation of Marvel's first family (bad films often generate great writing about film) 
.... moral of combining them: Timothy Brayton often generates great writing about film.  

Off Cinema 
Laughing Squid a feline feeding machine to let your cat be more self-actualized indoors
Gothamist sad news: Annie Lennox's daughter's boyfriend has gone missing after a tandem kayak accident 

"Clobberin' Time"
There's a lot of handwringing going round about what exactly happened between Josh Trank and the studio and the source material to make Fantastic Four so bad. Film School Rejects even felt it needed a six-year timeline. But there's also post-mortems about the opening weekend which are lower than usual for superheroes.Variety argues that audiences are getting wise to money grabs (with tanking reboots like FF and diminished returns for Spider-Man) and studios need to think harder about repackaging known brands. But I personally don't know if that's the case -- I mean audiences are still putting up with needlessly padded "part 1 and part 2" finales which everyone knows are not artistically motivated decisions aimed at providing them with the best possible movie. So until audiences start bailing on those, I'm not eager to give them too much credit for protecting their wallets against Hollywood's 'screw-quality / make another billion quick' tactics. 

Ricki Rendazzo, Reed Richards, and Bubbles Bursting

Meryl Streep? Tom Cruise? Pac-Man? Vacation? It's like the 1980s all over again in movie theaters. It was a weak weekend overall with a ton of miniscule new releases and underperforming wide newbies. Meryl Streep had her worst opening weekend in a film sold on mostly on her presence since Prime (2005) before she regained her box office clout with The Devil Wears Prada. The only true success story this weekend was the word of mouth for Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation which held on to #1 for another weak. It is definitely a fun summer picture but the "best in the series!" reviews feel like a bit of an overstatement. It's not quite as ambitiously staged and exciting as Ghost Protocol, but it's better than the other action films around it which makes it seem that much better. That opera scene with at least four simultaneous agendas in play and all the deadly assassins totally confused by each other sure is a kick, though, don't you think?

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Too Tired To Link

Gothamist the first look teaser at Martin Scorsese's new HBO series Vinyl starring Bobby Cannavale (just how many tv shows are going to be about the music business post Empire? it seems like there's at least 3 new ones on the way from reports. This, Baz's, and Lee Daniel's second). Speaking of...
Coming Soon Empire Season 2 has a teaser
i09 Agent Carter's villain in seaon 2 will be Madame Masque -- and get this... they're modelling her on movie siren Hedy Lamar! 

Playbill Shoshana Bean singing "The Wind Beneath My Wings" - she's starring in the pre Broadway stage musical adaptation of Beaches
Yahoo "Kirsten Dunst is tired, you guys"
THR What if Werner Herzog directed Ant-Man? HAHA
FSR 44 Fantastic Foursomes because the Fantastic Four aren't 
Signs and Sirens has a mean girl astrological note to Jennifer Aniston
Variety Josh Trank blames studio for Fantastic Four's abysmal reviews 
E! Awww, matching foot injuries for Kelly Ripa and Marc Consuelos 
Coming Soon Black Mass just got a bunch of character posters
Playbill talks to Mamie Gummer about working with her mother and her recent stage appearances 
THR What if Werner Herzog directed Ant-Man?! HAHAHA

He can lift things 100 times his body weight but what does this achieve but to increase his burden, his capacity for suffering?" 

Edward Norton Once Turned Green When You Made Him Angry...
He is also angry about Oscar turning green. I know I know. I did not say anything about Edward Norton's rant against the monetization of awards season at IndieWire and surely you expected me too. So here we go.

While there is definitely too much politicking / campaigning and Oscar might do well to cut off a few of its competitors at the knees with tighter rules about campaigning, do we really want to lose a great deal of the Oscar coverage in the world? Again, as a reminder, it's the only time of the year when the media pays attention to films made for adults. I believe that the media frenzy would die down if there were less money to be made. And then were would movie culture be? Superheroes, dumb comedies, franchises and summer blockbusters already hog movie culture for the rest of the year. It's nice to have four months where people think about dramas and dramedies and ambitious auteur vehicles and traditional star vehicles and such. (Some of us -- the craziest ones -- would still obsess without money to be made as we have always... but most outlets would reduce coverage on these films if there were less money in it).

That said, I do understand why actors get frustrated; It's a huge chunk of their year when they would surely rather be acting or vacationing on their private island or whatnot. But there are easy solutions to that one like not showing up at every event but picking and choosing key ones. Everyone seems too afraid to miss anything which is silly because there are only a few essentials. Everything else is like cumulative effect and going to 7 things instead of 10 won't kill people's interest in you or your film or your chances at winning gold. That's my belief at least. 

Yes No Maybe So
Here's the red band trailer to Deadpool. I don't have the strength for a YNMS but perhaps you do for the comments section? I think I've been burned by Ryan Reynolds too many times and anything originally born from that awful X-Men Origins Wolverine risks being inexcusable from conception but bless him/them/someone for that joke at Green Lantern's expense