On DVD/Blu-ray: REACH ME (2014); AS ABOVE SO BELOW (2014); and RAGNAROK (2014)

REACH ME
(US - 2014)

Though it's been largely forgotten over the years, John Herzfeld's 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY (1996) was one of the better Tarantino knockoffs that came in the wake of PULP FICTION (1994). If it's remembered at all today, it's for giving moviegoers their first exposure to Charlize Theron, whose icy presence and epic catfight with Teri Hatcher managed to upstage the bigger names in the cast. Making his first feature film since the 2001 Robert De Niro thriller 15 MINUTES, Herzfeld returns to the Santa Monica settings of VALLEY for REACH ME, but the results are decidedly different. Like VALLEY, it's packed with big names (or, at least, familiar faces), but REACH ME falls into the played-out, post-CRASH, "everything is connected" ensemble subgenre, a simple-minded MAGNOLIA with a laughably hokey self-improvement slant that makes it resemble what might happen if a more-sanctimonious-than-usual Paul Haggis tried to make a movie version of the 2006 Rhonda Byrne bestseller The Secret. The premise is shaky from the start, and the film is so badly-assembled that it's obvious something bigger was planned before they settled on this 92-minute cut that ended up being barely released. As it is, REACH ME is so choppy and sloppy, which such whiplashing changes in tone that Herzfeld is never able to establish any dramatic or narrative momentum. It's just a collection of scenes that never come together and ideas that never coalesce, populated by characters you don't care about, played by actors who have no chance of overcoming the project's countless deficiencies. REACH ME is as preachy and pandering as any evangelical film and can only be described as "self-helpsploitation." This isn't a movie made for general release--it's a motivational DVD for businesses to play at workshops and training seminars they force their employees to attend. It's WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW!? for the self-improvement crowd.

As the self-help book Reach Me blows up on social media and skyrockets to the top of the bestseller list, the world searches for its enigmatic and reclusive author, Teddy Raymond (Tom Berenger), who spends his days anonymously wandering the beach, desperate to avoid the spotlight. Ambitious journalist Roger King (Kevin Connolly) works for a TMZ-like tabloid site run by celebrity blogger Gerald (Sylvester Stallone in rare character actor mode, going for "gregariously eccentric" but really just "loud"), who's obsessed with getting an exclusive interview with Raymond. King falls for Raymond's press agent (THE WALKING DEAD's Lauren Cohan) after tracking him down and finding he has a peculiar and effective method for making major life changes: Raymond simply has chain-smoker King stand on the beach and yell "My name is a Roger and I'm not a smoker!" at the top of his charred lungs for several hours and just like that, he's a non-smoker. The book has also affected the lives of others: ex-con Colette (Kyra Sedgwick), who discovered it while serving time, giving her the nerve to face down a bullying inmate; famous rapper E-Ruption (Nelly), who's built a hip-hop empire since absorbing Raymond's words; and dim-witted hitman Thumper (David O'Hara), who uses the book to convince his cohort Dominic (Omari Hardwick) to leave their mobster boss Frank (Tom Sizemore) and open a restaurant together instead of killing a Weiner dog that belongs to the guy (Christoph M. Ort), who's now with Frank's model ex Denise-Denise (Rebekah Chaney, Herzfeld's wife and one of 30 credited producers). Others drawn into the story's wobbling orbit include Colette's actress friend (Elizabeth Henstridge) who's sexually assaulted by an asshole movie star (Cary Elwes); rogue cop Wolfie (Thomas Jane) who acts like a spaghetti western gunslinger and keeps intentionally getting himself in situations where he's forced to kill his way out, angering the alcoholic priest (Danny Aiello) who has to hear his confessions; powerful gangster Angelo Aldobrandini (Kelsey Grammer), who's fed up with the incompetence of Frank and his chief flunky (Frank Pesce); Raymond's tough-but-sensitive spokesman (Terry Crews), who advises E-Ruption that it's not polite to curse in public; and a movie stuntman (Ryan Kwanten), whose Tourette's was cured by Raymond.

In his quest to turn REACH ME into the self-help IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD you never knew you needed, Herzfeld also finds room for bit parts by Frank Stallone, Danny Trejo, Sally Kellerman, Jillian Barberie, Noel Gugliemi, Darius McCrary, Frankie Valli Jr., Chuck Zito, and yes, even Herzfeld himself as a movie director in arguably REACH ME's biggest casting stretch. There's no story here, no observations made about the self-improvement industry--just a staggering waste of actors who must really like Herzfeld, as they all took significant pay cuts on a strapped production that found Herzfeld and his benefactor buddy Stallone resorting to Kickstarter and Indiegogo to get the funding to complete the movie. The idea of Stallone asking people for money on Kickstarter is as absurd as his Nic Cage-meets-Al Pacino performance, with one scene where he's painting what looks like a giant vagina on a mural while incoherently screaming at Connolly that's begging to become a viral sensation. This is a shockingly bad film, one of the year's absolute worst and so awful that it makes something like THE POWER OF FEW look good. It scrapes the bottom of the barrel of an already historically dismal subgenre--poorly-written, amateurishly executed (watch the inept and awkward Fake Shemping for Stallone and Berenger in their scene together as Herzfeld can't cover for the obvious fact that the actors weren't there at the same time) and almost unparalleled in 2014 in its utter disregard for the concept of entertainment. Even with this cast, there is no commercial audience for REACH ME, which is probably why Cannon cover band Millennium only gave it an under-the-radar VOD debut just a month before its DVD release. (PG-13, 92 mins)



AS ABOVE SO BELOW
(US - 2014)

The Catacombs of Paris are a natural setting for a horror film and if nothing else, AS ABOVE SO BELOW and its cast and crew deserve some credit for actually shooting on location and trekking further in-and-downward than any other commercial film crew before them. It's too bad that extra effort is wasted on yet another assembled-via-checklist found-footage horror film, with imagery too dark and handheld camera work too shaky to maximize the unique opportunity offered by the Catacombs. With all the screaming, shouting, dropped cameras, and blurry, jittery imagery, the Catacombs rarely get a chance to convey their inherently ominous, claustrophobic nature, regardless of how many tight passageways and narrow tunnels the characters have to squeeze themselves into and through. Urban archaeologist Scarlett Marlowe (Perdita Weeks) is dedicated to continuing the work of her late father, an alchemy historian who was after the magically healing Philosopher's Stone, believed to be discovered by 14th century alchemist Nicolas Flamel. Flamel's body, along with six million others, is buried in the Catacombs, and through ancient Aramaic carvings translated by her ex George (Ben Feldman)--who's still bitter about her leaving him behind in a Turkish jail during their last expedition--Scarlett makes a startling discovery: from the alchemist belief that the Number of the Beast is 741, she surmises that the Gates of Hell are located approximately 741 feet under Paris. Scarlett, her cameraman Benji (Edwin Hodge), and a reluctant George hire Parisian urban explorer Papillon (Francois Civil), who brings along two of his friends, and the group venture deep into the Catacombs and, of course, start going in circles and winding up at the same spot. It gets worse when they begin encountering physical manifestations of long-suppressed memories--George finding a battered piano with the same bum A-key that was in his family's house when he was a kid; Papillon happening upon the specter of his brother who died when he couldn't save him from a burning car; and Scarlett answering a ringing rotary phone and hearing her dead father on the other end of the line. Faster than you can say EVENT HORIZON, the explorers are being haunted by their own psychological traumas as they get closer to Hell, which may very well be nothing more than a vast room filled with found-footage horror films.

Directed by John Erick Dowdle (the [REC] remake QUARANTINE and the M. Night Shyamalan-produced DEVIL), who scripted with his brother Drew, AS ABOVE SO BELOW couldn't really have been made as anything but found-footage, given the close confines of the Catacombs and the whole hook of actually shooting down there but it's a moot point when you can't tell what's going on anyway. There's a fundamental problem with the Dowdles' approach when you're squeezed into some of the tightest confines a film crew has ever worked, and in a naturally terrifying location and the end result is not intense claustrophobia but rather, frustration and boredom. In the long-ago, ancient days of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and even the first PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, found-footage was a clever way for no-budget, DIY filmmakers to produce effective, scary horror movies. Now, with studios like Universal and production houses like Legendary backing the $5 million AS ABOVE SO BELOW (still cheap, but mega-budget compared to the $23,000 spent on BLAIR WITCH), the entire subgenre's transformation into a cynical cash-grab is complete, and judging from the rapidly declining box office that recent titles have seen, the public is finally growing tired of them. AS ABOVE topped out at $29 million--far below what found-footage hits were raking in just a couple of years ago, but still making 6x its budget. With that kind of profit margin, you can rest assured that even with decreasing appeal and fan fatigue, you're getting more of these things whether you want them or not, and they'll be claiming squatters' rights at multiplexes nationwide for several years to come. That's not to say there haven't been interesting offerings here and there--Barry Levinson's THE BAY and Bobcat Goldthwait's WILLOW CREEK were limited-release/VOD standouts--but AS ABOVE SO BELOW squanders its access to the Catacombs and is as middling and forgettable as the majority of its ilk. (R, 93 mins)



RAGNAROK
(Norway/Sweden/Denmark - 2013; US release 2014)

Some key personnel from Norway's hugely popular COLD PREY slasher franchise are behind this terrifically enjoyable homage to the commercial, crowd-pleasing heyday of Steven Spielberg, with some added James Cameron nods as well. Museum researcher Sigurd (Ryan Gosling lookalike Pal Sverre Hagen) is ridiculed and cut off by his financial backers and demoted to tour guide by his boss over his insistence that much of Norse mythology, particularly Ragnarok, essentially the Norse End of Days, actually happened. A widower who lost his wife and research partner to cancer five years earlier, Sigurd drags his two kids, daughter Ragnhild (Marie Annette Tandero Berglyd) and young son Brage (Julian Rasmussen Padolski) along with fellow curator Allan (Nicolai Cleve Brach), adventurer Elisabeth (Sofia Helin), and grumbly driver/terrain guide Leif (Bjorn Sundquist) to the mountains of Finnmark near the Norway/Russia border where they find runestones and Viking gear in a hidden cave. They're left behind by the scheming Leif, who steals the findings and has no interest in museum preservation, but he's killed by something in the surrounding lake. Brage finds a strange egg from which emerges a baby snake-type creature secretly stashed away by Allan. Soon, they all encounter a massive serpent documented in the runestones of Viking queen Asa over 1000 years earlier. The serpent is huge, hungry, and pissed off at the intruders, going on a motherly rampage to recover its missing offspring.

Director Mikkel Braenne Sandemose (2010's COLD PREY III, still unreleased in the US) and writer John Kare Raake (awesomely-named producer and COLD PREY director Roar Uthaug is credited as "screenplay consultant") wear their love of '80s and '90s Hollywood blockbusters on their sleeves.  The Spielberg influences are all over the place--you'll spot elements of JAWS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and JURASSIC PARK (the latter in particular when the serpent pursues the kids), and even more recent monster fare like 2007's THE HOST and 2008's ROGUE, and the idea of a giant creature unleashing hell to rescue its offspring from human interlopers dates back to the beloved British GODZILLA knockoff GORGO (1961). The CGI and special effects throughout RAGNAROK are top-notch and the cinematography by Daniel Voldheim is superb. This looks and feels like a huge movie, and there's some surprising depth to it as well, especially in the relationship between Sigurd and his kids and in the way loner Elisabeth is drawn to Ragnhild, a child forced to grow up too soon. Sigurd is a loving dad, but he has a habit of letting the kids down, not in a neglectful way but more out of absent-mindedness and focus on his research, and it's something the kids have just learned to work around. All issues get put aside to focus on survival, and once Leif is out of the picture, the remaining characters are turned into a tough and likable team...for a while, at least. RAGNAROK is formulaic and offers nothing original, but it's very good at what it sets out to do. It's filled with appealing performances, impressive and suspenseful action set pieces, and excellent visual effects. It's the kind of popcorn movie that just wants you to sit back and have a good time, getting to the point and not overlong, old-school in its execution, and light on the gore, making it acceptable for kids but intense enough for adult audiences to get sucked in as well. They need to make more movies like RAGNAROK. (PG-13, 95 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

On DVD/Blu-ray: ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA: EXTENDED DIRECTOR'S CUT (1984/2012)

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA: EXTENDED DIRECTOR'S CUT
(US/Italy - 1984/2012)

Directed by Sergio Leone. Written by Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone, and Stuart Kaminsky. Cast: Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Williams, Joe Pesci, Burt Young, Louise Fletcher, Tuesday Weld, Danny Aiello, Richard Bright, James Hayden, William Forsythe, Darlanne Fluegel, Larry Rapp, Richard Foronjy, James Russo, Amy Ryder, Jennifer Connelly, Scott Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, Brian Bloom, Noah Moazezi, Adrian Curran, Mike Monetti, Mario Brega, Robert Harper, Olga Karlatos, Arnon Milchan, Frank Gio, Paul Herman.  (R, 251 mins)

SPOILERS: This review assumes you've seen ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA.

It's probably a safe bet that we'll never see a definitive, last-word version of Sergio Leone's final masterpiece ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. Known for his legendary spaghetti westerns that made Clint Eastwood an international star, Leone set out to make the ultimate gangster film and in many ways, he succeeded. Though he made some uncredited contributions to Tonino Valerii's comedic western MY NAME IS NOBODY (1973) and Damiano Damiani's semi-sequel A GENIUS, TWO FRIENDS AND AN IDIOT (1975), Leone hadn't directed a film since 1971's DUCK, YOU SUCKER!, aka A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE, and he spent the better part of the 1970s prepping ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, based on Harry Grey's novel The Hoods.  The rights to The Hoods were initially purchased by DARK SHADOWS creator Dan Curtis, who was nursing ambitions of breaking out of TV horror and making a name for himself on the big screen. Leone desperately wanted the rights to Grey's book, prompting his then-producer Alberto Grimaldi to cut a deal that saw Curtis signing over the film rights to The Hoods to Grimaldi and Leone in exchange for Grimaldi ghost-producing Curtis' 1976 film BURNT OFFERINGS. With the rights secured, Leone and a committee of screenwriters (among them frequent Dario Argento collaborator Franco Ferrini) began work on his vision of ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, though it ultimately didn't begin shooting until June 1982. By that time, Grimaldi was no longer in the picture and Leone finally got the project going through Israeli producer Arnon Milchan, who was just making a name for himself by producing Martin Scorsese's THE KING OF COMEDY (1983) and would eventually go on to form his Regency Enterprises production company and become a major Hollywood player, bankrolling films like Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), Michael Mann's HEAT (1995), David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB (1999), and Steve McQueen's 12 YEARS A SLAVE (2013).

Sergio Leone (1929-1989)

Shooting wrapped in April 1983 and Leone spent over a year editing the footage. His initial, very rough cut ran around ten hours. He cut it down to six, and eventually down to 269 minutes. Still not satisfied, his official version screened at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, with a running time of 229 minutes. While the film and its majestic Ennio Morricone score were lauded at Cannes--but not winning any awards as it was screened out of competition--US distributor The Ladd Company, a division of Warner Bros., had already decided American audiences weren't seeing the 229-minute cut. Against Leone's wishes (Milchan, then new to the ways of Hollywood, has admitted "I should've fought harder"), The Ladd Company had assigned in-house editor Zach Staenberg to completely recut the film, jettisoning the vital flashback structure and putting the scenes in chronological order. Under orders from his bosses, Staenberg (often dismissively referred to by Leone fans and co-star James Woods as "the guy who edited POLICE ACADEMY," but he did go on to win an Oscar for his work on THE MATRIX, and in his defense, he was just doing what he was told to do) took Leone's film from 229 minutes down to 139 minutes, and that was the version released in US theaters on June 1, 1984. Needless to say, it was a disaster critically and commercially, with Ladd/Warner yanking it from theaters after two weeks following a barrage of negative press from major film critics who just saw the superior long version at Cannes less than a month earlier. Eventually, The Ladd Company relented and gave Leone's cut a very limited release (at 227 minutes, more on that in a bit) before it debuted on VHS and cable in 1985, but by then, the damage was done. Leone was heartbroken over the treatment given to his dream project in the US, and his health began to rapidly decline. The stress of the arduous shoot and the resulting massacre in the editing room took years off of his life, and he died in 1989 at just 59, looking at least a decade older. ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA was his final film.

Leone and his cast at Cannes in 1984

In the US, the long version went from 227 minutes back to Leone's "official" 229 minutes over the years, reinstating some snipped shots from a pair of rape scenes--one with Robert De Niro and Tuesday Weld, and an especially graphic one with De Niro and Elizabeth McGovern--that were trimmed so the long version could secure an R rating. The 139-minute version, released on VHS and shown on cable in the mid '80s, is now rightfully regarded as one of the most shameful instances of a studio cluelessly destroying a filmmaker's vision. It's since been buried in the Warner vaults, presumably never to be seen again, though it would be interesting to view again for curiosity's sake. Even in its "official" 229-minute form, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA leaves questions unanswered. Given the argument that the 1968 portions of the film are a dream being experienced by Jewish mobster Noodles (De Niro) in an opium den in 1933, it's possible that clarity was never meant to be had with the film. Perhaps it's hazy and incomplete by design. That still doesn't explain other mysteries of ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, like the significance of Frankie Minaldi (Joe Pesci) turning up in the lobby of a hospital long after his portion of the story is over, unseen by Noodles and Max as they get off an elevator and never seen or referenced in the film again, unless something in Leone's earlier rough cuts showed that he has a role in the ill-conceived Federal Reserve robbery that proves to be the gang's undoing or he's an unseen power player pulling the strings of union leader Jimmy O'Donnell (Treat Williams). As unwieldy and wandering as dreams can often be, there will never be definitive answers for a lot of what happens in ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, much like there can never be a definitive version. No matter how much gets put back in, the enigmatic elements remain. We're watching--presumably--the dreaming, drugged-out mind of a man consumed by guilt, who's just ratted on his friends and inadvertently gotten them killed. It's never going to make perfect sense.

The 251-minute restoration has been marketed as an "extended director's cut," but Leone's original pre-release version ran 269 minutes before he settled on the 229-minute Cannes 1984 cut. With Martin Scorsese throwing his weight behind the project, the restoration involved Leone's family members and various collaborators, though 18 minutes of footage was apparently tangled in rights issues and it would seem that the 251-minute version finds the film once again released in a compromised state (perhaps the real explanation is that the still-missing 18 minutes aren't salvageable?). Whether that full 269-minute version will ever see reassembly is still up in the air. The six additional scenes came from a workprint source, and when the "director's cut" played at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and was released on Blu-ray in Italy later that year, the image quality didn't win it any praise. It's been cleaned up significantly in the ensuing two years, but the added scenes still stick out like a sore thumb. Some look better than others, especially later on, but the first addition--Noodles encountering a cemetery director (Louise Fletcher, who was completely excised from all previous versions) when he visits the mausoleum where Max (Woods), Cockeye (William Forsythe), and Patsy (James Hayden, who died of a heroin overdose in November 1983, eight months before the film's release) are interred--looks the worst, by far. Faded and scratchy, it's hard to imagine what this looked like before it was cleaned up, but Fletcher's scene is usually cited as the most famous of the "lost" sequences, even though she doesn't really have much to do. Other than a few minutes of screen time for the ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST Best Actress Oscar winner, the biggest significance of this scene comes near its end when Noodles spots a black car that's following him, giving him more evidence that after a 35-year self-imposed exile, the ghosts of his past have finally caught up to him. Of the five other restored scenes--including a heated 1968 meeting between Max-as-"Secretary Bailey" and O'Donnell, Noodles getting defensive when a Jewish chauffeur (played by Milchan) disapproves of his lifestyle, and an additional scene after Noodles drives the car into the water after the gang pulls off the Detroit diamond robbery for Frankie and his brother Joe (Burt Young)--the most important gives us a much more thorough introduction to Eve (Darlanne Fluegel), Noodles' girlfriend in 1933, a prostitute with whom he took up after his brutal rape of love-of-his-life Deborah (McGovern), finally driving her away for good. In the 229-minute cut, Eve more or less appears and we can easily figure out that she's Noodles' girlfriend, and we didn't really need background on her to ascertain that, but by reinstating their introduction, the viewer gets a better read on their relationship and how Noodles still isn't over Deborah.

All of the scenes explain things in some way, but given the inherently enigmatic and impenetrable nature of the film and its construction, less can be more. Not less as in "139 minutes," but nothing in these additional 22 minutes makes ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA necessarily better, nor do they make anything worse. It's also a different Blu-ray transfer than Warner's previous release of the 229-minute cut, darker and with a more muted color palette. There are moments where it doesn't look all that great, and there's been chatter online--which I don't really buy--that the whole transfer was degraded to more closely match the inferior quality of the added scenes. While devoted fans of Leone and the film will want to see this cut, I'm not sure it surpasses the 229-minute version, which had a pretty good if not demo-quality HD transfer. At any rate, it's not a "director's cut." It's a big step toward the restoration of the 269-minute cut, but Leone more or less dismissed that as a definitive edition when he cut it down to 229 minutes and signed off on it. Maybe his feelings changed before his death and maybe he'd prefer the 269-minute version now and be cool with settling for this 251-minute cut instead, but he's not here to speak for himself, and much like the intricacies and the specifics of the film's deliberately ambiguous plot, we'll simply never know.

The two-disc edition of ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA: EXTENDED DIRECTOR'S CUT lists "theatrical cut" as the second disc. This is not the 139-minute US theatrical cut--it's simply the 229-minute "official" version that you probably already own if you're a fan. While everyone is likely in agreement that the 139-minute Zach Staenberg cut is an abomination, it would be interesting to watch, much like Universal's botched, shelved "Love Conquers All" cut that Criterion included in their BRAZIL box set. Why not include it for the sake of completist fans? Don't bury it. Don't deny its existence. Present it as a cautionary tale of studio meddling gone horribly awry. Hell, get Staenberg to do a commentary over it. Can you imagine the stories he's got about hapless execs telling him to make those nonsensical cuts and re-edits?  That's a missed opportunity. Fortunately, if you already have the 229-minute version, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA: EXTENDED DIRECTOR'S CUT is also available on its own in a single-disc edition on both Blu-ray and DVD.

Treat Williams, William Forsythe, James Woods, and Robert De Niro
at the New York Film Festival screening of ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA:
EXTENDED DIRECTOR'S CUT in September 2014.