Now on Blu-ray: The Good, The Great, & Gotti; EIGHTH GRADE, UNCLE DREW, SOLO, and GOTTI

I first caught rookie director Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade on a whim at SXSW this spring. What a stroke of luck that this off-handed choice turned out to be one of the year's best and most powerful films of the year. Burnham's delicate approach to the ever so indelicate world of the modern teen is emotionally gripping and terrifying in equal parts.

Kayla is a thirteen-year-old suburban girl in her last week of eighth grade before heading off to high school. The film follows her as she attempts to navigate this strange no-man's-land between childhood and adulthood in a day and age where the latter in encroaching on the further more and more. Her fumbling attempts at becoming popular, or at least making popular friends, are thwarted over and over again by a sweet awkwardness that makes her all the more relatable. In search of herself, Kayla finds that she may not be quite as ready to grow up as she thought she was, and perhaps it's okay to hold on to her childhood a little bit longer.

At the center of this bold and truthful slice of life drama is the incredible Elsie Fisher as Kayla. Elsie lays bare her own soul and insecurities in order to fathfully convey the challenges of girls her age. She gives an amazing performance that feels less like a performance and more like an observation in a way that elicits an incredible and unexpected empathy for the character. She's ably supported by a number of other young actors , both friend and foe, who give solid performances as well. Also putting in an incredible turn in a supporting role is Josh Hamilton as her single father trying to understand the emotions of a teenage girl who barely understands them herself. 

This is an impressively human and thoughtful piece of work for a first time director and actor who have created something to be very proud of. Eighth Grade is sure to end up on my end of year Best Of list.

The Disc:

I say this a lot, but Eighth Grade is a new film and looks and sounds great.

A24 and Lionsgate have provided an insightful commentary track with Burnham and Fisher that is definitely worth checking out, along with some deleted scenes and a making of featurette that shines some light on the fascinating process of creating such an unusual and empathetic piece. Definitely recommended.

 Charles Stone III's Uncle Drew is pretty much the exact opposite of the kind of films we typically feature on Screen Anarchy, a studio-backed broad comedy based on a series of TV ads. The thing is, no matter how much you know or don't know about basketball, Uncle Drew is pretty damn funny, even if it doesn't do anything terribly new or interesting, that is definitely worthy of note.

Dax (comedian Lil Rel) is a Foot Locker sales associate obsessed with basketball. He turns this obsession into a lifelong desire to coach a team to victory in the legendary streetball tournament, the Rucker Classic. But when his star player is stolen out from under him, Dax has to go in search of a new team, which leads him to a streetball veteran named Uncle Drew (NBA star Kyrie Irving). Uncle Drew may be in his 70s, but he hasn't lost a step. Dax and Drew go on a quest, zig zagging around the east coast to round up a team that can win the Rucker, and the search for the rest of Drew's old squad provides for some prime comedic moments.

In the end, the film is a surprisingly warm-hearted family comedy about the need for all of us to follow our dreams and confront our fears. Lil Rel puts in a lively performance as Dax, an unlikely streetball hero, and Kyrie Irving is joined on the court by NBA legends past and present in the form of Big Fella (Shaquille O'Neal), Lights (Reggie Miller), Preacher (Chris Webber), Boots (Nate Robinson), and women's basketball goddess, Betty Lou (Lisa Leslie). The team puts on an impressive display on and off the court, and director Stone keeps it all tight.

Viewers who aren't avid basketball fans might miss a few gags and in-jokes here and there, but the overall experience is broad enough to bring a smile to face of even the least sportsball savvy audience.

The Disc:

Lionsgate brings a few fascinating bonus materials to the court with their Blu-ray release of Uncle Drew, including one I've never seen before. There are the usual extras; behind the scenes footage, deleted scenes, and separate featurettes on the comedians peppered throughout the film, the custom van that takes the crew across the country, as well as the history of the Uncle Drew character. There is also a brief animated explanation of the legend of Uncle Drew, which is cute but largely disposable. The one most fascinating extra for me is an enhanced audio commentary that must've been a dream for the director to record. In the commentary, Stone is allowed to pause, rewind, and replay segments of the film as he sees fit when the story needs a little bit more explaining. It's a fascinating watch and the kind of commentary I bet a lot of filmmakers wish they had the opportunity to make. I really dug it.

Solo: A Star Wars Story, had a crazy production history, and the resulting film and its relative financial failure was enough to inspire LucasFilm to put a hold on any future Star Wars universe spin-offs, but was it really that bad?

Andrew Mack reviewed the film for us and gives a pretty solid synopsis of the film here:

Han lives an Oliver Twist-like existence on Corellia 8, stealing and scavenging for a local ganglord to eke out a meager existence. Together with love interest Qi'ra, he yearns for a way to get off planet and start a new life. After double-crossing the ganglord Han and Qi’ra get separated at a security check-in and Han joins the Imperial Navy to evade capture.

Three years later, Han is now part of the ground forces, his rebellious spirit getting him kicked out of the Navy, and doing him no favors on the ground either. He runs into Tobias Beckett and his crew on the battlefield and Han immediately recognizes them for gangsters impersonating Imperial soldiers. Seizing the opportunity to convince them to take him into the gang Han joins them on their next job, robbing an Imperial supply train of the universe’s most precious commodity, Hydrofuel. 

Thus begins Han’s career as a smuggler, scoundrel and eventually the reluctant hero. When that first job goes wrong Solo and Beckett find themselves indebted to crime boss Dryden Vos. To pay back what they owe Solo suggests that they go to the source of Hydrofuel, the mining planet Kessel, and bring back the fuel in its unrefined form. Thing is, this raw form is highly volatile and explodes when it reaches a certain temperature. Hence, the gang has to get out of Kessel faster than usual. See what screenwriters Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan did there? Solo: A Star Wars Story is a tale with twists and turns, a story of betrayed loyalties, of events that begin to form the character that we have come to love since his first appearance in Episode IV.

Yeah, that's a lot of synopsis, but a lot happens in this film. The resulting feature is a bit uneven, and didn't entirely land or provide the same kind of adrenaline fueled excitement that JJ Abrams' The Force Awakens did, but it's a perfectly competent science-fiction action film. The film does deliver some really impressive outer space action, and there are also the requisite neat looking alien worlds and their residents, but for whatever reason the film feels little more than adequate in terms of story.

Mack had similar feelings:

There is less of a sense of grandeur and scale in this Star Wars film than any other chapter before it. We wondered and pondered on how a Dirty Dozen style Star Wars film would work in Rogue One and it worked pretty damn good. Now we are looking at a Western style Star Wars and does it work? Not as well. When every film leading up to Solo, despite their faults, are at the very least ambitious and grand in their story telling, Solo feels like a bit of a letdown. Even a surprise character return at the end of film does not resurrect Solo from the dullness. 

I liked it, though, and my kid loved it. Far from a franchise destroying disappointment, Solo is perfectly fine. Nothing more.

The Disc:

Solo looks and sounds spectacular on Blu-ray, so if you're looking to give your home theater a workout, this is a solid choice.

LucasFilm also hasn't skimped on the extras. I spent a couple of hours exploring the various featurettes on every element of the film from the design of the Millennium Falcon, the introduction of a new droid character, the writing team of veteran Lawrence Kasdan and his son Jonathan Kasdan, as well as looks into the Kessel Run, young Chewbacca, and a lot more. One of the longest featurettes is a very self-congratulatory director and cast roundtable led by Ron Howard that is lovely if you want to watch them all pat themselves on the back for a while, but isn't much more than that. One thing that is conspicuous by its absence is the lack of evidence that original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street) were ever involved. They left the project and were replaced, but a lot of the film was already in progress when it happened, so it seems that erasing them from the story of the film's production is a bit sketchy. Oh well.

If you liked the film, this is a great presentation. If you haven't seen it yet, it feels very Star Wars-y and will likely scratch a lot of the itches you want it to.

 I'm going to admit something here: I watched Kevin Connolly's Gotti purely out of a sense of morbid curiosity. I had no interest in the film or its subject, until I started hearing the reports of how incredibly bad the film was, at which point, I felt like it was something I definitely needed to see.

It turns out the reports were not exagerrated, Gotti is absolutely terrible.

The most interesting part of the film, which attempts to trace notorious gangster John Gotti from his early days as an enforcer through his taking control of the Gambino crime family in the '80s, is the gonzo performance of leading man John Travolta as the titular character. Travolta's Gotti is a perpetually sneering myopic, power obsessed hoodlum. He pretends to be concerned about his family, but it's clear that staying in control by manipulating everyone around him is the only game he's playing. Travolta's performance is incredibly over the top, and his attempt to make a De Niro-esque transformation into John Gotti falls far short of benchmark status.

The film itself is also a tangled mess of tonal inconsistency and confused loyalty. There are times where it's clear that the film is painting Gotti as a bad guy, but there are as many or more instances of the film turning its empathy toward him as a misunderstood family man just trying to put food on the table. It's borderline irresponsible.

The Disc:

This turd is effectively polished. The disc looks and sounds fine except that it contains a terrible film. Blessedly, there are no bonus features, not even a trailer.