Early Editions

Here’s a fun thing about a life spent as a film and TV critic: When you leave your gig, most publicists are really nice about keeping you on mailing lists and screener platforms, just in case you have something to say about their stuff. Most of them, anyway.

Amazon’s been pretty supportive, and that’s how I was able to watch all eight episodes of Paper Girls in time for this week’s newsletter, in order to review the entire season rather than just make guesses about whether or not it’ll maintain the precise balance of playful/serious tension that runs through the first couple of hours. Same reason I held off on writing about Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ms. Marvel until they were mostly or entirely done; I hate writing about unfinished stories.

And though Paper Girls is technically unfinished as well – it ends on a very deliberate cliffhanger, promising even wilder time-travel shenanigans (and hairstyles) in a second season – the first season does exactly what it sets out to do, spinning Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang’s comic-book series – which ran thirty issues between 2015 and 2019 – into an episodic adventure series.

Like the comics, the show is centered on four 12-year-old girls – Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), Tiffany (Camryn Jones) and KJ (Fina Strazza) – in an Ohio exurb whose early-morning paper route on November 1^st, 1988 plunges them into an epic adventure through the decades, jumping them first to 2019 – where Erin enlists the help of the older, wearier version of herself (Ali Wong) to stay a few steps ahead of the vengeful pursuer known only as Prioress (The 100’s Adina Porter) – and then rolling to elsewhere through the timeline, where Tiff and KJ encounter their own older selves, and uncover a complex war for the universe as they know it. There are bicycles and pterodactyls and Nathan Corddry being twitchy and Jason Mantzoukas wearing socks with sandals so we know he’s not to be trusted.

“Isn’t this just Stranger Things with girls?” Well, no, because that show has never figured out a way to transcend its reference points; I love Stephen King and Amblin movies as much as the next Gen-Xer, but the Duffer Brothers are little more than magpies at this point, harvesting the images of the movies they grew up watching without understanding their themes. Also, those kids are adults now; just let it end, would you?

Vaughn and Chiang’s comics – and the series Stefany Folsom and her collaborators have created from it – are all about how the fantastical stuff impacts and changes the story’s heroes. Erin, Mac, Tiff and KJ are all thoughtfully developed, complex young women who learn and grow over the course of their adventure – or consciously reject the opportunity to do so – as they discover what their individual futures hold, and how none of them gets the life they expected. Folsom’s adaptation tightens some aspects of the story and flat-out changes others, the better to streamline the narrative and save some of the really wild leaps for further down the road. Most of the time-war stuff is kept off-camera, and what we do see is deliberately indistinct and messy, the better to ensure we share the kids’ uncertainty about how everything works.

Those of us who read Runaways and Y: The Last Man will recognize this as Vaughn’s preferred method of storytelling – an episodic, step-by-step approach ideally suited to comics and television. Which is why, even though Paper Girls could have been a movie, I’m glad it isn’t; it makes use of the longer arcs and easier pacing that streaming allows. And a two-hour adaptation wouldn’t even scratch the surface of this particular story, or let all four of the young stars do the work they do here. Nelet shows us how Erin’s underlying anxiety has encouraged her strong sense of right and wrong; Jones finds endless angles on Tiff’s genius-level overconfidence, and Strazza builds an entire world out of KJ's image of herself as an outsider – for reasons that become clear over the course of the season. But it’s Rosinsky who steals the show as the punkish Mac, juggling the character’s inherently tragic past and future with a pop-eyed bewilderment that becomes a magnificent running gag throughout the season – a reminder that for all of her grown-up posturing, she’s just as much a kid as any of them.

Wong and Corddry are terrific as well, and the decision to cast comic performers in most of the grown-up roles makes everything just a little unpredictable. Except for Jason Mantzoukas, who’s bringing it in every shot. (I would expect nothing less.) I also enjoyed Porter’s steely unflappability as the single-minded Prioress, and the impatience she’s so clearly struggling to conceal whenever she has to pretend to be normal among civilians. A movie would have reduced all of this to little beats; Paper Girls encourages us to savor the breadth of its canvas. I really hope it gets renewed.

Hey, I Thought You Launched This Newsletter To Write About Physical Media

Oh, fine.

With David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future coming to disc next week, this seems like the right time to revisit Eastern Promises, which Kino Lorber released in a first-ever 4K edition earlier this year.

The 2007 thriller remains an outlier in David Cronenberg’s filmography for the almost mundane world it creates. There’s nothing at all that’s fantastical or surreal in this one, an entirely grounded thriller scripted by Steven Knight about an English maternity-ward nurse (Naomi Watts) who gets tangled up in the affairs of London’s Russian oligarchs, and the heavily tattooed enforcer (Viggo Mortensen) who becomes her unlikely protector. True, A History of Violence is straight-up drama as well, but it carries that intense psychosexual undercurrent that’s become Cronenberg’s post-horror signature.

I admire Cronenberg’s willingness to do something radically normal – though of course his lifelong fascination with the fragility and mutability of the human body makes a huge difference in the way two key scenes play out. The awful prologue with Tatiana Maslany bleeding out in a chemist’s, and of course that climactic spa fight between Mortensen’s Nikolai and his would-be assassins, are entirely Cronenberg; just imagine them in the hands of someone like Stephen Frears, who made sure the horrors implied in the Knight-scripted Dirty Pretty Things remain firmly just out of sight. Cronenberg lets us see the consequences of violence to the body playing out in real time.

That said, the movie is never really more than those moments, and the handoff from Watts’ character to Mortensen’s sort of hobbles Eastern Promises as a drama. I get what it’s doing, but the emotional hook falls out at that point, pushing the film into a conventional thriller dynamic that just isn’t as interesting as what was going on before. I much prefer A History of Violence, which is driven inexorably towards its final confrontation by Mortensen’s remarkable opacity; Eastern Promises lets him have a lot of fun with the similarly unreadable Nikolai – and I will say that, accent aside, this is the closest I’ve ever seen Mortensen come to being himself on screen. That wryness, the slightly cynical bemusement with the world around him? The unexpected flashes of pure kindness? That’s the guy I’ve interviewed half a dozen times over the last couple of decades. It’s always nice to see him again, especially in the new 4K restoration; this transfer is leaps and bounds ahead of previous releases, with none of the digital smoothening that marred Universal’s earlier Blu-ray presentation.

Eastern Promises has been one of few remaining reasons to hang on to that creaky old HD-DVD player, but now we can think about moving on. Kino Lorber’s new release – available as a 4K/BD combo or a solo Blu-ray, both mastered from the same source – gives the film the showcase it deserves, its crystal-clear new master supervised by director of photography Peter Suschitzky and approved by Cronenberg himself. I’d say it’s immaculate, except for all the grime that’s part of the mise-en-scene; rather, the movie now looks as dingy and grotty as it did on 35mm fifteen years ago, with HDR allowing for a sumptuous range of murk in the smoke, steam and shadows that constitute its atmosphere.

In addition to the new master, Kino Lorber’s Eastern Promises offers one new supplemental feature, a ten-minute interview with screenwriter Steven Knight – who’s since become a director in his own right, making high-concept dramas like the one where Tom Hardy is in a car and the one where Matthew McConaughey is in a videogame. (I assume Cronenberg was finishing Crimes of the Future when the supplements were produced, otherwise he surely would have participated; as it is, I can offer you this fun little thing we did at TIFF earlier this summer, talking about how all his collaborations with Mortensen are secretly buddy comedies.)

Back to the discs, and you’ll be glad to hear all the featurettes produced for Universal’s earlier Blu-ray – a fairly generic making-of, brief looks at the tattoo designs created for Mortensen and Cassel’s characters and the bathhouse throwdown and an even briefer glimpse of Watts’ motorcycle work – are all here as well, along with two trailers. (Sadly, Kino wasn’t able to license The Mark of Cain, a feature-length doc produced for a 2008 French special edition; I’m hoping people start dumping their imports on that one.) All of the extras are on the Blu-ray; the 4K platter is movie-only.

Speaking of 4K Cronenbergs, Eastern Promises has the curious distinction of being the only one of his films to be released in UHD on this side of the Atlantic; Crimes of the Future is topping out at Blu-ray, though there’s a 4K edition being released in France. Crash also got the UHD bump in Europe, with separate UK, French and German editions rolling out last year, though Criterion settled for a Blu-ray edition in the US. (They did use the same 4K source, though, and the 2K platter looks lovely.) And as I’m double-checking all of this, I discover that Arrow, the producers of that UK Crash disc, just announced another 4K Cronenberg title: Videodrome will be coming out October 24^th in one of the label’s elaborate big-box limited editions.

Given that a lot of its special features are the same as the ones on Criterion’s existing Blu-ray, I’m thinking this one’s likely to be exclusive to the UK … but maybe it means Criterion will roll out a 4K upgrade of its own somewhere down the line. I can wait. As Cronenberg keeps demonstrating, the new flesh isn’t going anywhere.

Next week: Crimes of the Future gets its own physical release, and maybe some of the other stuff I’ve been waiting on will show up too. Keep hope alive, my friends.