Nostalgia: Not Always Bad!

Nostalgia is a poison, they say. And I think that’s mostly true, but here’s the other problem: Familiarity is marketable. There’s a seventh Scream movie opening tomorrow, and a new season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the Apple show about people running around underneath and in-between the events of a few recent Godzilla movies.

(I’m writing about both of them in this week’s What’s Worth Watching column, of course, so if you’ve been looking for an excuse to upgrade to the paid tier, that’s be a pretty good one.)

For decades now, popular culture has been dominated by remakes, reboots, reinventions, prequels, sequels and spinoffs, and that’s not stopping any time soon. It’s always been easier to get a green light – or even a pitch meeting – if your project has a pre-existing audience. In the studio days, that meant “Judy Garland is attached!” and now it means “Millennials have been waiting decades for the return of Johnny Cage!” Studios and production companies love nothing more than mitigating risk, so writers and directors have to use old properties to tell new stories. Sometimes it actually works!

Two of last week’s new releases work in that space. Technically they’re both remakes – one of an unreleased documentary with an irresistible pop hook, and the other of a highly problematic B-movie from the VHS age. But both Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue and Steven Kostanski’s Deathstalker manage to feel fresh and surprising, almost from the jump.

Song Sung Blue is the story of Mike and Claire Sardina, a middle-aged couple who spent the ’90s and some of the ’00s performing in and around Milwaukee as Lightning and Thunder, a Neil Diamond tribute band. They were never that big – although they did open for Pearl Jam that one time – but they played a lot of shows and had some very fervent fans, largely due to Mike’s full-on commitment in the role of front man. Individually and together, Mike and Claire endured personal setbacks that would have led most people to hang up the sequins, but they just kept going, buoyed by the music, their relationship and their friends and family.

Greg Kohs’ documentary, which premiered at Slamdance in 2008, had the perfect structure for a three-act drama, and Brewer knows it, infusing this straightforward romantic melodrama with the beats of a jukebox musical. He’s got the right chops for this – it’s weird that nobody offered a straight musical after Hustle and Flow – and in Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, he’s got leads who bring out the best in each other.

Jackman’s always had massive theater-kid energy, of course, but Mike is a new role for him: He’s a dreamer, yeah, but he’s also a realist. Stardom never came for him, and he works on cars to pay the bills. But he still performs, because he needs to express that side of himself more than anything else. Early in the story, Mike tells Claire that all he really wants to do is make his living as an entertainer – not to be famous, not to be celebrated, but to celebrate with other people. He doesn’t write his own songs. He just needs the right ones. And when Claire – who’s maybe packed away her own dreams to work state fairs as a Patsy Cline tribute act – suggests they look at the Neil Diamond songbook, suddenly it all comes together.

Except that it doesn’t, not quite. Diamond’s songs are great, and everybody loves them, but it takes work for Mike – who goes by Lightning; eventually Claire calls herself Thunder – to get people to understand he’s not just a cover act. “It’s a Neil Diamond experience,” he insists, and Jackman manages to put just enough integrity into that line delivery to convince us that Mike really does believe that. That’s the idea underneath Song Sung Blue: The idea that artifice can be a kind of truth, and that someone else’s music can let us be our most honest selves. We’ve all seen transcendent karaoke performances, right? What if you could do that every night?

Mike and Claire’s romance runs parallel to the rise of Lightning and Thunder, and Jackman and Hudson nail that as well. And of course Jackman can do the charming, bruised, earnest thing – he’s always been an incredibly underrated melodramatist – but the real surprise is seeing Hudson match him beat for beat. She’s not as versatile an actor, or at least she hasn’t taken roles that showcased her versatility, and while she was really fun as a shallow influencer in Glass Onion it’s been a full quarter-century since her one breakout performance in Almost Famous. But she’s up for anything here, and as alive and invested as Jackman; I’m not at all surprised she scored a Best Actress nomination at this year’s Oscars.

I am surprised that the movie didn’t fare better with audiences, because it’s as much of a mainstream crowd-pleaser as anything I’ve seen this decade. But maybe it’s also the sort of movie that audiences don’t think they need to see in a theater – it doesn’t have elaborate CG effects, the stakes are decidedly modest and the biggest selling point is Diamond’s music. I would argue that this is the sort of movie that begs to be seen with a crowd, because it’s got moments that need to be shared. Scream 7 will gross more on its opening weekend than Song Sung Blue did in its entire theatrical run, no question. But I don’t think that’s something to celebrate.

Still, if you missed it at the megaplex Song Sung Blue plays pretty damn well at home. And Universal’s Blu-ray offers a razor-sharp 1080p/24 presentation of the feature, with 7.1 Dolby TrueHD sound that puts us right in the audience for the musical sequences, but also knows when to scale things down to a more naturalistic level. The lack of a 4K release is surprising, but perhaps the quick turnaround has something to do with that; anyway, one’s just been scheduled for April in the UK, so you can always import it if no domestic announcement is forthcoming.

Supplementally speaking, Brewer’s audio commentary is supported by three polished production featurettes: “One Plus One Equals Three,” drilling into the film’s stranger-than-fiction love story; “Lightning in a Bottle,” which focuses on the cast and the set pieces, and “Eye for Style,” which lets costume designer Ernesto Martinez walk us through the wardrobe choices. (Total running time is just under 20 minutes.) We’re also given extended performances of “Crunchy Granola Suite” and “Sweet Caroline,” the better to keep the good times rolling and to underscore just how good Jackman is at singing in character. The guy’s a theater kid through and through.

And now that we’ve resurrected Neil Diamond, you know what else was big in the ’80s? Deathstalker!

I don’t know if you’ve seen Deathstalker lately, but that is a very skeevy movie. One of several Roger Corman quickies designed to ride the sword-and-sorcery wave kicked off by Conan the Barbarian, Deathstalker went hard on nudity and bloodletting, making it an instant favorite for teenage boys in the VHS era who were looking for a movie that delivered on the promise of the awesome poster art.

The 2025 version of Deathstalker is gratifying in a different way. In an age of digitally generated environments and smoothed-out sameness, writer-director Steven Kostanski has made a movie that celebrates the hand-tooled aesthetic of old-school Conan knockoffs, with gloopy monsters and sweaty swordfights, evil warlords and scheming viziers and soldiers of fortune who rediscover their purpose at the urging of their younger companions. Also Patton Oswalt voices a little wizard guy named Doodad.

Look, you’re either on board or you’re not. Over the last decade and a half, Kostanski and his pals in the Astron-6 collective have demonstrated a knack for tactile creature features like Psycho Goreman and Frankie Freako that commit fully to being tongue-in-cheek throwbacks to the straight-to-video age. And while Deathstalker isn’t an Astron production it’s fully in step with the aesthetic – and Daniel Bernhardt’s knowingly stone-faced turn in the title role provides a solid center for all the bloodletting and spellcasting.

Also, in case you were worried, this version is a lot less misogynistic, and Christina Orjalo even gets to wear pants as our hero’s plucky sidekick Brisbayne! Well, they’re more like leggings, but still. That’s literally not nothing!

Shout’s Blu-ray delivers a crisp, clean 1080p/24 master with robust DTS-HD 5.1 and 2.0 audio options; the 5.1 track is, shall we say, enthusiastically gloopy. (A 2.0 French dub is also available.) The disc also comes with a healthy collection of supplements in which Kostanski and his team take obvious pleasure in celebrating their goofy handmade creation. The director appears on two audio commentaries – joined in one by star Bernhardt for a convivial watchalong, and in the other by DP Andrew Appelle and editor Robert Hyland for a more technically oriented but still very relaxed chat – and participates in a pair of lengthy Zoom interviews.

There’s a conversation with Bernhardt moderated by Todd Stashwick, and in the second, Kostanski is the moderator for a discussion with visual-effects supervisor Cody Kennedy and effects artists Adarsh Bora and Matthew Satchwill. Kostanski also appears in “Animating Stop-Motion Skeletons,” walking us through the movie’s tribute to Ray Harryhausen. A music video for the Deathstalker theme song and the theatrical trailer are also included.

Oh, and there’s also an exclusive Canadian release of Deathstalker from Raven Banner that pairs the Blu-ray with a CD soundtrack; you can find it at the Raven Banner merch store.

As with the extras in their Psycho Goreman and Frankie Freako special editions, the whole thing is just fun. There’s a sense that something has been gotten away with here – that producing a sword-and-sorcery picture movie that’s mostly practical, and meant to be seen with an audience, shouldn’t have worked out this well. And it probably shouldn’t have, but it did. That’s something worth celebrating.

Finally, since you’ve come this far: Time for a giveaway! To mark the physical release of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet next Tuesday, March 3^rd, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment has provided me with two 4K/Blu-ray combos to give away to lucky Shiny Things readers.

Just e-mail me at normwilner@gmail.com by 12 noon ET on Saturday, February 28^th with the subject line “Hamnet With an N,” and include your name and address in the body of the message. This one’s for residents of the US and Canada; winners will be selected at random.

 

Song Sung Blue and Deathstalker are now available on Blu-ray from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment and Shout! Studios, respectively.

Up next: Hamnet and The Running Man kick off March with a bang and more than a few whimpers, and Shout gives one of Jake Gyllenhaal’s greatest vehicles a 4K upgrade. And don't forget, there's always time to upgrade your subscription so you don’t miss out on Friday’s What’s Worth Watching circular. You don't want to offend Godzilla. Trust me on this.