For the week of November 5th, New Line and Warner Home Entertainment are bringing the extended version of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey to Blu-ray. Despite the film's near-universal financial success - to date, it has grossed more than $1 billion - An Unexpected Journey did not find the critical support bestowed upon director Peter Jackson's Academy Award-winning Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Some viewers found it too poky, others found it too silly, while many people criticized Jackson's decision to split the relatively slight J.R.R. Tolkien adventure story (most paperback editions clock in at around 350 pages) into three nearly three-hour-long features (or over three hours, in the case of this new 182-minute cut). To some extent, all the criticisms have merit, though they lose sight of how pleasurable entering Jackson's Middle-Earth can be. His cinematic eye is as candy-hued and mysterious as it's ever been, and he presides over An Unexpected Journey's many action sequences with a kind of controlled mania (one gripe: he has replaced the sterling practical makeup effects of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy with far less tactile mo-cap and CGI embellishments on his orcs and trolls). Best of all are the two lead performances. Sherlock and The Office star Martin Freeman brings his understated warmth and wit to the role of Bilbo Baggins, and Ian McKellen is - again - a delight as Gandalf the Grey. It's worth it just to watch these two navigate their way around each other and the journey to Smaug's treasure, and the extended version inflates that experience for the LOTR faithful.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown noted that "Unlike the extended cuts of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the newly expanded Journey doesn't play like the essential, definitive version of the film some have been expecting. It's more of a traditional director's cut than anything more robust; inflated but not necessarily improved. The additional scenes will delight many of those who already adore the movie, leave some fence-sitting fans grumbling that the previous version is the clear victor, and embolden previously disenfranchised critics to wag their fingers more vigorously than ever. Some of the new scenes and extra beats are quite good. Others... not so much. The coming days and weeks will be filled with point/counterpoint discussions as to which bits work and which fail. Does the hit-or-miss nature of the extensions tarnish the movie or the Middle-Earth experience? Despite the fact that there are more flaws than before, not really. I remained thoroughly entertained from start to finish and found myself to be as fond of the joy Jackson and company spill out on the screen as before. Does that make the extended cut a better film? Not by my estimation, although for the most faithful among you it may be exactly that. Bottom line: if you have any affection for The Hobbit whatsoever you owe it to yourself to find out firsthand. If nothing else, the Extended Edition's Appendices are worth the cost of admission alone, so you won't be out anything. Even if you aren't impressed with the new cut of the film, its overwhelming abundance of extensive, meticulously crafted supplemental content is worthy of a purchase."
Season Six of AMC's Mad Men (which hits Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate) finds the series in an unusual position: with one season to go (which will be broken up, as with Breaking Bad's final run, into two eight-episode mini-seasons), the story of mysterious ad man Don Draper (Jon Hamm) should be ramping up in preparation for the end, yet this year finds Mad Men very much in transition. Spoilers to follow: Now that Don Draper has renounced his attempts at fidelity that made Season Five so gripping, he's even more adrift in the turbulent world of the late 1960s. The problem is, Don's ennui and indecision comes to mirror the show's own narrative stumblings. For the first time, this most confident of television dramas isn't quite as assured as it normally is. Showrunner Matthew Weiner (who spent last year shepherding both this and the Owen-Wilson-and-Zach-Galifianakis dramedy You Are Here - maybe his attentions were spread too thin?) and his team have a hard time balancing out the current struggles of the series' large cast of characters with the need to parcel out just enough backstory to explain their behaviors, and the result is unusually flashback-heavy, a decision that kills the show's subtle-but-elegant sense of forward momentum. I'm reminded of the other iconic show that Weiner cut his teeth on, HBO's The Sopranos, which also labored to find its purpose in the years following the death of Tony Soprano's duplicitous mother Livia. Still, flawed Mad Men is better than most other television programs, and for all its problems, Mad Men remains (mostly) compelling and rich, with Hamm's phenomenal work grounding some of the more problematic areas. He delivers a perfect performance in an otherwise imperfect run of episodes.
Jeffrey Kauffman remarked that "The sixth season reestablishes the series' fine modulations between soap operatic drama and nice character driven comedy, but there are still some niggling concerns hovering around the edges of an overall excellent year. Once again Don devolves into a series of neuroses that seems to be endangering his future. While perhaps more 'clinical' than in previous seasons, this is just the latest iteration of the 'Don freaking out' syndrome that has been used previously to varying effect. The show continues to mine its historical epoch quite well (this season sees the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as race riots and the debacle of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago), but next season should (if the show follows its general template) get to 1969. It might be time to start thinking about letting Mad Men expire with a modicum of dignity, rather than drawing things out to, say, 1974 when disgraced resignations became all the rage."
From Sony Home Entertainment comes the action-adventure White House Down, which has the distinction of being the second of two "Die Hard at the White House" thrillers to hit theaters in 2013. The main differences between it and Olympus Has Fallen, however, are a) White House Down made a lot less money than Olympus Has Fallen (proportionate to its budget), and b) while Olympus Has Fallen was content to rip off Die Hard in spirit only, White House Down cribs from the 1988 Bruce Willis classic chapter and verse. It's all here: Channing Tatum plays a down-on-his-luck policeman who accidentally finds himself the last line of defense between the White House's inhabitants and a team of vicious terrorists; the criminal mastermind (James Woods, in a performance that's alternatively histrionic and heartfelt) employs both a know-it-all technogeek (the once-and-future Liam McPoyle, Jimmi Simpson) and a psychotic bruiser (Zero Dark Thirty's Jason Clarke) (who develops a personal vendetta against Tatum's protagonist, natch) to do his dirty work; and Tatum must fight to save a family member trapped in the White House (whereas John McClane had an estranged wife to rescue, for Tatum, it's his resentful daughter). Best of all, the name of Tatum's character is John Cale, which, as Ignatiy Vishnevetsky pointed out in the Onion AV Club, "suggests that screenwriter James Vanderbilt is either a big Velvet Underground fan or that he's three letters and one drinking problem short of a [Die Hard] intellectual-property lawsuit." White House Down's biggest innovation is turning the film into an unconventional buddy-cop picture, as Cale must team up with Jamie Foxx's escaped President of the United States James Sawyer, though Sawyer even functions, more or less, as a physical version of the sounding board that Reginald VelJohnson's Al Powell acted as in, you guessed it, Die Hard. Long story short, if you're looking for predictability or innovation in White House Down, that way lies madness, but it's well made and never boring, and lots of stuff blows up in different ways. Just be prepared for more than a little déjà vu.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review criticized the film for its lack of originality, how "none of it ever comes close to matching the majesty of Die Hard. Worse, one of the most critical scenes comes straight out of The Rock; just replace flares with a flag. The picture duplicates rather than innovates in almost every scene. It's admittedly action-packed but there's no life to it, no pride in the content. It's as straightforward and dumbed-down as these sorts of movies can be, a rather grating, 'why even bother' experience that barely produces a pulse beyond the flashes at the end of its ceaselessly firing guns...The performances are dry and the emotion seems forced into every scene. The relationships are never believable and the confrontations feel staged rather than natural. Every character is painfully flat and so linearly structured that there's absolutely no surprise as to what happens to whom, how it happens, and why, all encapsulated in that The Rock ripoff scene at the end that comes across as the corny culmination of a completely disappointing movie. Granted, the actors never have much of a chance to improve on bad material, but they certainly don't do much to inject a positive energy, either. From Foxx and Tatum on down, there's a very stiff, by-the-book feel that runs through the movie. The final insult-to-injury comes in the form of the surprisingly poor special effects that look flat and very much the product of CGI. Nothing looks authentic; characters appear as if they've been Photoshopped into a number of scenes while digital vehicles look like plastic toys, both more than enough to detract from whatever tension, emotional content, or adrenaline any scene manages to create."
The docudrama Lovelace arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Starz/Anchor Bay. The interesting thing about this film isn't exclusively that it tells the story of Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace (Amanda Seyfried, in the best work of her career); ever since Paul Thomas Anderson's masterful Boogie Nights, the idea of a porno-centric biopic has become a lot less taboo. Rather, what distinguishes Lovelace is its unique approach to perspective. Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman also brought Howl to the screen, and while their treatment of Lovelace is far less experimental (Howl mixed live-action and animation reenactments alongside actual documentary footage concerning Allen Ginsberg), it's still much more unexpected than the traditional biopic structure. For the first half of Lovelace, we get the candy-colored version of Lovelace's rise to adult-film stardom: she meets a great guy (Peter Sarsgaard, who's equal parts sleazy and charming) who introduces her to show-business, and from then on, the sky's the limit...until Epstein and Friedman get to the sustained sucker punch that is the second half. At that point, they replay many of the "positive" events from the first half, but they strip away the glamour, revealing the abuse and fear that kept Lovelace imprisoned to the Deep Throat stigma. It's an unconventional move, and it isn't always successful (the stunt-casting, which fills Lovelace's large and small roles with the likes of Eric Roberts, Wes Bentley, Chris Noth, Adam Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Robert Patrick, Chloë Sevigny, Hank Azaria, Juno Temple, Debi Mazar, Sharon Stone, and James Franco, gets very distracting very early on), but it allows Lovelace to both idealize and excoriate the world around its heroine.
Martin Liebman wrote that "Lovelace doesn't break any new ground. Certainly it embraces a rather fascinating subject that's one part taboo and another part human interest story, but the combination never fully breaks free from a staleness, a sense that the material, beyond the pornographic premise, has been done countless times before. That said, it's rather good at what it does, stale dramatic content or not. The film expertly morphs into a tragic tale of how life and feelings and one's future mean little or nothing in a business that's about exploitation and, really, nothing more. Several scenes demonstrate. A battered Linda is approached by two police officers who, upon recognizing her, retreat from the scene but not before asking for an autograph. She's forced to take a polygraph test to validate her story of abuse and troubled life because, after all, how could a celebrity of her stature live like anything but a goddess? The film closes by stating that Deep Throat grossed some absurd amount of money over the years, well into the nine digits. Linda saw almost none of that. The film does do well in portraying her as a victim rather than a true star, as a prop rather than a human being, a battering ram and a money maker rather than a loved and emotionally supported spouse. It does so without using the pornography as a crutch but rather as a backdrop for the depiction of a life damaged by an industry that's glamorous and alluring on the surface but anything but when the cameras stop rolling, the clothes are returned to the body, and real life outside of the fantasy demands more than woman wants to give."
A far less serious slice of erotic entertainment is eOne's Passion, which sees director Brian De Palma returning to the kind of lurid, sexually provocative thrillers he cut his teeth on in the 1970s and 1980s. A remake of Alain Corneau's Love Crime, Passion watches as the battle of wills between a ruthless advertising executive (Rachel McAdams) and her unscrupulous protégée (Noomi Rapace) blossoms into something more torrid - and dangerous - than either woman imagined. For the first forty minutes of Passion, De Palma is in Black Dahlia-mode; his setups and lensings are sleek and beautiful, and McAdams and Rapace share an enjoyably acid repartee, but he's working at half-speed, with any solid thriller pretensions mired below under-done corporate shenanigans (it doesn't help that no one in the cast around McAdams and Rapace can rise to the capabilities of the leading ladies). But then something kicks in, and all of a sudden, we're looking at the same person who made Dressed to Kill and Blow Out and Femme Fatale - beginning with a virtuoso sequence where De Palma intercuts (via split-screen, of course) a stealth murder with a performance of Nijinsky's The Afternoon Of A Faun, he delivers one thrilling setpiece after another, ultimately outdoing Corneau's very respectable original feature. If Passion is any indication, the old Brian De Palma never went away; he just needs a bigger budget to play with next time.
Jeffrey Kauffman praised Passion, saying that "De Palma pulls out all the stylistic stops in this film, including a whole series of vertiginous angles once the drug angle starts entering the fray, as well as a seriously daft but hugely visceral split screen sequence that sees the left half showing a performance of the ballet set to Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun, while the right half depicts a rather gruesome murder. The killing is made even more bizarre due to the fact that the kinky sexual proclivities of the victim, which include mask wearing, play an important role in the crime. De Palma frankly seems to be aware that he's making something akin to a trashy paperback novel, but he seems determined to do so with a modicum of panache. Ultimately, Passion may not even make much sense, but it careens along almost hypnotically on the combined force of the riveting performances by McAdams and Rapace...as well as De Palma's intentionally playful take on the subject matter. The kinky sexual subtext, which includes a fairly ubiquitous lesbian aspect, keeps things just this side of salacious in typical De Palma fashion. De Palma has often been accused of emphasizing style over substance, and truth be told that assessment is probably going to be lobbed at Passion as well. In this case, however, the style supports the visceral performances in crafting a surprisingly fun, if unabashedly silly, thriller."
One of the most enduring big-budget screen ventures is Warner Bros' 1983 drama The Right Stuff. Director Philip Kaufman's adaptation of the Tom Wolfe novel ranks as a masterwork of American cinema, though that reputation was not immediate; while critics almost universally embraced the film, audiences had trouble acclimating to The Right Stuff's kicky mix of old-fashioned mythologizing and arch, knowing comedy. They shouldn't have, given the popularity of Wolfe's source material (Wolfe added plenty of humor to his representation of the NASA program) but in 1983, moviegoers wanted sincere and idealistic screen visions of Americana, and Kaufman couldn't shade his story in that fashion (remember, Kaufman had turned his version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers into both a satire of the self-help-era mindset and a sly parody of the original Body Snatchers from 1956). In The Right Stuff, Kaufman presents two exemplars of heroism - test pilot Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) and the group of seven Mercury astronauts (played by Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Dennis Quaid, Fred Ward, Lance Henriksen, Scott Paulin, and Charles Frank) - and then tempers their achievements with decidedly unheroic concerns. Yeager is a modern-day cowboy, but his efforts to expand the capabilities of rocket-propelled aviation put him in constant physical peril. The Mercury astronauts actually reach those limits through their forays into outer-space, but the increased global exposure forces them to shift their focus from space exploration to public relations. Everything has a cost in Kaufman's world, and that ambivalence manifests itself through scenes both awesome (Yeager's final test run) and comic (Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer's Mutt-and-Jeff-inspired NASA recruiters) in nature.
Michael Reuben too commented that "One of the most surprising features for first-time viewers is just how funny The Right Stuff is, because it's so often described in terms of patriotic solemnity. Tom Wolfe's use of humor was essential to his popularity as a writer, and both Kaufman's script and direction for The Right Stuff took care to find cinematic equivalents. Kaufman cast Jeff Goldbum (the tall one) and Harry Shearer (the short one) as a pair of mismatched NASA recruiters whose deadpan delivery would be right at home on the vaudeville stage. Shearer's narration of a newsreel compilation of circus performers who he thinks would be likely candidates as astronauts (they're used to heights, speed and fire—and they're available) could be a skit on Saturday Night Live. To portray the press corps, Kaufman hired members of Fratelli Bologna, a San Francisco comedy theater troupe, who turn the press's crazy scrambles into a kind of Keystone Cops ballet. And, of course, there's the constant ribbing among the pilots and the astronauts, who may present a unified front to the outside world, but in private are constantly trying to outshine each other. Because The Right Stuff depicts the beginning of the space program, Kaufman and effects supervisor Gary Gutierrez elected not to create their flight sequences using then state-of-the-art techniques seen in films like Star Wars and Outland. Instead, as Kaufman later said, "we tried new techniques and old ones, often jerry-built. Sometimes we hurled models out of windows and filmed them on their way down." The result has a rough-hewn authenticity that blends well with the documentary scenes culled from thousands of feet of newsreel footage collected by the editing team from all over the world."
Also from Warner is the James Dean: Ultimate Collector's Edition. This box set compiles all of the films that Dean made for Warner Bros. - Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, and Giant - and perhaps unavoidably, they paint a complete picture of an incomplete star. As magnetic as Dean was (and make no mistake: he was a true movie star - you can't look at anyone else when he's around), much of his actorly beats and tics are straight from the Method branch of the Actors Studio; there isn't much, in terms of technique, separating Dean from, say, Marlon Brando. The difference was one of direction: Brando threw all of his internal conflict on the viewer, whereas Dean buried it even deeper inside himself. Think Cal in East of Eden, lurching towards a connection towards his brother's girlfriend (Julie Harris), or Rebel Without a Cause's Jim Stark, and the primal, garbed howls of frustration he suffers when dealing with his ineffectual parents (Jim Backus and Ann Doran) or local street toughs. Interestingly, Dean's final feature, the posthumously released Western epic Giant, shows him beginning to shed his Brando-like affectations - playing the predatory, amoral Jett Rink gave Dean an opportunity to turn that psychological angst onto others, brandishing it like a weapon against Rock Hudson's Bick Benedict. I'm reminded of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, and the bitter irony of seeing a promise on the screen that would forever go unfulfilled. Dean carved that same path - for all the iconography he gained in death, I'd rather see him live and struggle on-screen, and find new ways to surprise us.
About East of Eden, Michael Reuben writes, "James Dean's status as a cultural icon extends far beyond the three films he made in his brief career. Of those three, Rebel Without a Cause remains the best known, but the critical consensus holds that East of Eden contains Dean's finest screen performance. Part of the success of Dean's work as Cal Trask, the angrily inarticulate son of a California farmer, is due to the perfect match between actor and role. Upon first meeting Dean, novelist John Steinbeck, who based the character on one of his brothers, is reported to have exclaimed, 'My God, he is Cal!' But certainly major credit for Dean's performance must go to director Elia Kazan, who picked Dean for the part (over another unknown named Paul Newman), then steered him through production as he steered so many other actors through legendary performances on the screen and stage...Kazan used Dean's unique energy, which literally bursts off the screen, to suggest the larger dimensions of a conflict that extends far beyond one family, one father and one pair of brothers."