For the week of April 8th, Warner and New Line are releasing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. The second installment in Peter Jackson's new Hobbit trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug feels like Jackson and Co. wanted to address all the concerns that viewers had with 2012's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Gone is the lengthy salvo of opening exposition; The Desolation of Smaug begins with Bilbo and the Dwarves fleeing an Orc raiding party, and it keeps them on the move up to the film's last beat, a cliffhanger that promises further destruction when There and Back Again premieres at the end of this year. Even the our main band of heroes has more definition – whereas An Unexpected Journey had time enough for just Ian McKellen's Gandalf the White, Richard Armitage's Thorin Oakenshield, and Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins, here we get to know the rest a little better, particularly Aidan Turner's Kili, who gets to play one-third of the love triangle between Kili, Legolas (Orlando Bloom), and elf guard Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a development that Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens created specifically for this movie. Yet despite the improvements, The Desolation of Smaug comes off as even more sluggish and wheel-spinning than An Unexpected Journey. For all the earlier film's issues, it also had a palpable sense of fun, once you got past the forty-minute beginning in Hobbiton. The Desolation of Smaug is far grimmer by comparison, complicating the heroes' journey with fatal poisonings, economic decay, and the apocalyptic return of a certain Big Bad from Jackson's first Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
Now, going dark in the middle part of a trilogy is a common move - films like The Empire Strikes Back and The Dark Knight are as good as they are because they raise the stakes on their heroes - but those movies have something The Desolation of Smaug desperately needs: forward momentum. The Desolation of Smaug is entertaining for about ninety minutes, right through Bilbo and the Dwarves' rollicking barrel escape from elf King Thranduil (Lee Pace, chewing scenery like a pro), and then it stalls out during an extended, mostly unnecessary stay in Esgaroth. Ostensibly, we need these scenes to set up Luke Evans' Bard the Bowman for the next movie, but Jackson lingers far longer than he should until it becomes clear that he's stalling to pad The Desolation of Smaug's almost-three-hour runtime (if you thought An Unexpected Journey didn't dramatize enough of the original Hobbit text, The Desolation of Smaug covers even less ground). It's much ado about nothing, and the feeling extends to Gandalf's repetitive search of Dol Guldur and even Bilbo's big meeting with Smaug the dragon (Benedict Cumberbatch), which builds to a fever pitch and then abruptly stops so Jackson can tease something for the next movie. More than any of the film's other faults (including some grainy camera shots during the barrel escape that look like Jackson captured them on a GoPro and some shockingly unrendered CGI during the end fight against Smaug), this formlessness grates, and it calls into question Jackson's decision to give J.R.R. Tolkien's relatively slim volume the epic treatment.
Kenneth Brown's Blu-ray review commented that "as a faithful adaptation of the second act of Tolkien's beloved book, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug fails, and fails spectacularly. It not only represents filmmaker Peter Jackson's loosest Tolkien adaptation to date (far more so than An Unexpected Journey), it fundamentally alters key events, characters, themes and climactic encounters, sacrificing cherished story beats and subtleties for the sake of bigger, badder, grander movie magic and, worse, the expectations and attention spans of fickle audiences. Defenders of the Original Text will neither be pleased nor amused, and find Jackson has taken several steps too many to expand and energize the second entry in his Hobbit trilogy. The more you treasure Tolkien's work, the more your distaste for The Desolation of Smaug will grow as the film hurtles toward its action-packed endgame. As a film, though - particularly as the action-oriented midpoint of a much larger action-fantasy trilogy - Jackson's second chapter works, and works quite spectacularly. Divorced from the text, which is treated more like a rough outline than a sacred tome (a la The Lord of the Rings), The Desolation of Smaug is a brisk, thrilling, well-executed adventure through the dark wilderness of Tolkien's Middle-earth. The drama of the dwarves' quest to reclaim their homeland has been heightened, even enriched, exponentially. The heart of Bilbo's tale continues to pump the saga's lifeblood, even when the brave little Hobbit is reduced to a less crucial hero in Thorin's company. Secondary heroes and villains that were once sketches on the page are fully developed and that much more intriguing. And the journey, for all its faults, is suddenly more gripping, progressing with a confidence, clarity of purpose, breakneck pace and dazzling craftsmanship that's entirely Jackson and entirely engrossing."
Starz/Anchor Bay is bringing the Academy Award-nominated August: Osage County to Blu-ray. The first big hurdle this film adaptation of Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning stageplay has to clear is a runtime that condenses a three-hour show into just two hours. In relaying how the disappearance – and eventual death – of patriarch Beverly (actor and fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard) simultaneously unites and destroys the Weston family, Letts made every minute of his long play count, turning the stage into an emotional (and sometimes physical) battleground for the clan's many, many grievances. The movie version just doesn't have the same scope, but that said, it's a wonder the film works as well as it does. Its success is a testament to how good Letts' source material is - though a conflation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Shepard's Buried Child in many ways, Letts' acid-tinged portrait of family has some of the same mania as his (far bloodier and more sexual) Bug and Killer Joe. It also helps that director John Wells has gathered one of the most accomplished film casts of recent years: besides Shepard, the film features Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Julianne Nicholson, Juliette Lewis, Ewan McGregor, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dermot Mulroney, Chris Cooper, and Margo Martindale. As the oldest and most bitter of the Weston children, Roberts gives the best performance of her career, and Martindale is her equal as Aunt Mattie Fae, Streep's vivacious sister whose jolly demeanor hides deep-seated resentments. Only Cumberbatch and Streep disappoint. Cumberbatch has an excuse – his Little Charles is the play's most uncomfortable element, so it's debatable if some of the unease the actor evinces is part of the role - but Streep is a real letdown. She's playing Weston matriarch Violet, and she uses the extremes of the part (Violet's pill addiction, her cancer, her inability to allow any B.S. from herself or her family) as an excuse to indulge in her most actorly excesses, except all the wild emotional shifts and scenery-chewing monologues feel like a Performance-with-a-capital-P. Streep may be a national treasure, but she's also increasingly content to act at the audience rather than to inhabit a character (see also: The Iron Lady, Julie & Julia, It's Complicated), and August: Osage County suggests that trend is far from over.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "this is an oftentimes bleak, borderline disturbing movie that never relinquishes in its punishing portrayal of family dysfunction, harmful revelations, and general anger and chaos. The picture is defined by heated back-and-forths as old wounds reopen, old arguments take shape, old questions are again asked, old fears surface, and old ways book a return engagement. The picture traverses the fine line between dark comedy and dark drama and occasionally slips too far into the latter as the proverbial claws come out in nearly every scene. The movie is defined by a barrage of negative emotions and populated by characters with an uncanny ability to turn anything remotely good into something dreadfully bad, whether by necessity or simply through a lack of tact. August: Osage County is no fun, at least not in the traditional sense. It's cinema as something of a blunt instrument by which the audience is reminded that, yes, families fight and, no, most don't take it to this extreme. Flawed and wounded characters abound, be they aggressively flawed and openly wounded or a product of the broken family system. The negativity is a generational thing with this bunch, a trickle-down effect that seems to have at least been diluted through the years but that remains an inescapable prison when all of that soup is mixed back together in the boiling petri dish of the American heartland."
Drafthouse Films is offering A Field In England, the newest film from director Ben Wheatley. Wheatley's best known feature prior to this was the dark thriller Kill List, which unfolded like some terrifying mix of The Hit and The Wicker Man; what made Kill List so chilling was Wheatley's firm control of the material, a control that, on first inspection, is completely missing from A Field In England. Though paired down to, essentially, a black-and-white, five-character narrative set during the English Civil War, the new film feels wild and unruly in ways that Kill List did not because it's a horror movie of the subconscious. Here, five men go hunting for treasure in the titular field, but their efforts descend into madness and murder when they begin ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms. From that point on, A Field In England remains committed in its efforts to disorient the viewer - Wheatley wants to make his antiheroes' bad trip a visceral experience, and he succeeds, often at the expense of narrative comfort or enjoyment. Watching A Field In England is a physically grueling experience, what with its barrage of cinematographic tricks, strobing effects, and rampant surrealism, but if you can stomach the camera and audio tricks at play, the picture begins to reveal a deceptive structure. For one, so much of the proceedings play out as a sly homage to the experimental cinema of the 1960s: it contains strong echoes of films like Peter Watkins' Culloden and Frantisek Vlácil's Marketa Lazarová. More importantly, though, the hallucinatory madness stands indicative of the slipperiness in human nature. As Wheatley sees it, mankind's default mode is chaos, and the mushrooms only tease out what already exists.
Michael Reuben noted that "A Field In England hurtles toward some dark unknown according to its own mysterious logic. The field seems to exist in its own dimension, outside normal time and space and walled off from the civil conflict raging outside it. A location for the treasure is identified, and O'Neil [Michael Smiley] orders the men to dig, but are they digging their own grave? Whitehead [Reece Shearsmith] certainly thinks so. He sees portents of doom in the sky and warns O'Neil that the treasure will be their destruction, but their captor will not desist from his quest, even when roaring winds rake the tall grass and rip away his encampment. 'It does not surprise me that the Devil is an Irishman,' says Friend [Richard Glover], who supplies the deadpan comic relief, 'though I thought perhaps a little taller.' Some men try to escape; some attempt to battle O'Neil; some are injured and appear to die, though reality in the field becomes so uncertain that you're never sure. A Field In England opens with a warning about 'flashing images and stroboscopic sequences,' and indeed the last portion contains an extended segment that Sixties filmmakers who sought to recreate a psychedelic experience could never have imagined. From a narrative perspective, it is triggered by one character's consumption of huge mouthfuls of magic mushrooms. The real meaning of the rapid-fire imagery is as open to interpretation as the Stargate sequence in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Especially in light of Wheatley's closing shot, which should prompt a re-evaluation of everything you've seen up to that point, it's a sequence that, like the rest of the film, defies easy analysis."
Finally, Paramount is putting out Blu-rays of two Audrey Hepburn classics: Funny Face and Sabrina. Viewed together, the two films offer proof of what a talent Hepburn was. In Funny Face, she plays a vivacious Parisian who spars romantically with an iconic fashion photographer (Fred Astaire), while in Sabrina, she's the title character, a poor young girl who finds herself torn between two very different brothers (Humphrey Bogart and William Holden). The movies, too, reflect some of Hepburn's respective characters: director Stanley Donen fills Funny Face with eye-popping color and striking dance sequences, and the great Billy Wilder turns Sabrina into a witty, melancholy riff on the Cinderella story. As Hollywood entertainments go, you really can't do much better than these, though your personal preference may vary. In particular, Sabrina stands out as a landmark film for Wilder and Hepburn. It's about five times sadder than you might remember – at times, it plays like a dry run for Wilder's Best Picture-winning The Apartment - and its three leads are splendid. Hepburn's never been so wistful, Holden so funny (it's a peerless comic turn), and Bogart so painfully human.
Of Funny Face, Michael Reuben wrote that "Musicals from the era of Funny Face have predictable plots, and besides the conclusion is foregone from the moment the names Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire appear in the titles (even though Astaire was thirty years her senior). The plot - or, in the classical term for stage musicals, the "book" - is just a structure on which to hang the film's production numbers, which are fully loaded with everything that Stanley Donen, the director of Singin' in the Rain, could muster. So, of course, we get Fred Astaire dancing one of his signature solo routines with an umbrella and raincoat ('Let's Kiss and Make Up'), plus a modern pas de deux with Kay Thompson when both of them disguise themselves as bohemians to infiltrate Prof. Flostre's home looking for Jo ('Clap Yo' Hands'). Astaire and Hepburn share several dance numbers ('He Loves and She Loves,' ''S Wonderful,' and the title song), but perhaps most memorable is Hepburn's elaborately choreographed dance in a nightclub, when Jo demonstrates to Avery how she's surrendered to the spirit of the Parisian intelligentsia. The routine veers from sophistication to parody and back again, but Hepburn is never anything less than graceful (She trained as a ballet dancer). But there's more. Kay Thompson's memorable opening number, 'Think Pink!' (music by Roger Edens, lyrics by screenwriter Gershe), is not only a tour de force by Thompson, but also a montage of the era's advertising styles, recreated with input from photographer Avedon. A later montage of Avery photographing Jo all over Paris for Quality magazine also reflects Avedon's influence, as Donen repeatedly freezes the frame, reverses it to negative, then cycles through the color spectrum - in effect, providing an illustration of how the fashion photographer's hand shapes an image."
Michael Reuben wrote that "Adapting a stage play that couldn't even hold star William Holden's interest past intermission, Wilder and co-screenwriter Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell of Success) spiked a high-society Cinderella story with enough physical comedy and social satire to dry out any tears the audience might be tempted to shed. Fortune smiled on the production when Cary Grant, originally cast as Holden's disapproving older brother, dropped out shortly before shooting began. Lured by the prospect of working with Wilder, Humphrey Bogart stepped in, and the anti-chemistry between Bogart and Holden (who didn't get along during the production) turned out to be ideal. If Grant had played the part, everyone would have suspected a romantic soul in hiding. Bogart's astringent performance kept everyone guessing, and it still works today, because Bogart's face is that of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Rick Blaine, Fred Dobbs, Harry Morgan and every gangster that Bogart had played in a long career filled with cynics and tough guys."