For the week of November 4th, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is bringing Maleficent to Blu-ray. This adventure-fantasy - a live-action retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story from the perspective of the evil faerie Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) - sold itself as a "root for the villain" kind of entertainment (like Payback for kids, almost), so it's a little disappointing to realize that Disney and director Robert Stromberg (the Academy Award-winning special effects artist behind such films as Alice in Wonderland, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Avatar) has something far more conventional in mind. Despite Jolie's full-throated commitment to the part (she looks like she stepped right out from the frames of the 1959 animated version, and Rick Baker's subtle makeup effects only enhance the illusion), Linda Woolverton's script turns Maleficent into an unequivocal hero. She's a wise and kind faerie, shielding her magical homeland from the unwanted attentions of a corrupt and power-hungry human world, and while Maleficent does curse Princess Aurora (played as a teenager by Elle Fanning) to a fate of everlasting sleep, she only does so because of the brutal wrong King Stefan (Sharlto Copley, whose histrionic work here forms a loose "Overacting Trilogy" with his 2013 appearances in Elysium and Oldboy - District 9 feels a long ways away) has done to her; to gain power over the land, Stefan drugged Maleficent and cut off her wings, and if that description reads as a little too harsh for a kids' film, I can promise you that it plays out as two or three times more disturbing on screen. In fact, Maleficent spends so much time acting as a noble protector - to the faerie community, to Sam Riley's wounded raven Diaval, even to Aurora herself - that you start to wonder if anyone associated with the film even saw the original Sleeping Beauty, or if Woolverton had an idea for a female superhero fable that she merged with elements from Maleficent's backstory to make the property more commercially appealing to Disney. That lack of fidelity wouldn't matter so much if Maleficent were more fun, but outside of the playful mischief and dignity Jolie brings to the part (alongside a nice assist from Riley's wryly befuddled human-crow hybrid), Maleficent is too stern-faced to enjoy itself. The opening ten minutes includes a battle between the creatures of the Moors and the human) feels modeled off the Orc-Elf conflicts in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Stefan's betrayal of Maleficent is upsetting - Stromberg and Jolie stage and enact the moment as if it were a rape or genital mutilation, and while their choice is appropriately horrific, it carries a gravity that is out of place in a PG-rated, ostensibly family-friendly picture. Even the CGI-assisted shenanigans of Aurora's fairy godmothers (Juno Temple and Mike Leigh veterans Imelda Staunton and Lesley Manville) pale under such pain: whatever happened to the gentle fantasy? Bigger and more bombastic doesn't need to be the name of the game, and Maleficent might have benefited from adopting more of its inspiration's lovely, casual grace.
Martin Liebman had a far more favorable opinion of the film, writing that "Maleficent...satisfies beyond the well-defined and precisely executed themes. It's a digital marvel, a veritable playground of all things CGI that actually look good, like they belong, like they work in conjunction with the movie, not dominating of or distracting from it. Whether creature transformations, walking moss-covered tree warriors, buzzing fairies, or complex backgrounds, the film is only enhanced by the precise work carefully crafted by the digital artists. The movie additionally flows well and manages to tell a story that's both easily accessible and deeply seeded in a rather compact time frame, running just over ninety minutes but managing to satisfy all requirements dramatic, thematic, and technical without overextending its welcome. It's also wonderfully performed. Angelina Jolie appears in what is arguably a career-defining role, portraying a wonderfully complex character who she manages to simplify without dumbing down, to make friendly and frightening both without losing a bond with the audience. Jolie, more than any other performer in the film, seems to understand and capture that delicate essence the movie so easily captures, which is the balance between darkly frightening, thematically deep, and dramatically simple yet audience friendly and approachable. Jolie melts into the part, including both the extremes that inwardly define the character as well as the [simpler] costuming and stage presence that outwardly shape the character. Quickly rising star Sharlto Copley, who dazzled in both District 9 and Elysium may not play the part for which he will be remembered, but he does play it earnestly, with a passion for the part and an understanding of the role's greater requirements beyond simple dialogue and physical postures."
Warner and New Line are releasing the extended cut of 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 The Battle of the Five Armies 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 three-hour-and-six-minute-extended-version-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. So it goes with this extended cut. Though a little of the twenty-five added minutes justifies its inclusion - there a nice bit that restores Thráin Oakenshield to Gandalf's investigation of Dol Guldur, and his inclusion helps add definition to a sequence that felt a little slight - most of this material is just as redundant as the flaws in the theatrical cut. If nothing else, then, this new Desolation of Smaug honors the spirit of the previous film.
Kenneth Brown allowed that "Yes, a number of questionable plotting and storytelling decisions have been made (the most unforgivable being those that revolve around Smaug and a wildly out-of-place third act skirmish in Erebor). Yes, action most certainly trumps drama. And yes, the this but that critiquing littering this review is evidence of how unreliable Desolation can be. But it's hard to walk away from the film without some level of satisfaction; unless, again, your love of the text is such that you can't set aside thoughts of what The Hobbit could have been (to quote a disgruntled member, 'Jackson shoulda stuck with the damn book'). The liberties the filmmaker takes, though, free the film and allow it to flit about on the wind in a dazzling dance of swords, arrows, magic, flawed heroes, vile monsters, stirring music and sweeping visual effects. The more I focus in on the various pieces of The Desolation of Smaug, the more I feel the need to fly to the top of the page and lower my score. However, the more I suppress the urge to scrutinize every frayed edge or dwell on my attachment to Tolkien's original work, the easier it is to sit back, let go, and embrace an invigorating ride through Jackson's Middle-earth. Perfect? Goodness no. Desolation is as troubled as Journey, even if for completely different reasons. Fun? Thrilling? Eye-gouging and jaw-dropping? Yep, yep, and yep. Enough to make the second part of Jackson's trilogy easy to digest, enjoy and, ultimately, recommend."
From HBO Home Entertainment comes a television milestone: the complete run of The Sopranos on Blu-ray. We are living in a Golden Age of television - as fans of shows like Breaking Bad, The Wire, and Deadwood can attest - and we can attribute much of the medium's artistic and narrative growth to this Mob-themed drama. On the surface, it's a high-concept jape, the story of what happens when Mafia capo Tony Soprano (the late, great James Gandolfini) begins covertly seeing a psychiatrist (GoodFellas's Lorraine Bracco) to deal with the stress of his "day job." That setup isn't a million miles removed from Analyze This (a similarity the characters explicitly reference in the show's second season), but series creator David Chase isn't interested in playing the analysis theme for shticky comedy. Tony Soprano isn't some lovable rogue: he's a brutal, duplicitous killer and an unfaithful family man, yet his need for psychiatric care endures us to him all the same. Whether he realizes it or not, Tony is pushing back subconsciously against the casual terrors of his world - be they rival mobsters (played, at different intervals, by Dominic Chianese, Steve Buscemi, Joe Pantoliano, and Frank Vincent), constant federal pressures, and his selfish, conniving mother Livia (Nancy Marchand, who died partway through the series - great as it would be in its later years, the show never fully recovered from the loss) - and that resistance achieves, at times, a certain heroic dignity. However, Chase knows that his audience wants to see a bad man become a good one, and so he changes the equation. To him, the mob stuff is the MacGuffin. What The Sopranos is really about is life itself and all its attendant, millennial fears, and whether or not any of us is capable of inner growth and change. It's a brilliant use of misdirection, even when Chase's socio-philosophical goals impede satisfying narrative aims; the show's first and second seasons are flat-out brilliant, but Seasons 3 through 6 find Chase deliberately sidestepping obvious conflict or character arcs to further his thesis, especially in the series' controversial, deliberately ambiguous finale. Still, that emphasis on complex psychology has now become de rigueur, thanks to television dramas like Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire (created by, respectively, Matthew Weiner and Terence Winter, both of whom cut their teeth working in Chase's Sopranos writing room), which foreground inner sanctums at the expense of pulp thrills, and what seemed deliberately obtuse a decade ago now comes off as eerily prescient. And brilliant, of course.
As Kenneth Brown wrote in his Blu-ray review, "Where would television be without The Sopranos? Creator/executive producer David Chase's critically acclaimed six- season mafia drama was much more than HBO's second original hour-long drama (the first being Oz). It intensified an already seismic shift in the television landscape; a historic shift that, over the last fifteen years, has radically changed the way networks approach, develop and produce a series, altered what viewers expect and even demand from their favorite shows and most memorable protagonists, and drastically accelerated the blurring of the line between cinema and the small screen. Were it not for The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Boardwalk Empire, Masters of Sex, Hannibal, Battlestar Galactica, House of Cards, The Shield, True Detective, Homeland, Fargo... the shows you love (and the shows you love to hate) might not even exist. And that isn't being hyperbolic. At the very least, television would be a very different place. Still stuck in the past, still trying to prove itself, still without one of the most compelling and captivating TV series to ever grace HBO, or any other network, broadcast or cable, for that matter."
From Lionsgate comes the drama A Most Wanted Man. The film is the latest from The American director Anton Corbijn, but outside of Corbijn's patient, understated approach to what might be conventional suspense narratives, the two films couldn't be more dissimilar. While The American is an arthouse tone piece that's more akin to Stuart Cooper's The Disappearance or Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, A Most Wanted Man is an espionage thriller in the vein of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and not just because all three films are based on novels by John le Carré. They share the same cynicism - a suspicion that the skullduggery in which the character are involved is corrupt and degrading - and if A Most Wanted Man has more of a visceral pull, it's only because Corbijn and le Carré have set the film in the contemporary realm of international terrorism. The focus is on German intelligence agent Günther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman) as he tries to ascertain what link Chechen refugee Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) has to a suspected Muslim terrorist plot. Bachmann wants to quietly infiltrate Issa's network by gaining the trust of a local philanthropist (Homayoun Ershadi), but the CIA (personified by a steely, terrifying Robin Wright) is set on employing far more drastic measures, and the tension between Bachmann's dogged humanism and the CIA's ruthlessness gives this film its spine. In lieu of action scenes or graphic violence, Corbijn trusts that we'll find conflicting systems exciting, and he's mostly right - as dense and complicated as the film gets (and it's one of those spy thrillers that practically demands a second viewing), the fraught atmosphere that emerges from Bachmann and CIA's respective manipulations proves unbearably tense. That said, like this year's God's Pocket, however, A Most Wanted Man is probably better known because it features one of Hoffman's final performances, and his ghost hangs over the proceedings like a pall; it doesn't help that his physical presence is so haggard and unsteady although, true to form, Hoffman uses his own decay to suggest the essential inner strife of a career intelligence operative who has sown deception and ethical ambiguity into his own moral fabric. It's a subtle, brilliant piece of work - watch how he handles Bachmann's climactic outburst, or how he navigates the understated relationship with his secretary (Nina Hoss) - that ranks alongside his turns in Capote and The Master.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "le Carré is obviously adept at showing the 'spy game' as a sometimes frustrating bureaucracy, but A Most Wanted Man may let Bachmann and his team overcome every seeming obstacle with a bit too much ease, at least for the benefit of any mounting suspense. While there are some shortfalls here (perhaps due to Hoffmann's untimely death), the film is often riveting and contains top rate performances all around. Hoffman, [Rachel] McAdams, and [Willem] Dafoe all do slight German accents here which manage to sound authentic without lapsing into hokiness, and Dobrygin is unforgettable despite having very little dialogue (his doleful eyes manage to convey his character's angst quite convincingly). A Most Wanted Man doesn't really have the emotional impact that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold does, perhaps because there's no real relationship at the center of the film (there are glancing hints made that Richter and Karpov as well as Bachmann and one of his underlings have romantic leanings, but nothing is ever really strongly established with either couple). The key selling point here is probably Hoffman, who manages to make spying seem like an exercise in middle management."