For the week of March 24th, Warner and New Line Home Entertainment are bringing The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies to Blu-ray. The final installment in Peter Jackson's new Hobbit trilogy, The Battle of the Five Armies finds the raiding party of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) making a final stand against the evil dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) before joining the battle against a vast Orc army. That description is pretty lean, and you could be forgiven for thinking that The Battle of the Five Armies might follow suit. However, even though the film's theatrical cut is the shortest of all the Hobbit entries, its 144-minute runtime still represents a beyond-severe case of narrative bloat. By some accounts, the events in this film comprise only seventy-two pages of the actual text of J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit, yet Jackson and screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens have labored mightily to fill almost two-and-a-half hours of screentime, and the strain shows. As an example of big-budget moviemaking, The Battle of the Five Armies is remarkably clunky. The pacing is all off - how else to explain the film's opening fifteen minutes, which deliver a perfunctory resolution to the Smaug narrative, a story that, for all intents and purposes, is the main reason for The Hobbit to exist? Since Jackson effectively begins with the climax, he has to shift all of the narrative tension to the titular battle, a move that result in a sea of undercooked backstories and subplots. Everything with Martin Freeman's wry, brave Bilbo is wonderful, but he's more marginalized than ever in this picture: instead, Jackson and Co. emphasize the asinine love triangle between Legolas (Orlando Bloom), Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), and Kili (Aidan Turner), a go-nowhere tête-à-tête that pits a captured Gandalf (Ian McKellen) against Sauron...cough, I mean, the Necromancer (Cumberbatch again), Thorin's sudden case of gold madness (which plays out like a ludicrous mash-up between Jackson's early scary movies and the "Space Madness" episode of Ren & Stimpy), and the Wormtongue-lite shenanigans of the Master of Laketown's scheming counselor Alfrid (an insufferable, unfunny Ryan Gage). The original Hobbit story can't support all that excess, and it doesn't help that the battle itself is so uninvolving. It's certainly long - I'll give Jackson that. But it also has no added weight. We are intensely aware that 95% of everything we're seeing is a digital sprite of some kind, and the main characters are spread so thinly amongst that CGI chaos that we never see them long enough to worry about their respective fates. Compared to the siege of Helm's Deep from The Two Towers, the combat is a joke - Jackson accomplished so much more at Helm's Deep (on such a reduced budget, comparatively speaking) through clean action staging, vivid practical effects, and sympathetic heroes who never got lost in the battle. More and more, The Battle of the Five Armies and the Hobbit trilogy as a whole feel like a cry for help, that Jackson's love of toys and computers has dulled his once-electric sense of story and character. He needs to leave Middle-Earth as much as we need him to.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown wrote that the film "is a decently engaging three-star amusement park ride, but be warned: the more you scrutinize, the deeper you look, and the closer you examine all the moving parts, the more dissatisfied you're likely to become. And it isn't long before that dissatisfaction breeds disappointment. Movie magic gives way to cheap tricks, character drama is often minimalized, and too much heavy lifting is left to the always-excellent cast, who aren't given much to work with in Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens' grunt-heavy screenplay. Just over the course of penning this review, my trigger finger has been itching, tempting me to drop my movie score another half-point. So why so much contempt? The trajectory of The Hobbit films has been clear since the dwarves faced the Goblin King in An Unexpected Journey, as has Jackson's relative lack of real passion for Tolkien's text. With The Lord of the Rings trilogy, every effort was made to honor the books, barring several widely discussed changes the filmmakers' acknowledged countless times as necessary evils. Jackson didn't have a burning desire to make The Hobbit trilogy, though; signing on only after Guillermo del Toro bowed out. That initial reluctance seeps into The Battle of the Five Armies. It's not that Jackson isn't passionate about the film he's made. He is, and his joy oozes out of each shot, scene and delirious clash of the Tolkien titans. It's just that his passion isn't in the original story. He loved Tolkien's 'Rings.' He merely had a fondness for 'The Hobbit,' and the difference becomes fairly obvious when comparing both trilogies."
From Universal Home Entertainment comes Angelina Jolie's Unbroken. This adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's nonfiction bestseller marks Jolie's second film as director, and its subject matter certainly recalls the intensity of her directorial debut, the underrated war drama In the Land of Blood and Honey. As a filmmaker, Jolie seems drawn to emotionally and physically bruising tales; In the Land of Blood and Honey covered love in the time of Serbian genocide, while Unbroken is a grueling retelling of WWII flyer Louis Zamperini (Jack O'Connell) and his hellish wartime experiences, primarily his time stranded at sea and his subsequent internment in a Japanese POW camp. If Unbroken isn't as explicit as the R-rated In the Land of Blood and Honey, it certainly pushes the boundaries of its PG-13 rating, with Jolie lingering on Zamperini's many hardships. The scenes on the raft between Louis and two Allied airmen (Domhnall Gleeson and Finn Wittrock) have a harsh beauty that compliments the terrors of dehydration, Axis strafing runs, and sudden shark attacks, and at least an hour of Unbroken unfolds at the POW camp: here, DP Roger Deakins desaturates the color from the film, creating a bleached, greying-yellow palette that makes Zamperini and his fellow prisoners look even more gaunt and decaying than they already do. In fact, so much of Unbroken is so admirably brutal that it's a bit of a shame to report that the film doesn't work as well as it should. For all its violence, Jolie is making a Hollywood prestige picture (Unbroken's U.S. premiere was last Christmas, for Pete's sake), and she exchanges the indie grit of her debut feature for crisp widescreen lensings and big skies and a script assembled by the intimidating-yet-unlikely team of Gladiator's William Nicholson, The Fisher King's Richard LaGravenese, and Joel & Ethan Coen, of all people. You'd think, given their aggregate triumphs, that they'd come up with something truly unique for Unbroken, but this is a formulaic biopic all the way, with Zamperini's WWII experiences coexisting alongside rote beats from Zamperini's hardscrabble childhood and his pre-WWII time as an Olympic athlete. Jolie doesn't bungle any of these scenes, but she also never seems terribly invested in them; they exist solely to overload the wartime stuff with subtext, and they feel like leftovers from a far more conventional affair. The glossy template softens this uncomfortable territory, and it's a relief whenever Jolie returns to her darker impulses, particularly the fierce battle of wills that erupts between Zamperini and Takamasa Ishihara's savage Japanese corporal "Bird." It's the hint of a psychosexual subtext that gently recalls both In the Land of Blood and Honey and Nagisa Ôshima's brilliant Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence - the more Bird abuses his captive, the more he seems in thrall of emotional depth charges he can't name. That's where Jolie's heart lies, and a more uncompromising drama would have mined this territory for psychologically revealing depths.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman also noted that the film doesn't "cros[s] any emotional territory that hasn't been well traversed before it. The film works extraordinarily well in a rather straightforward manner, relying on the power of the story and the stature of the man, yes, but also depending on general narrative flow and basic human spirit to carry it through to fruition. To claim that there's anything emotionally new in Unbroken would be to hold it higher than it deserves, but the film does manage to get everything right, even if that means it only exists in a comfort zone of classic cinema tragedy-turned-triumph where odds are overcome, burdens are bested, and spirits soar. Angeline Jolie has done everything right - and that makes Unbroken a powerful experience - but it doesn't break through to uncharted territory, either. Audiences expecting a classic narrative in mostly new clothes - the core story details, not the broader generalities - will find the movie a major success. Those hoping that it somehow reinvents the wheel will be left disappointed."
Walt Disney Home Entertainment is bringing the new adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Tony-award winning musical Into the Woods to Blu-ray. When fans first heard that Chicago director Rob Marshall and Disney were going to be bringing Into the Woods to the big screen, many bristled at the implications. If nothing else, Marshall and the Mouse House are known for the kind of show-stopping, populist glitz that Into the Woods mostly eviscerates; the original stage production is a bleak, cynical affair that finds Sondheim and Lapine upholding most fairy-tale conventions for Act One - nothing but happy endings for Cinderella, Rapunzel, Red Riding Hood, the Witch, beanstalk-climber Jack, and a lonely Baker and his wife (played in the film by, respectively, Anna Kendrick, MacKenzie Mauzy, Lilla Crawford, Meryl Streep, Daniel Huttlestone, James Corden, and Emily Blunt) - before gutting the "Happily Ever After" myth in Act Two. It's bracing stuff, and although this film version preserves the overall contours of the play's shocking twists, it makes some key changes that compromise the source material's overall power in ways both large and small. The biggest problem is a fundamental mismatch of content and form. The original Into the Woods is a claustrophobic affair, particularly once Sondheim and Lapine starting tightening the noose on the characters in the second act. The film, however, is a multi-million-dollar blockbuster, with CGI effects and big action sequences and a star-studded cast (let us not forget the contributions of Chris Pine as an arrogant Prince Charming and Johnny Depp - in what amounts to a glorified cameo - as the Big, Bad Wolf), and the inflation of intimate to expansive doesn't fit - the production flash overwhelms the smaller, intimate moments, many of which are quite wrenching on their own, whether it's Kendrick's delicate indecision toward the Prince or Blunt's emotional whiplash once her story starts pivoting into a place of deeper ambiguity. It doesn't help that Marshall makes some questionable directorial choices - he has ace cinematographer Dion Beebe slather the woods in post-production murk, and in an effort to soften some of the play's more upsetting moments, he stages the death of a major character in such a haphazard, unclear fashion that it took me a few minutes to realize this person was actually dead - or that Lapine's film script elides about a fourth of the original book to the detriment of certain character arcs: you could remove Rapunzel and her relationship with Billy Magnussen's vain Prince from the movie and be none the wiser, and Pine's deluded royal ninny is missing many of the complexities that made the part so wonderfully frustrating on stage. That said, perhaps the biggest setback is time. When Into the Woods first debuted in 1986, its brand of fantastical revisionism felt fresh in a way it doesn't seem now, and through no fault of its own: programs like Once Upon a Time, Wicked, and Disney's own Tangled & Beauty and the Beast have cherry-picked the best parts of Into the Woods. After a certain point, the imitators get the last word.
Kenneth Brown responded far more favorably to the film, writing that it "offers a lively, energetic string of happily-ever-afters long before it hits its stride, joyously subverting expectation and fairy tale convention in broad, fiendishly clever strokes that are as surprising as they are hilarious. And, like the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine stage musical from which director Rob Marshall's big screen sing-along has been faithfully adapted, it's this subversion of the familiar and nostalgic that makes the story, characters and songs so memorable. Fans will be delighted to learn reports of the Disney-fication of the play have been greatly exaggerated. There are some nips and tucks here and there, and a slight softening of several racier moments, but nothing of real consequence. By and large, Marshall's adaptation hews closely to Sondheim and Lapine's musical; so closely that the measure of its success or failure really comes down to filmmaking fundamentals. Casting. Performances. Editing. The sights and sounds. And while the results struck me as rather hit-or-miss, many viewers will be swept away by most everything Marshall delivers, stopping only to ask why there aren't more scenes, more songs, more characters, more of the little touches that have kept the original musical alive in the imaginations of audiences for twenty-eight years."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing three films from documentarian Errol Morris to Blu-ray: a single-disc The Thin Blue Line package as well as the two-film set of Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida. Of the three features, the The Thin Blue Line is most famous, and justly so. While focusing on the murder of Texas police officer Robert W. Wood and the eventual incarceration of drifter Randall Adams, Morris uncovered information so compelling about Wood's actual killer and the various legal manipulations surrounding the crime that he ultimately helped exonerate Adams after a twelve-year Death-Row stay. Like the Serial podcast or HBO recent documentary sensation The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, The Thin Blue Line is the documentary as agent of civil/social change, and with that distinction comes all sorts of questions about the role of art in influencing reality. The film is a masterful, haunting piece of work - Morris' experience as a private investigator gives The Thin Blue Line the same kind of procedural snap found in, say, David Fincher's Zodiac - and so it means something when I say that it isn't even Morris' masterpiece. That distinction belongs to Gates of Heaven, Morris' first full-length feature and one of the finest films of any genre, documentary or otherwise. In it, Morris looks at pet cemeteries from two primary perspectives, that of offbeat paraplegic Floyd McClure and of the Harberts family. McClure emerges as a slightly hapless dreamer who strives to give pet deaths the grace and dignity they deserve, while the Harberts - who are no less idiosyncratic than McClure - ultimately realize McClure's dream. As the Maysles brothers did with Gimme Shelter or Grey Gardens, Morris eschews conventional documentary structures in order to let his interviewees shape the direction of the film, and some critics have attacked Morris for mocking his subjects' idiosyncrasies. However, Morris affords his characters total humanity, with their quirks growing from a very real and very genuine desire to make the world better. As Roger Ebert, who listed Gates of Heaven as one of the twenty greatest films ever made, once wrote, "Gates of Heaven remains in a category by itself, unclassifiable, provocative, tantalizing...this eighty-five-minute film about pet cemeteries has given me more to think about over the past twenty years than most of the other films I've seen." In comparison to the both The Thin Blue Line and Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida can't help but feel like a minor work, but even it has a richness of incident. Morris views the inhabitants of the titular town with a gaze that is equal parts tender and comic. Whether he's examining a linguistically curious minister, a pair of obsessed turkey hunters, or a local cop who seems like the direct antecedent to John C. Reilly's character from Magnolia, Morris shows them the same level of compassion and love. He sees what others can't.
Of The Thin Blue Line, Svet Atanasov wrote that "the film is, to put it mildly, surreal. Excluding a careful reenactment of the actual murder, as reconstructed by different parties, it is essentially a collection of interviews in which Adams, Harris, and various prosecutors, lawyers, and witnesses discuss the case. Now that it is beyond obvious that many of them lied - and more importantly believed their lies - it is shocking to see how easy it was to manipulate the justice system and nearly kill an innocent man. What makes The Thin Blue Line such an important film, however, is not the fact that it convincingly exposes the lies of a group of people, but the manner in which it does it. Indeed, by masterfully using fiction as a litmus test, the film essentially reveals how the absolute truth cannot exist in a society in which there are no proper mechanisms that can guarantee its survival. In other words, what the justice system is left to choose from are only half-truths, myths, and lies."