For the week of November 16th, Warner and New Line Home Entertainment are bringing the extended version of 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 (164 minutes in this extended cut) 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. Now, in fairness, this extended iteration offers maybe the most satisfying version of The Hobbit since 2012's An Unexpected Journey (which, although baggy and overlong, has the best character work and action scenes of the whole trilogy). The extra twenty minutes help make Smaug's defeat less perfunctory and triages one of my biggest concerns with the Hobbit pictures, that Bilbo never coheres with the rest of the group. Furthermore, anyone who loathed Alfrid as much I did will appreciate the cap on his screentime. That said, Jackson also distends the battle scenes even further, larding on jarring graphic violence in an effort to keep us interested. It works, but not in the way we expect. When the first Orc head went flying through the air in The Fellowship of the Ring, the brutality was a stark reminder that we had left the world of a simple kids' entertainment and had entered the darker climes of Tolkien's nightmares. This Battle of the Five Armies is similarly violent, but again, it's trying to make horrible one of the lightest, most entertaining things that Tolkien ever wrote. Even though it is fun seeing flashes of the guy who made Bad Taste, I don't think Jackson ever justifies the shift in tone. Like so much about his Hobbit pictures, the new battle scenes suggest that, familiar as he might be with Middle-Earth, Jackson might have spent too long in its wildernesses.
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."
Also from Warner comes the recent summer blockbuster The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. Director Guy Ritchie's action-comedy only made a modest impression on audiences this summer, and in its defense, it always seemed behind the eight-ball. It was a reboot of a popular 1960s TV series with a central premise that made rebooting very difficult - nothing says timely like 1960s Cold War tensions between the CIA and the KGB - it was being released in the doldrums of summer, and it had to follow close on the heels of Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie's wonderful Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, which covered similar material (well, similar-ish) to critical and commercial acclaim. Plus, the whole main creative crew of Ritchie, Henry Cavill, and Armie Hammer was somewhat of a consolation prize, considering that The Man from U.N.C.L.E. first began its cinematic life as another pairing for Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney. To recap, that's the director of the Sherlock Holmes series that no one really cares about helming a buddy picture starring the Superman that no one likes and the Lone Ranger that everyone hates. That said, I've always been a big supporter of lost causes and The Lone Ranger, and so I kinda liked this Man from U.N.C.L.E. as well. Without question, it's nowhere close to being 2015's best spy movie (that honor would go to Steven Spielberg's masterful Bridge of Spies, with Rogue Nation a close second), but it's certainly more enjoyable than this month's dispiriting Spectre: The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is looser, funnier, more engaging. A big part of that charm, in fact, comes from the chemistry between Cavill and Hammer. That Hammer is a delight is no surprise - even Lone Ranger detractors have to admit that his performance is knowing and goofy, and he's even better here as what is essentially the comedy version of the T-1000 - but Cavill is as light and charming as his Superman is ponderous and grim. They play off one another quite nicely, although their chemistry is even better when you factor in Alicia Vikander who, as the duo's third wheel, helps give her scenes the spark and lift of a screwball comedy. The movie works because of their pairing. The rest of the cast isn't terribly memorable (Hugh Grant coasts as a dashing MI6 operative, and Elizabeth Debicki makes almost no impression as the Big Bad), and Ritchie's action scenes lack invention, although he does get a lot of comic mileage from staging one big action beat in the background of a far more sedate shot. But ultimately, we go to the movies to watch attractive people have a good time with one another, and on that front, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. more than delivers.
Michael Reuben wrote that "the original Man from U.N.C.L.E. began as a sort of Bond Lite, a spoof of the newly popular Bond film franchise. Robert Vaughan's Napoleon Solo substituted a smirking attitude for the fancy locations and big stunts that no Sixties TV budget could afford. A succession of guest stars provided sufficient variety to replace the extravagance of the Bond films' sinister villains with their deadly minions. As the seasons progressed, the show's plots became progressively more absurd, the dialogue more tongue-in-cheek and the THRUSH plots more far-fetched (a drug to heighten human senses? not exactly world domination material). Ritchie and Wigram have clearly drawn inspiration from the same well of mockery, but they are working on a wider canvas with a more extensive paint box. The parade of Sixties fashions, hairstyles and vintage decor is gorgeous, but after a while one yearns for something more compelling than designer eye candy punctuated by quips and inside references to beloved spy films. Ritchie's U.N.C.L.E. often feels no more substantial than one of the plots from an episode of the TV show, but padded out to twice the running time with extra characters and La Dolce Vita daydreams (only now in color)...In this film...the villains get too little screen time, and their scheme doesn't amount to much, because the heroes have to focus on establishing their relationships. Now that we know who they are and they've come to know each other, maybe next time they can entertain us by saving the world instead of arguing constantly. Obviously, they'll still look sharp and retro as they do it."
Walt Disney Home Entertainment has maybe the biggest - if we're talking about physical size - release of the week with its The Collected Works of Hayao Miyazaki boxset. The package represents a massive undertaking for the Mouse House, albeit one worth making: Miyazaki is one of contemporary animation's titans, and his work - primarily with Studio Ghibli - has given the genre a new dignity and respect. The Collected Works, if nothing else, provides animation fans an opportunity to chart that progress. Certainly anyone who only watched his 1979 Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro might find this praise a little effusive; Cagliostro is a rollicking piece of entertainment, but it does lack the nuance and depth of his best features. However, Miyazaki has always been a quick study, and with 1984's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, he'd made huge leaps, marrying vivid action with greater thematic/emotional resonance. On that front, 1986's Castle in the Sky is even better - in many ways, it's his Star Wars - but Miyazaki wasn't content with only going big and broad, and so we got his 1988 classic My Neighbor Totoro, a lovely children's fable about the challenges and magic of friendships. It's the first of his "hang-out" movies, which he'd continued to develop in 1989's Kiki's Delivery Service and perfect in 1992's funny, hang-dog Porco Rosso, which plays like an animated version of the Rick's Cafe Americain scenes in Casablanca. Miyazaki didn't officially direct a film for five years following Porco Rosso, but when he returned, he did so with one of his seminal works, the anti-war fantasy Princess Mononoke - to date, the film remains Miyazaki's most disturbing and adult feature. For many viewers, though, 2001's Spirited Away remains his masterpiece, and it's hard to argue with that opinion. Without dulling his sense of surrealism or irony, Miyazaki made a children's movie that speaks to the harder, stranger sides of being young (it's also a David Lynch-level head-trip). The reception to Spirited Away was so rapturous that there was nowhere to go but down, so no one balked at the slight push-back to its follow-up, 2004's dark Howl's Moving Castle. In a lot of ways, Howl's Moving Castle feels like a retread of material covered in Princess Mononoke - and a less successful retread at that - but it's also one of Miyazaki's most visually resplendent pictures, and its aesthetic wonders go a long way towards maintaining viewer interest. That said, it's a toss-up as to whether or not it's more beautiful than 2008's Ponyo - this variation on the Little Mermaid might be a hair too gentle for Miyazaki acolytes, but coming after Howl's Moving Castle, it succeeds as an ambling, consistently stunning palette cleanser. Finally, 2013 brought viewers what might be Miyazaki's swan song: the pastoral drama The Wind Rises. Even in the twilight of his career, Miyazaki found new ways to surprise his audiences, so for the first time, he applied his lyrical animation style to a docudrama, telling the story of Japanese engineer Jiro Horikoshi. The Wind Rises also surprises because of how nakedly autobiographical it seems; Jiro's story closely mirrors that of Miyazaki's, two dreamers who took flight using the only artistic means they had. That's his whole life, in this boxset.
Finally, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is giving Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's brilliant fantasy The City of Lost Children a Blu-ray upgrade. For four years, Jeunet and Caro established themselves as a kind of Gallic Terry Gilliam through their affinity for strange, audacious visual effects and even stranger humor - their first film together, the 1991 black comedy Delicatessen, is one of the funniest and most beautiful pictures you'll ever see about cannibalism - and they reached their apex with The City of Lost Children. In its broad strokes, the film unfolds like a Grimm's fable; in a steampunk, vaguely dystopian alternate reality, a mad scientist (Daniel Emilfork) is abducting little children so he can steal their dreams, but when he nabs one little boy (Joseph Lucien), he angers the boy's older brother (Ron Perlman), a hulking circus strongman who teams up with a determined oprhan (Judith Vittet) to rescue all the missing kids. Certainly, Jeunet and Caro maintain the fable aspect, creating a propulsive odyssey as our heroes try to defeat the mad genius, but this picture is a fairy tale in the same way that The Adventures of Baron Munchausen or Time Bandits are fairy tales: all of the important incidents come filtered through a panoply of bizarre details, including (but definitely not limited to) the mad scientist's lair, which sits perched over the ocean like a handmade oil rig, the scientist's family, which includes a talking brain and six devious clones (all played by Jeunet's favorite leading man, Dominique Pinon), and mind-controlling fleas. Even the central dynamic between Perlman and Vittet's characters generates a kind of natural surrealism - he is so physically imposing and she is so small that you wonder if Jeunet and Caro made the two their protagonists just to see if they could win a bet over who could create the most idiosyncratic buddy adventure. The City of Lost Children is a nonstop display of narrative and visual wonderments (even if, like many of Gilliam's movies, the invention is so pervasive that it begins to wear on you after a while), but sadly, it would be the last major collaboration between Jeunet and Caro. Hollywood tapped Jeunet for the disappointing sequel Alien: Resurrection, and Caro didn't follow, so that when Jeunet starting finding universal acclaim with his A Very Long Engagement and especially his Oscar-nominated Amélie, Caro became just a footnote.