In the words of Taylor Swift: “Are we out of the woods yet? Are we in the clear yet? Good.” That feels the appropriate response to the DVD release of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Warner, 12), the concluding chapter of diminished returns in a trilogy that should never have been. The Lord of the Rings films represented a robust cumulative achievement, but the film-maker’s decision to trisect the efficiently lean narrative of The Hobbit smacked of cynicism from the off. The Battle of the Five Armies bears the brunt of that cash-in mentality even more sorely than the preceding films: opening as it does with the warmed-over revenge of scorned dragon Smaug, there’s hardly any story left to tell, much less to spin out over nearly three hours.
As it is, the eponymous battle is pretty much the lone order of business here, and Jackson realises it with his customary muscular gusto – he’s good at battles, as we all well know, but there’s not much to distinguish this one from the effects-laden showdowns we’ve already seen in his Middle-earth odyssey. The Blu-ray is as tricked out with extras as you’d expect, as is the inevitable three-film box set, yet this oddly inconsequential epic feels perilously close to being an extra itself.
Fellow blockbuster fantasist Tim Burton can’t be accused of such self-recycling. He’s never made a film quite like Big Eyes (EIV, 12), and in all probability will not make one again. As the storytelling tone bends and breaks throughout this heightened biopic of suppressed housewife-turned-painter Margaret Keane, it’s hard to tell just what film Burton himself had in mind. A Sirkian domestic melodrama with flourishes of cruel satire? A broad marital comedy distracted by an earnest plea for open artistic expression? An eccentrically extended promo for the worst songs of Lana Del Rey’s young career? (“With your big eyes/ and your big lies,” the chanteuse drones repeatedly through one especially deranged montage.) It is all these things and, somehow, less, despite a very genuine attempt by Amy Adams at articulating Keane’s nervous inspiration. She may have surprised even herself by winning a Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy, but there’s not a scrap of funny business here.
Just as Keane’s work was claimed by her overbearing husband Walter, however, so Adams’s efforts are hijacked by a bizarrely garish turn from Christoph Waltz as the man of the house. Bug-eyed and gurning lasciviously, Waltz strains at every turn to remind us we’re in a Tim Burton movie; the film only flickers to life when we’re allowed to forget.
In a paltry week for new releases, the most essential home cinema purchase is of a more marbled vintage. Beautifully polished and presented, the British Film Institute’s Carl Theodor Dreyer Collection (BFI, 12) gathers four of the imposing Danish minimalist’s most celebrated features – Ordet, Gertrud, Day of Wrath and Master of the House, the latter in multiple versions – along with seven of his shorts and a rich buffet of accompanying documentary and archive material. It’d be a welcome package at any time, but revisiting Dreyer’s exquisite austerity comes as a particularly bracing tonic after the latest excesses of Jackson and Burton.
On the streaming front, it’s Netflix that is yet again dominating all television talk, thanks to last week’s upload of superhero series Daredevil. Hardly one of Marvel’s hottest properties when the widely (and rather unfairly) dismissed Ben Affleck-starring adaptation was released in 2003, this typically high-concept caped-crusader yarn – blind lawyer by day, extrasensory crime fighter by night – makes an unexpectedly happy transition to the small screen.
While recent attempts to shrink comic-book universes for television have felt tinny and toyish, this one scores by entering the roughed-up, semi-real world of Nolan-era Batman, albeit with its own streak of pulpy venom and an empathetic human lead worth rooting for in Charlie Cox. Whisper it softly, particularly with the newest Avengers behemoth around the corner, but this has the makings of Marvel’s finest screen moment.
