The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

*** out of ****

I can’t really disguise my enthusiasm. Without any objectivity, I’ll geek-out out at the beginning of the review. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is pretty damn cool. Everything from the film’s opening - which features the familiar setting of “The Prancing Pony -Inn & Pub” - to three-hours later when a dragon is preparing to destroy a town – is filled with amazing production design and thrilling sequences. Even one of the movie’s dumbest sequences, in which the dwarves fend off vicious orcs as they roll down a white water river in barrels, had me amused.

In the second installment of this new trilogy, Bilbo Baggins (played by the excellent Martin Freeman) and the dwarves continue to evade the orc hunting party as they take the dangerous path through a dreadful forest where they are briefly taken captive by the woodland elves. After escaping, they are successful in a making their way to a town on a lake which is just shy of their final destination, The Lonely Mountain –where there is treasure and terror in store. Meanwhile Gandalf (Ian McKellen) parts from the group to find the powerful source of evil, which is beginning to spread through Middle Earth.   

This is a movie that is bound to take just as much criticism as the first Hobbit, for being a product of post-Avatar experience-cinema, where narrative strength takes a backseat to thrilling spectacle. It’s also hard to ignore the fact that this is a dark epic action odyssey based on a light-hearted children’s novel. There’s something a little messier about this series than the previous trilogy, but I look forward to having it in all in my Blu-ray collection to save for those days when I’m under the weather and desire nothing more than something lengthy, beautiful and mindless as I drift in and out of consciousness on the couch.

An issue I take with most of Peter Jackson’s films is something that a lot of action filmmakers don’t seem to understand: Showing characters survive impossible odds may seem fun, but the more they escape danger in one piece, the lower the stakes are. We need to feel afraid for them and if they’re invincible, we feel nothing.

I love Peter Jackson but like all excessive directors, his tendency to stretch things out has its ups and downs. Sometimes, special effects shots look less polished than others. His comic silliness can be successful just as much as it falls flat. New characters can add emotional strength or they can bore us. Throwing the character of Legolas (Orlando Bloom) into this story actually makes sense but his character overstays his welcome and would have been better as a cameo. The subplot involving the Elf-hero and a love-interest, Tauriel (the gorgeous Evangeline Lilly) is interesting but could have been scrapped for time.

What’s wrong with The Hobbit Trilogy is that it’s a trilogy and should have been one movie. An average person who goes to see it just wants to enjoy a simple adventure story. There are so many subplots in this film that I’m trying to figure what small percentage of the movie actually featured Martin Freeman as our title character. People may enjoy binge-watching an entire television season at home, but at the movies, they expect a more condensed design. This film’s anti-climax only frustrated the people who surrounded me in the theater -maybe more than the thirty-minute-climax of The Return of the King.

Like Jackson’s remake of King Kong, I like what it delivers, but I doubt the majority of the audience is as enthusiastic. If the studio really wanted to cash in, they could have tried simultaneously releasing a two-hour cut for impatient people and a three-hour cut for people like me, who just can’t get enough. Maybe the longer cut could have been reserved for the High Frame-Rate 3D version only. 

Speaking of HFR, I’m in awe of movies being shot at twice the motion quality of what we’re used to. At the same time, I fear that Jackson may have damned it by using this film series as its debut. My strongest opinion of HFR is that it creates a greater contrast between what is real and what is simulated. From digital effects all the way down to excessive camera movement, I feel hyper-aware of what is being controlled. HFR shines when the camera remains still and the content is authentically captured without special effects. I have not seen such potential for the advancement of cinema in all my life. I hope that it catches on and that it allows filmmakers to discover non-traditional approaches to shooting a movie. Believe me, like the last Hobbit movie, there are parts when it works wonderfully.

Ender's Game

*** out of ****

Be warned, all you haters of science fiction: Ender’s Game is steeped in the genre and will not give you an inch. That’s why I like it. This is a movie with a rather abstract futuristic setting, mostly humorless expositional dialogue and is more about ideas than action. While I have never read the Orson Scott Card novel, on which this film is based, I get the impression that the movie is a faithful adaptation and sticks to its guns in regards to its vision of a militaristic society that exploits children as the ultimate weapon.

Half a century after an alien attack on earth, the world has united to prepare for another. The military has learned that it takes very high-tech weapons to fight the enemy and values the developing minds of children to control them. I don’t need to research the author’s inspiration for this idea, when I consider that it was written in 1985 during the early videogame boom, which turned kids into champions of a thing that adults of the time could barely grasp.

This exploitation has potential to disturb an adult but excite a child, particularly boys. Kids are quite often dished out movies about child characters being given an exciting adult responsibility. In this story, the “Spaceman Spiff” fantasy is taken to a dark extreme with the unsettling idea of kids being conditioned as an essential instrument of war.

The main character, Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield from Hugo), a brilliant young student has demonstrated great potential, is recruited by Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) for battle school. Ender is a troubled soul whose emotions are buried from a life of trying to prove his worth. Being a third-born in a family that was supposed to be limited to two children, gives him the pressure to succeed where his disturbed older brother (Jimmy 'Jax' Pinchak) and his kind sister (Abigail Breslin) did not.

Graff admires the kid’s mind but wants to put it to the test. Placing him in battle school in a station orbiting the planet may be a big advancement in training, but Graff chooses to put Ender in situations that will provoke antagonism from the more arrogant students, much to the dismay of Major Anderson (Viola Davis), who often debates the morality of their tactics. Ender continues to overcome aversion proving to have leadership qualities, which only encourages Graff to continue toughening him up.

The movie is essentially, military school in space. Every situation is about the main character understanding the value of strategy and the kind of individual spirit that one must grow to be a leader. The inner-turmoil of Ender is displayed in many ways, as he fears that he may be a monster of war. When defensive, the damage caused is more than he intended.

When Paul Verhoven made the famous movie of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers,” he put a spin on its fascist implications for a satirical effect. This upset many fans of the original material -at least the ones who understood what he was doing. Maybe they felt judged. Gavin Hood doesn’t do anything like this with Ender’s Game, but I was still reminded of it for the portrayal a militaristic future with a sense of awe and excitement. However, there is a thought-provoking plot twist in store. You may feel a chill when the child-like perception of war shifts to the bitter consequences of it.      

This was a story worth making into a movie. Like all great science fiction, it will provoke discussion and debate over what it meant rather than how cool it looked. 

Blue Is The Warmest Color

*** out of ****

This year’s Palm d’Or winner at the Cannes film festival is Blue is the Warmest Color, loosely based on a French graphic novel about a lesbian love affair between two young women. It follows a high school girl who realizes she prefers for the company of women, when it comes to intimacy. Maybe this is because she went on a movie-date with a guy and saw Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (Not a good date movie). In passing, she sees a masculine looking college-age girl with dyed blue hair, for whom she seeks out, finds at a lesbian dive bar and begins a relationship.

To watch the movie makes its graphic novel origin kind of surprising. Almost everything on the screen looks like it was invented along the way, rather than mapped out. This is a compliment to the raw emotion and naturalistic strength of the film and its players. It is a movie with some very heavy scenes of sexuality that are supposedly simulated, yet a carnally explicit display of what lovers do when they are going to town in their most private environment.

It seems pornographic but when you think about it, most pornography is very aware of its exhibitionism, which these characters don’t seem to be. We see every clumsy detail of their fun time, making us voyeurs of what looks like a genuine sensual experience. Is this a good thing? I don’t know.

The sex, memorable as it may be, is one of many elements in this coming of age story that are portrayed in such a truthful way. The movie is naked in more ways than one. There’s a lot of unflattering imagery of people eating in close-up, awkward private moments and everything in life that typically gets filtered-out by the unspoken glamor agenda in the filmmaking process. According to IMDB, the film’s director, Abdellatif Kechiche, shot 800 hours worth of footage for the film and utilized a lot of unguarded moments from the actors between takes in order to capture their natural behavior.

The two leads, played by Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, have been praised for their undeniable believability. While I have total respect for everything they must have undergone, I am sometimes curious how much skill was involved. Some directors invent circumstances, which provoke great performances from almost anyone. The congratulations we give their actors are really about the endurance test it must have been to commit to such intense circumstances.

I have respect for this film, but for some reason, I want to nit-pick at it. It has the tendency to dwell on elements of the character’s lives that don’t feel connected to the plot. It’s boldly, yet aimlessly, about a lot of issues, but focuses on them in a personal way, rather than being a social critique.

At its 179-minute running time, I was also surprised that it didn’t do very much to convey the years that are passing by in the story. There is no music score and very few stylized shots or cuts. In separating itself from the artifice of cinema, the movie made me more aware that a cameraman is there intruding on the business of others. This is a movie reserved for the more hardcore filmgoers, open to experimentation.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

***1/2 out of ****

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is an honorable sequel. I’m not sure that it is a better movie than the original. I just know that it is tonally different from the first one. What I am sure of, is that this movie was shot better -but lacks the editorial pace of the original.

The new film has a more interesting story to tell. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), the winner of the 74^th Annual Hunger Games -a battle-to-the-death game in a future totalitarian society- is suffering the consequences of her defiant victory. The fascist President (Donald Sutherland) - of what is known to remain of human civilization - pays the young victor a visit in her coal-mining district. He communicates his dismay for rebels and he feels that her actions have provided hope to the all the districts surrounding the capitol, which have been under oppression for generations following a war. He fears that another war is brewing.

Katniss is due for the Victory Tour of all of the districts and is threatened by the President that she must do what is necessary to sway the masses from another revolution or he will make sure that the people she loves the most, will suffer a terrible fate. Katniss is terrified, but with no ability or will to control the animosity she has awoken in the people against their rulers, she starts to take desperate measures to save the ones she cares about.

Meanwhile, a new Gamemaker (Philip Seymour Hoffman) advises the President with strategies to undo Katniss’ influence. She was the only one to ever win the game alongside another tribute. This tribute was Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), and they won together by pretending to be in love. While Katniss has another suitor, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), with whom she shares a deeper connection, she is forced to play out the charade of the romance that conquered all. Peeta, who really is in love with Katniss, does his best to respect and honor their partnership as survivors.

With the help of their alcoholic mentor, Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), Katniss and Peeta must plan for a new strategy in response to a terrifying announcement made by the President, about the upcoming games… and who will be in them.

When I saw the first Hunger Games movie, I was delightfully surprised that the genre of dark dystopian science-fiction, of which I hold so dear, was making a splash with young adult fiction. At the time, I had not read the books. Some disappointed people, in regards to the movie, were big fans of Susanne Collins’ novels.

I liked the movie so much, that I read the book and it made me appreciate the movie more for not trying to replace the book. Considering that the three books are written from a first person narrative, I have a lot of respect that they did not try to emulate this in the movies with voice-over narration. They left these characters and their mysterious future world up to interpretation for a fresh audience. I also thought that the pace of the film was very respectful of the characters’ emotional passages.

In Catching Fire, the second installment of what is now a four-part movie series (based on a trilogy), Jennifer (Louisville loves you too) Lawrence continues to be a tremendous asset in bringing these books to the screen. Her professional ability to apply herself in a genre, that some actors might not take seriously, gives us a hero to root for. She’s really good.

While Gary Ross did a very good job on the first film, I prefer any kind of series to have variety. Changing directors can do this. Francis Lawrence, who did a great job directing an incredibly flawed script in I Am Legend, has thankfully been given a good project, with which to apply his visual talents. His aesthetic approach, through cinematographer Jo Willems, is much more grounded in smooth well-composed shots. The drama is strong and the action is damn intense. There are some pretty great-looking CGI apes too. Ferocious apes always make me happy.

Now that I have seen a Hunger Games movie after reading the book on which it was based, I can sympathize with the complaints that the hardcore fans have but not enough for me to call it a poor adaptation. While many passages feel distractingly overstuffed with essential information, there are so many important elements of suspense missing from the story. Hopefully, they will use the extra time they have afforded by turning the third part into two films. Maybe they will finally explain to the movie audience why the Mockingjay is so significant!