Review: The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey (dir. Peter Jackson)

Story: 13 dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) set out on a quest to reclaim the mountain under which they lived (and the gold in it) from the dragon Smaug. The wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) insists that the hobbit Bilbo Bagins (Martin Freeman) joins them. Bilbo is not directly that keen for an adventure, but joins the dwarves nonetheless. Meanwhile, dark powers seem to awaken in Middle Earth.

The Hobbit did nothing but confirm to me that, when it concerns everything Tolkien, I am right and the rest of the world is wrong. I’ve made this argument several times, so in this review I will not mention the plodding storytelling, the painfully dull and slow dialogues and the bloated self-importance that characterized the Lord of the Rings movies and also this new franchise outing. Nor will I go on and on about the fetishistic, alsmost fascist escapism these fantasy epics offer to the deluded masses.

So let’s get past all that and discuss elements of The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey in their own light.

First of all, I must say that I disliked it less than I did The Return of the King. Most important is that The Hobbit has a lighter tone. The book on which it is based is a children’s book, and that is clear from the film adaptation as well. Even though this is clearly a 12+ film (don’t bring little children!)  The story is still a bit too serious for my tastes – I do not think that any film featuring dwarves, elves, ‘wargs’ and albino orcs should take itself serious at all – but there is definitely a move in the right direction.

Of course the film looks gorgeous again. This is the one quality of the LOTR films that I recognize as well. Unfortunately, due to the 3D and the 48fps technology (by which the number of still images you see in one second of film is doubled) the sets and even the gorgeous natural backdrops have a slightly artificial shine on them. Also, whenever there are quick movements in the frame or sweeping camera moves it seems as if the film is projected too fast.

Actually, that might have been an idea! For with 2 hours and 45 minutes The Hobbit is much, much too long. Entire sequences could easily have been scrapped. Especially in the painfully dragging first hour-and-a-half. Only in the action-packed last hour the film picks up pace. Crucially, this is also the hour in which the single outstanding scene takes place: the fateful meeting between Bilbo and the creature Gollem (Andy Serkis).

With Bilbo we arrive on a plus for The Hobbit. Martin Freeman is one of my favourite television and film actors, and his Bilbo Bagins is a nice bloke. Much more so than Elijah Wood’s Frodo (who makes an entirely unnecessary cameo appearance together with Ian Holm). I actually like watching Bilbo doing stuff. Whatever that stuff might be.

The dwarves are with too many. Even Gandalf, on several moments in the film, has to count to find out whether or not they are all still there. They could have had slightly more outspoken and specific characters as well. Onle Armitage’s Thorin and Ken Stott’s Balin stand out. The others are nothing but ‘the fat one’ or ‘the young one’.

Finally (BIG SPOILER): it is entirely impossible to put a group of fifteen characters through so many perils and come out on the other hand without a single casualty. What is the point of having thousands of goblins attacking our company if they can simply be pushed from a bridge?

Final verdict: Jackson’s Tolkien movies will never win me over. I’ll just have to get used to the fact that they do enchant most of the global audience nonetheless. The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey does nothing to change that. It has its pluses and its minuses, but in the end it leaves me entirely cold. The only good thing is that it will make a global super star out of Martin Freeman.

The Movies of This Winter…

The Big’uns:

 Jack Reacher (dir. Christopher McQuarrie) stars Tom Cruise (oversized smurf) as a former military man who is described, in Lee Child’s novels about him, as a blonde giant of a man. Little that can go wrong there then. Wreck-it-Ralph (dir. Rich Moore) is a Disney feature about the bad guy in an arcade game, who decides that he does not want to be the bad guy anymore and sets out on a journey to other games. Very promising indeed, if only for the appearance of beloved characters from games that were played by people who were kids in the 1990s. Django Unchained will see Quentin Tarantino tastelessly screwing up (movie) history once more, now with the help of Jamie Foxx, Christopher Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio. Get your act together Quentin, and go make another Jackie Brown. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters could be real fun, or it could be the next Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. But it is directed by Norwegian horror prodigy Tommy Wirkola, and stars Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton, so the odds are reasonable. Finally, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey sees Peter Jackson (and everybody else involved in the LOTR madness) revisiting Middle Earth. I expect abolutely nothing from this mind-numbingly boring property, so I won’t be disappointed in any way. On the plus side: the 48 fps images look good in the trailer, and in Martin Freeman it does star a personal favourite of mine.

 

The Award Darlings

You’d think that a book about a boy and a tiger in a little boat would be unfilmable, but Ang Lee decided to give Life of Pi a chance. In 3D. Also considered unfilmable was David Mitchell’s book Cloud Atlas, but Andy and Lana Wachowski, together with Tom Tykwer, decided to give it a try. However good the film may turn out to be, it won’t win prizes. It’s too weird probably. Much more conventional is Hyde Park on Hudson (dir. Roger Michell), about president Roosevelt (Bill Murray gunning for a career Oscar) receiving the King and Queen of England as his guests. Speaking of American presidents: Steven Spielberg’s biopic Lincoln stars Daniel Day-Lewis, so Bill Murray may have to wait for his Oscar a little longer. Another biopic that may score big is Hitchcock (dir. Sacha Gervasi), starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren. Already a favourite is Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, the Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman starring The Master. Argo (dir. Ben Affleck) will be a contender, as will Les Miserables. The latest one is directed by Tom Hooper, who dug up quite some gold for The King’s Speech two years ago. And if the director is anything to go by, look out for Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. A new The Hurt Locker? We’ll have to wait and see.

Review: The Dark Knight Rises (dir. Christopher Nolan)

Story: Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) lives in recluse. Mentally and physically broken by his years as Batman he sees Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) clean up the streets of Gotham. However, the arrivals of the gymnastic burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) and of the cruel mercenary Bane (Tom Hardy) force Batman out of retirement. The question is if he is able to rise up again and confront his present foes as well as the demons of his past.

If The Dark Knight Rises is quite a disappointment, then it is so because of the enormous expectations of fans, and the high bar set by its predecessors, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). In fact, to call ‘TDKR’ a bad film is unjustified. It is a good summer blockbuster; by far the best of this summer. It grabs such fodder as The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-man in their necks and scoulingly sends them back to kindergarten. And yet it disappoints.

The biggest let down for me was that director Christopher Nolan does not chart new territories and themes in TDKR. Rather, he returns to the issues already covered in quite some extent in Batman Begins. And although Bruce Wayne / Batman does grow as a character, I miss the expansion to Batman’s universe and psychology that made The Dark Knight so very special. From a storytelling point of view it makes sense to make the circle complete, and Nolan does not hesitate to emphasize this, using quite a big number of flashbacks to Batman Begins. But I think he is mistaken to pressume that his audience is not already overly familiar with the previous films.

Valuable time is lost with these flashbacks, and although I do not think that The Dark Knight Rises is too long, I do think it could have spent some of its running time (a whopping 164 minutes) in a more effective manner. On many an occasion, especially in the climactic final hour, Nolan falls back on cheap short-cuts in his staging of the battle over Gotham’s fate. On first viewing these moments may be mistaken for plot holes, but on second viewing they appear to be the result of cramped storytelling and shoddy editing. Unnecessary mistakes that could easily have been solved had Nolan allowed himself more time to stage these scenes properly and less time reinvoking worn down, and this trilogy unworthy, generic stereotypes.

Nolan likes to work with the same people over and over again: Story writer David Goyer, producer Emma Thomas, writer Jonathan Nolan (yes, the brother), composer Hans Zimmer, editor Lee smith and cinematographer Wally Pfister. If I would recommend Nolan to look for another editor if he continues in action films, I must also praise Wally Pfister. Pfister was nominated for an Oscar for The Dark Knight, and he won one for Inception, and in The Dark Knight Rises he delivers again. The vistas of a Gotham under siege are stunning. In cooperation with the special effects team Pfister does something extraordinary: the stunts and effects that in other films seem weightless and immaterial digital constructions have heft and weight and, consequently, realism in TDKR.

Nolan also prefers to work with actors he already knows. Of course he brings back Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman (as Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (Alfred Pennyworth), but he also calls in the services of his Inception veterans Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard (as business woman and love interest Miranda Tate) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as Gotham city cop John Blake). And there are surprising cameos by some old characters as well. The only major new face is Anne Hathaway. And it must be said that, in such an enormous ensemble, it is Hathaway who stands out, next to Bale and Gorden-Levitt. The other actors suffer from the fact that their roles are perhaps slightly too marginal and underwritten. Tom Hardy is imposing, threatening and scary as Bane, but he can not rival Heath Ledger’s Joker. He should not want to either, and we should not expect it from him.

As an action spectacle, this film is stunning. Big set-pieces involve a chase scene with multiple motorcycles, a street battle between cops and thugs and, perhaps most memorable, a mid-air abduction in the opening sequence. We should not underestimate the contribution of composer Hans Zimmer to these scenes. The master of the genre almost overplays his hand with a thunderous score that drowns out bits of the dialogue, but the crucial word in this sentence is ‘almost’. Empire compared Zimmer’s soundtrack with an earthquake, and that is an appropriate metaphor. The music defies further description.

By not offering us something fundamentally new, apart from some interesting characters, Nolan deprives his film from the depth and the political commentary that The Dark Knight had. Complaints that TDKR is politically reactionary or conservative miss the point that there is actually a shocking lack of politics in this film. If there is any, it only serves as a masquerade of or a detraction from the actual plot, which then is too light to justify the epic ambitions of the film.

But Nolan does deliver emotionally. The fans who have made his films the huge successes that they are have invested in this world and in these characters. And although this individual film may not be able to match the quality of its predecessors, it does succeed in satisfyingly finishing this particular story of Bruce Wayne. Actually, it might be its strongest point (and this is the only small spoiler! I put into this review) that it finishes the story of Bruce Wayne, but not necessarily that of Batman. A relief for the studio and for the fans.

Final verdict: The Dark Knight Rises is a fitting and satisfying conclusion to what we can now call the best superheroe franchise to date. However, it is also demonstrably the weakest link in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and so it is with appropriate heartache that fans have to say goodbye to their holiday fling of three summers.

Trailer Tuesday: Lawless Prometheus Rises

Lawless

Dir. John Hillcoat. Starring: Shia LeBoeuf, Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska & Gary Oldman

Release date NL: November 2012

 

Prometheus

Dir. Ridley Scott. Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce & Idris Elba

Release date NL: 31 May 2012

 

The Dark Knight Rises

Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Marion Cotillard, Aidan Gillen & Liam Neeson

Release date NL: 20 July 2012

Gervais vs. Hollywood – Round Three

Today is January 12. That means that in three days, in Los Angeles, the Golden Globes will be handed out. The curious thing about the Golden Globes is that, as a prize, they mean nothing. They are voted for by the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Agency, a group of old men who are neither very prominent film journalists nor foreign. The only reason that they have become so important is because the Globes are traditionally awarded a week or two before the nominations for the Oscars are announced. This means that a lot of Academy voters, who – being busy and normal people – do not have the time to see every nominated movie, will regularly look at the Globes as an indication of what’s good.

The Globes are notorious for being the decadent alternative to the Oscars, as they are a party rather than a ceremony, and they are notorious because everyone knows that the nominees are just the people the HFPA want to hang out with. Which would explain the nominations for the Depp / Jolie vehicle The Tourist last year.

No, that is not true. The Tourist was not only nominated so that the HFPA memebers could hang out with Angelina and Johnny. They also accepted bribes. That is not my joke. It’s Ricky Gervais’. Last year the British comedian hosted the Globes for the second consecutive time, and his performances was so over the top, his jokes so harsh, that no-one expected him to be invited back. Already during the show, when Gervais was off stage for about an hour, rumors circulated online that he was fired during the broadcast.

But guess what. The controversy attracted a lot of viewers. So regardless how the insulted HFPA may feel, broadcasting network NBC (“not used to these numbers of viewers”) was very happy with Gervais. And so he is back. Again. Question is: how in the hell is he going to top last year? Apart from The Tourist and the HFPA, Gervais’ victims in 2011 where Charlie Sheen (obviously), Hugh Hefner, Bruce Willis, the entire cast of Sex and the City 2, Robert Downey Jr., John Travolta and Tom Cruise.I’m not sure who’s left. And I pretty sure that last year offered less spectacular material, such as the Sheen meltdown, than 2010.

How could Gervais shock us? I don’t know. The only thing I can imagine him doing is being extremely polite, and overtly enthusiastic and reverential in such a way that everybody sees he’s taking the piss. If he’s continuing his shtick from last year, though, he might mock George Clooney’s presidential ambitions (The Ides of March). He might make some terrible (or terribly funny) joke about cancer (50/50) and he is likely to comment on Meryl Streep’s performance as Lady Thatcher (The Iron Lady). Secretly I hope he is going to comment on the irony of awarding a God-playing actor (Morgan Freeman) the honorary Cecil B. DeMille Award, a prize named after the director of The Ten Commandments.

Anyway, we’ll have to wait until Monday morning to see on Youtube what kind of shenanigans Gervais has been up to this year. As a warm-up: here are the best bits of 2011:

Trailer Tuesday: Prometheus, Salmon, and Halflings in my father’s house

Prometheus

Dir. Ridley Scott. Starring Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, Idris Elba, Charlize Theron & Guy Pearce.

Release date NL: May 30, 2012

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Dir. Lasse Halstrom. Starring: Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt & Kristin Scott Thomas

Release date NL: March 8, 2012

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Dir. Peter Jackson. Starring: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood, Cate Blanchett, Andy Serkis, Benedict Cumberbatch & Richard Armitage.

Release date NL: December 13, 2012

Casa de mi Padre

Dir. Matt Piedmont. Starring: Will Ferrell, Gael Garcia Bernal & Diego Luna

Release date NL: TBA (USA: March 16, 2012)

The Pirates Film That Is Going To Be Fun (unlike that other monstrosity)

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists

Dir. Peter Lord & Jeff Newitt. Starring: Hugh Grant, Imelda Staunton, Brendan Gleeson, Jeremy Piven, Brian Blessed, Salma Hayek, Martin Freeman & David Tennant

Release date: April 25th 2012 (NL)

Trailers on the open sea…

Interesting trailers are being released by the dozens these days. Today: two trailers with wind in the sails.

Nova Zembla will be the first Dutch 3D film: the story about Willem Barentsz’ effort to find a route to the East north of Russia. A famous part of Dutch history, if only for the misery the crew of the ship had to endure.

Dir. Reinout Oerlemans. Starring: Robert de Hoog, Victor Reinier, Jan Decleir, Derek de Lint and Doutzen Kroes.

Release date: November 24 2011

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists is the latest film from the Aardman animation studio (Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run). How daft is it? Well, Hugh Grant is doing the voice work for the pirate captain called Pirate Captain.

Dir. Peter Lord & Jeff Newitt. Starring: Hugh Grant, Jeremy Piven, Martin Freeman, Brendan Gleeson, Salma Hayek and Imelda Staunton

Release date: October 10 2012 (UK: March 30 2012)

Preview: The Dark Knight Rises

Last week Warner Bros. released the teaser poster for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, and yesterday they also put an HD version of the first teaser online. A shoddy low-quality version had already been leaked to the internet, but its quality was so bad that hardly anything could be seen or heard in it.

The new teaser still tells us little about the plot: there are some images from Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, and a voice-over by Liam Neeson that comes from the first film. Then: an image of Gary Oldman’s commissioner Gordon on a hospital bed: hurt, weak. He insists that Batman must come back, that they were “in this together”. An unseen Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) doubt whether Batman still exists. Then there are shots of someone climbing out of a hole and of Bane (Tom Hardy). One of his face and one of him approaching a stumbling Batman in an underground location.

And that is it. I am thrilled. I am very much looking forward to the film, yet I am afraid as well. Mostly because of the cast list. The Dark Knight Rises sees Bale returning as Bruce Wayne/Batman, and Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (Alfred) return as well.

Tom Hardy will be Bane, who in the comics is a genetically engineered super-soldier or villain. Anne Hathaway is cast as Selina Kyle, and may transform into Catwoman. Hathaway is new to Nolan, but Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gorden-Levitt are not: they worked with him on Inception. Gorden-Levitt will be police officer John Blake, and Cotillard will play Miranda Tate, in the comics also known as Talia Al Ghul, the estranged daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul, Batman’s enemy from Begins. Josh Pence is cast as a young Ra’s, and Liam Neeson is rumoured to return as the old version of the character.

Such long cast lists lead to problems; see last years Iron Man 2. All these well-known actors and characters can hardly all be given the screen time they need to develop their characters properly and play a major role in what still should be the story of Batman. At worst, we could get a mess of a film. However, considering Nolan’s disciplined style of filmmaking that is not likely. More likely is that the film will show an extreme version of the template of The Dark Knight and Inception, in which supporting characters’ emotional or personal development are sidelined in order for them to schematically inhabit the various political, moral or mythological points Nolan wants make.

Something else I fear is that Nolan might move away from the realistic tone of his previous Batman films, and indulge in the more metaphysical themes and plotlines some of the comics (for instance Frank Millar’s “The Dark Knight Returns”) offer. That is something I would not be fond of.

But I had similar fears back in 2007, when I first learned that Heath Ledger, whom I, at the time, only remembered as the teenage heart-throb from 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight’s Tale, would play The Joker, a role made iconic by Jack Nicholson. And I had my doubts about the pitch for Inception as well: A thriller set within the architecture of the mind? And in both cases my doubts and fears were met by great films. Let’s hope Nolan can do it again.

Hathaway as Catwoman, Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises

A surprising confirmation yesterday from Warner Brothers concerning the notoriously secretive The Dark Knight Rises project, Christopher Nolan’s third and, probably, last Batman film.

Warner Borthers stated in a press release that Tom Hardy, whose involvement in the film was confirmed earlier (he worked with Nolan on Inception as well) will star as the character Bane, a hyper-intelligent and super-muscular drug addict/villain (in the comic books). Meanwhile Anne Hathaway, of former The Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada fame,  will take on the role of Selina Kyle, Bruce Wayne’s troubled love interest. Catwoman is not mentioned in the release, but there seems to be little point in bringing in Seline Kyle if she won’t turn into Catwoman as well.

These choices are surprising. The wise-cracking Hardy was in my opinion a shoe-in for The Riddler, whereas Hathaway has too much of a girl-next-door image to see her strip into a latex cat suit. On the other hand: Nolan’s bad guy choices were contested but ultimately successful previously: Scarecrow and Ra’s Al Ghul were risky baddies for Batman Begins, as they were not as well known as for instance The Joker. Also, the first announcement that Heath Ledger would be The Joker in The Dark Knight was controversial. And we all know how that turned out.

So let’s for now have trust in Nolan’s judgment, and look forward to The Dark Knight Rises, which is due to hit cinema screens (classic and Imax, no 3D thank God) summer 2012. Its cast was already known to star Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne / Batman, Michael Caine as Alfred, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox and Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon.