Category: Film

I missed it in the theatre because we went to see Looper instead hence I’m going to compare it to that a lot below.  They are both sci fi films and while  Looper isn’t a bad film, and I’m no film critic, it’s sort of a lot of shit spun up for believability with the time travel and telekinesis and farming and a lot of thought went into all those things and how to express them to the audience and then there is a fucking glaring mistake, one that completely invalidates the entire plot of the film and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

Dredd has no such mistakes.  Dredd doesn’t try to create any type of convoluted time-twisting trickery to validate it’s existence as a film.  Dredd  makes no pretensions about  human condition, redemptions or any of that confusion and while it does have a psionic, it doesn’t try to jam some universal world view onto it’s audience except that the future sucks– real bad, not The Road real bad, but close. There’s one city left in the USA and it’s huge and has arcologies that loom over the wreckage of the old city. The plot is essentially a day in the life of Judge Dredd in said city, albeit one that goes pretty horribly wrong for everyone involved.  That’s it.  Police officers go on a call, it goes crazy, lots of people get shot or thrown off stuff and that’s it, end of story.  No one is left shaking their heads at plot holes galore or how they really wasted two and a half hours because the director had a couple hits in the 70’s and 80’s.

That said, it’s not the greatest film ever, but for what it is, Dredd is extremely well done.  The helmets still look stupid and the firepower packed within the little pistols the Judges carry is a wee bit ridiculous.  In a few parts the budget looks so low that the suspension of disbelief that you are within a giant arcology gets a bit stretched (like watching part of an old Dr. Who, where they just rearrange some of the sci fi hallways to make a new hallway for that episode.  Small flaws aside, I wish I had seen this in the theater instead of Looper.

Ah… the Hobbit, my first foray as a grade-schooler into fantasy literature. I already knew the story a bit from the 70s movie (it came out in 1980 but is squarely in the 70’s for style) and some lord of the rings movie books that I had lying around, but reading the book as a little kid was both a challenge and a huge pleasure that lead to COUNTLESS (mostly lesser) sci-fi and fantasy novels to follow. It turns out that my dad was a closet Sci-fi freak and had boxes and boxes of paper backs like the Killer Thing and a lot of Ray Bradbury along with some Pel Toro. He was the one that turned me onto Tolkien in the first place and this path, started in the late 70’s led directly into D&D and basically the entire wonderful world of gaming (at that time on the fringe).

Before seeing the movie, I saw one of my co-workers walking out of the nerd store. She was buying a present for her cousin and would probably be the least likely individual to be coming out of the nerd store that I could imagine (looking quite like one of the forever21 models posted across the atrium). This present was a Hobbit card game of some sort and yet she had never seen the film nor read the book and this is where I think Peter Jackson had to make some hard choices about the Hobbit.

The Length
Stretching this rather short book into three films was shocking at first and remains shocking for a viewer that is familiar with the original book and 70’s film. I found a few small bits of the new Hobbit tediously long but this was made up by the fact that there were parts barely mentioned in the book that are getting the FULL treatment in the movie– and these are EXCELLENT parts of the story. Radaghast the Brown finding that Sauron has returned to Dol Gudor, the actual showing of the attack on Lonely Mountain by Smaug and the Orcs on Moria were all very well done and fun to see.

The Flashback
To my astonishment, the beginning of the Hobbit is actually the beginning of the Lord of the Rings (in the book) where Bilbo has a going away party and then disappears to Rivendell. So this sets up these films as a solid pre-quel to the LoTR stuff because the entire movie is one big series of flashbacks or stories the characters are telling to other stories.

Things that were great
Gollum. Fucking amazing. While the entire scene was different from how I pictured it in the book the tension level was fantastic. They nailed Gollum down beyond all expectations.  The way the ring was lost by Gollum was also very well done.

The Goblin King. While this entire sequence was Lucasified (see below), the Goblin king himself looked badass with his flesh beard and carbuncular skin. I was just very sad that he didn’t say the line: “Who are these miserable persons?” that I loved so well from the book. It must have been tough for Jackson to work through the Goblins actually not immediately killing the dwarves because, lets face it, in the other films they just attack and attack and attack all the time.

The Dol Godur back story.  We know from reading the Hobbit that Gandalf goes off from time to time to do stuff– once for a VERY long time.  The stuff he is doing is not important for the Hobbit story (other than the fact that he’s gone) but was vastly important when framed as a prequel to the Lord of the Rings.  He has to investigate and defeat either the return of Sauron in some form or the newly reformed Witch King of Angmar.  This is going to be super badass.

Things that weren’t so good
The escape from the goblin king – this was a ridiculous CGI sequence not unlike the newer star wars films. It puts the dwarves and gandalf at such odds and surviving so many near escapes from destruction fighting the goblins that the viewer can only conclude that they are completely immortal and free from harm. You just become numb to all the craziness on screen. Plus man, it’s tough to beat this:

Thorin almost getting killed- again, taking a quick scene from the book and expanding it to a really long scene is OK, as long as the resolution is somewhat consistent with the original intent. I understand that this scene was showing Thorin vs the ‘big bad guy’ and is the climax of the film, but why did we have to think he was dead? Why mess with the audience that already knows he will live?

The reason for this ‘almost death’ of one of the main characters, as I see it, is the type of viewer like my co-worker noted above that had never see the old movie, nor read the books. It’s that viewer that some of this stuff is targeting, not US nerds. For the climax, Thorin’s almost death adds drama and excitement and for most people this was likely needed. While the book is exciting, it’s not HOLLYWOOD exciting and to bring in the kids, all of the Lucasified scenes may have been necessary.  Unfortunately those were the  parts I loathed, both in the Hobbit and the Return of the King (where the mouthwash clean out of Minis Tirith by the ghosts was the worst offender).

It’s an Action film
It’s shocking for those of us that grew up with some very very different views on how the characters looked and how the ahem.. ACTION sequences went down that it is a bit shocking to see on screen.  We know Gimli and Aragorn are badasses– but you never got the impression that the dwarves from the hobbit were really that great at fighting anything.  They mostly got captured and run down only to be saved by Gandalf or Bilbo in the end time and time again.

Don’t let those things shake you out of seeing it though, the Hobbit rocked.

There was sadness and dismay when Guillermo del Toro left production of the hobbit and here we are with the project he got onto with the first trailer for Pacific Rim.

Still under the weather and I’ve been having a lie down with the youtube.

Frog Legz trailer.

Sick!

Wild Bunch kill count!

Absolutely worth seeing.  I can’t say a ton without spoiling quite a bit of it, but even those not a fan of the ‘teens in the woods having sex and being killed by stuff’ genre (Cabin Fever, Evil Dead, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc) will appreciate it.  Like Inglorious Basterds, Cabin in the Woods is both an homage and a genre deconstructionist piece where one can no longer look at the other films in the genre the same way again.  The climax of the film is just so well done, it’s worth paying the price of admission just for that.    What’s more, the writers aren’t trying to hide anything– in fact you can pretty much figure out what the twists in the film are in the opening credits.  Watching it play out, especially in scenes where the viewer knows what’s going to happen even though the characters do not, is pure joy.  In some parts, all I could think about was Alan Moore’s crazy homage pastiches from Marshall Law and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

However, in the teens finger fuck in a remote area then die genre usually has some stupid characters– in fact it doesn’t work without some stupid ones– Cabin in the Woods contains characters that are all very smart and thinking almost all the time.  When you see the film you will think to your self: “why didn’t they use IDIOTS instead?”

A genre so tired and worn out, like a pair of old shoes and yet, sometimes films with zombies still tempt us to watch them.  Boobs help, but can they carry something like this that looks, dare I say, SUB TROMA?