The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Movie Review

For the third and final installment in Peter Jackson’s bloated trilogy, The Hobbit, I couldn’t bear to sit through An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug to refresh my memory before trudging through the morass of The Battle of the Five Armies. The predictable result is that I had completely forgotten who some secondary characters were, what they had done previously, and why I should care about them at all.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Movie Review

Each of these dwarfs is just like the others...

As if the first chapter weren’t already interminable enough, the second part of The Hobbit has arrived. This one, subtitled The Desolation of Smaug, is the insufferable middle section of a trilogy that had no business being, at most, a single three hour movie. Like The Two Towers a decade ago, it’s a movie without beginning or conclusion and so it just feels like you’re awash in stuff that happens to characters. Only it’s far worse than The Two Towers because that was at least based on a book of its own whereas this is from part of a single book with lots of additional crap thrown in.

Short Cut Movie Review: Pacific Rim

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

I’m really having a tough time figuring out if Guillermo del Toro’s wild, CGI-packed, global-minded mindless summer action flick Pacific Rim is a serious movie that is as badly written as the worst of the Transformers films or a half-clever (and only half, really) satire and sort of send up of big, dumb, and loud Hollywood action films. The fact that it’s not entirely obvious is a sign of either a brilliant scheme to attract both fanboys and cinema enthusiasts alike or a complete failure to signal exactly what it’s trying to do.

Given del Toro’s record as a filmmaker, I’d like to think he’s up to something interesting here, but even if he is, I didn’t really enjoy most of the film. Written by del Toro and Travis Beacham, Pacific Rim is an amalgam of so many different films of recent Hollywood history that it’s hard to keep track of the references. It combines elements of Transformers, Alien, Top Gun, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, Godzilla, and countless old WWII films. The sum of all these disparate parts suggest a comment on the direction of summer tent pole action cinema as nothing more than further extensions of what has come before without regard for originality, even if Pacific Rim is ostensibly an “original” screenplay, it remains a largely derivative work.

The time is the near future and earth is under regular attack by alien creatures called Kaiju entering from another dimension at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The creatures take the form of enormous dinosaur-looking creatures that have caused the world to band together and pool resources to construct giant robots to battle them. The robots, known as Jaegers, are so complex they require dual pilots who pass through “neural drift” (really like a longer version of the Vulcan mind-meld) and work in synchronicity. One of these crack pilots if Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam). Idris Elba plays his superior officer and leader of the Jaeger program. There are a couple of mad scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) with crazy theories and even crazier behavior. Rinko Kikuchi plays a budding Jaeger pilot with a traumatic history.

The dialogue is so over-the-top bad and the behaviors of every character so clichéd and hackneyed that I ultimately have to believe it was done intentionally. Still, apart from some pretty well-choreographed fights involving gigantic CGI creatures, there was little I found thoroughly enjoyable. Except the scenes with Ron Perlman (a del Toro regular) as a Hong Kong black market dealer in Kaiju body parts. He’s fantastic and his dialogue was actually well-written and delivered.

Short Cut Movie Review: Mama

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

In horror and monster movies it is generally understood that what remains unseen is far more frightening than what a director can show you. Jaws is one of the most famous examples of this. Steven Spielberg couldn’t use the expensive rubber shark through most of the shoot due to technical issues. The result is a terrifying film because our imaginations fill in the gaps, conjuring horrifying images of the terror in the water. Since then almost every monster movie has attempted to repeat the formula to some extent.

In Mama, a ghost story written and directed by Andrés Muschietti and co-written by Neil Cross and Barbara Muschietti, a spirit watches over two young girls whose father went off the deep end and was about to take their lives before the ghost whisked him away. The girls are discovered five years later living animal-like in a cabin deep in the forest. Put into the care of their uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his wannabe rock star girlfriend (Jessica Chastain) their maternal spirit protector follows them, jealously guarding them from any outside influence.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Movie Review

Peter Jackson’s expansion of his mega-profitable behemoth of a franchise has gone from being a labor of love and an astounding cinematic adaptation of a beloved trilogy of books to a cynically calculated cash grab. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is just the first in a three part film adaptation of Tolkien’s single book prequel to The Lord of the Rings. Clocking in at just under three hours, it is already nearly twice the length of the 1977 animated version that was already a decent adaptation.