Miscellaneous Movie Musings the Sequel

[Strangler Lewis]

ISM, next you'll be saying you don't like Shakespearean histories.

Remember, this was a Spielberg/Kushner thing. The film was not about passing the Thirteenth Amendment. It was about the horrors of the Holocaust and Israel's need to stand up to Hamas. It was also about the imminent universal legitimization of gay marriage. That's why the Congressman who accuses Stevens of caving on broad principle was played by a fairly flamboyant actor and why Stevens's quadroon housekeeper lover whom we saw him in bed with was played by a notorious lesbian.

There. You can enjoy it more, now.

[Alex]

Hated pretty much everythign about The Hobbit. Seeing it in 48fps certainly didn't help it out (I thought it resulted in everything looking more fake, not more real and I never got used to it; but this is why I've never been interested in Bluray, the demo movies at the TV store look awful and cartoony and fake to me; wouldn't mind seeing it for something that isn't almost pure CGI).

There is 80 minutes, maybe, of move expanded to 170 minutes. All the worst excesses of the last half of the LOTR trilogy and King Kong without much in the way of narrative or character progression.

About halfway into the movie I actually got into my normal airplane seat sleeping posture and tried to go to sleep as a form of escape (I was in the middle of the row due to the 3D and couldn't tell if Lani was enjoying it). Didn't work for more than a couple minutes. Though I did manage to jump suddenly from Gandalf, Cate and Future Bad Guy having a talk in Rivendell to suddenly watching cartoons cling to Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Rock Bots.

So let me condemn this movie in the strongest way: I'd rather have to spend a weekend watching the Transformers trilogy over and over (and some of you may recall how much I hated each Transformers movie) than sit through half of this one again.

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Conversely, I'm surprised by how much I loved Lincoln. The opening scene is bad and the epilogue is Spielbergian glurge but I adored everything in between.

[innerSpaceman]

I really enjoyed Life of Pi.



I may not even bother seeing The Hobbit. Unless I'm suddenly in the mood for a three hour train wreck.

[flippyshark]

I enjoyed a fair chunk of The Hobbit, but big swaths of it washed past me as the late night wore on. I just don't like gimmicky action sequences, and there is no shortage of them here. Three movies out of this slender book was a bad decision, made for craven reasons. I really like Martin Freeman as Bilbo, though.

[Alex]

Saw Hitchcock. It was fine. Didn't much care for the gimmick of it and Hopkins' performance never stopped feeling like an impersonation to me.

Mirren was very good and she'll get a nomination simply for her 45 seconds of telling off Hitchcock.

Of interest to me was seeing Michael Stuhlbarg in minor parts in both Lincoln and Hitchcock. He jumped off the screen both times while not having much to do. He was good in A Serious Man (a film I didn't fall for like a lot of people did) a couple years ago.

I'd like to see more of him.

[innerSpaceman]

Ditto that. He's got a recurring role on Boardwalk Empire.

[alphabassettgrrl]

I rather enjoyed the Hobbit, though I let the pointless action sequences and the CGI unreasonable falling scenes wash past me. Couple of times I nearly burst out laughing at inappropriate times (my mind is a terrible place to watch movies).

This should probably have been one movie, maybe two at most. Three seems like he's pushing it, not to mention it shouldn't have been a three hour movie.

But it was fun, and fairly pretty, and the three hours went by only feeling like two.

[flippyshark]

Some thoughts on my viewing of Les Mis.

It was almost exactly what I expected, which is fine but never the best thing.

I am waaay too familiar with the score. I couldn't get caught up in it, because I was too busy cataloguing what was new, what was different, and so on.

I didn't mind the extended long takes in head-and-shoulders close-up as much as I feared I would.

Packed house. About two-thirds of the audience I saw it with applauded throughout, could be heard sniffling here and there, and gave a solid ovation at the end. But that other third? They HATED it!!! Quite a few walk-outs, and lots of post-movie comments such as "I was bored every effing millisecond!" and "Why didn't you tell me this was three hours of singing!?"

I think I will enjoy it more on a subsequent viewing, as I'll be more at ease with it. But I'm not in a hurry. (Alas, I'm a little burned out on the show, even though it is a long time major fave of mine.) I suspect I'll own it when it shows up on Blu-ray in a few months, and I'll be glad I have it, but it isn't going to be in heavy rotation.

Amanda Seyfried's warbly trill caused a lot of giggles.

Eddie Redmayne deserves award consideration as much as Anne Hathaway.

Overall, a marginal win, and I hope it grows on me a little more.

[innerSpaceman]

The Hobbit wasn't as bad as I feared, despite some really stupid and poorly-timed additions that are not from the book, and a really large plot hole featuring the made-up villain. I call shenanigans on that, because if you are going to make things up that Tolkien never wrote, you might want to make sure it doesn't leave a gaping plot hole that is patently absurd (not to mention lazy, as it could have been fixed with a camera shot or a line of dialogue).*

Other than that, though, when the film was sticking to the book, I found it a perfectly credible - if not spectacular - adaptation of The Hobbit. Not bad, and I have higher hopes for the remaining episodes. In fact, if there's ultimately an "un-extended" director's cut released for home video, it might be rather good.



* The invented bad guy, an albino orc named Azog, is shown harrasing and chasing our heroes on one side of an immense mountain range, the Misty Mountains. Our gang is then shown going through a series of intense adventures and adverse conditions crossing the mountains - - only to find that same bad guy magically and unexplainedly on the other side. WTF?


There was also little need for TWO prologues. The one featuring cast members from LotR was useless and should have been ditched. Oh, and one wholly-invented tangent backstory just as the plot gets going was bad enough. But to have a second one barely five minutes later really stalled the plot just as it was starting to pick up steam.

Another non-book introduction of LotR stars at Rivendell was also stupid. But the sour points were few, and everything else was decidedly Not Bad. I did not brave the 48fps version. The normal, 24fps 2-D film looked suitably pretty.

[innerSpaceman]

Though The Hobbit did not drag at nearly 3 hours, I found Django Unchained really breezed by at that same length. Full of mayhem, horror, violence and black comedy, it's the perfect Christmas Movie!

Quentin Tarantino is back in fine form with this revenge-plot send up of spaghetti westerns. Everyone in the cast was having a ball, and there are great performances by Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Also digging delightfully into the depths of Tarantino's beloved B-movie casts, the supporting players included the likes of Don Johnson, Franco Nero, Tom Wopat, Russ Tamblyn, Bruce Dern, Lee Horsley, James Remar, Michael Parks and Ted Neely! Bwahahah, I missed most of these, and will have to try and spot them on very warranted repeat viewings.


Tarantino did not overdo it on the dialogue scenes this time, which are perfectly interspersed with action bits. The film is brutal in its depiction of American slavery two years before the Civil War, but the violence is by-and-large comic-book gory, and comedy is paired nicely with action and suspense.


I loved it. Not Tarantino's best work, but that leaves it better than many other's. A whole lot of fun. Five stars from me.