Tag Archives: movie reviews

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (3 1/2 Stars)

Posted by John Dwyer on

Expectations

I am an unabashed fan of Peter Jackson’s work on The Lord of the Rings as well as the novels upon which they were based.  I loved them, and felt they captured the same things my own imagination did when I read the books.  As far as genre films go, I can’t think of many I like so much.  The Hobbit films took a kind of strange path going through some staff and rights issues before reason won the day and Peter Jackson was named director.  The somewhat more troubling thing is that in the Quest for More Money (thanks Spaceballs) a decision was made to split The Hobbit into three separate movies.  That feels like a stretch, since the Hobbit was shorter than any one of the novels that comprise the Lord of the Rings.  Anyway, I don’t care, gimme more more more.  I’m a little worried about this one, but excited as hell anyway.

Review
Yeah, it was probably a little overlong.  Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is an excellent fantasy movie that has a few flaws that keep it from being as great as its forebears.  The biggest issue it has is that’s basically an extended edition.  For a guy like me, that’s not so bad, but for a general audience some of these scenes have to feel very tacked on.  That said, it’s a beautiful movie that’s just as fun at times as the Lord of the Rings film.

You have here just about everything you need for a fun fantasy film.  Thirteen Dwarves with ridiculous headgear, a strange wizard, and a kindly hobbit who’s barely been out of his yard on one side of the ledger.  On the other a giant dragon who stole the Dwarves’ home, some warg riders, plus the general peril of the road.  The Hobbit uses these (well not the dragon, much) to great effect.  The action is very good– though quite a bit more lighthearted than Lord of the Rings– and usually pretty exciting.  There’s also a fair amount of lighthearted humor throughout.  The biggest difference is in tone as the source material was a children’s book.

There will be some challenges for some audience members.  The movie takes a long time to get going…  There’s a lot of Dwarvish singing, so if that’s not your thing, be weary.  The bigger issue is with pacing.  They have added quite a lot to the basic plot of the novel, to create backstory and lend a measure of grandness that the source material largely lacked.  Some of these changes work pretty well, but others really feel tacked on and add detail where none was necessary.

I’ve conceded that I went into The Hobbit heavily biased, and I did like the movie.  It’s probably not as good as any of the Lord of the Rings movies, but I didn’t care.  I had a lot of fun, and was able to enjoy most of the added content.  I do feel that the movie needed a better edit as I think it could have been a better movie if it was thirty minutes shorter.  To be fair, some of the added scenes could be set up for what will happen in the rest of the trilogy, and will make more sense when we can see the rest of the movies.

3 1/2 Stars.

Review: Killing Them Softly (2 1/2 stars)

Posted by John Dwyer on

Expectations
The trailer for Killing Them Softly is one of the better ones I’ve seen lately.  When Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” starts playing part way through I got me some of them chills.  I can’t quite tell if this is going to be a serious/realistic crime movie like, say, Goodfellas, or more towards the Guy Richie Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels end of the spectrum.  I’ll probably be okay either way, because I’m a fan of both genres.

Review
Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly is an experimental crime film with misguided aspirations for making political commentary.  Set in New Orleans (an admittedly interesting setting for a movie like this) Killing Them Softly follows a trio of remarkably incompetent wannabe criminals who try to pull a heist off on The Mob.  The Mob calls in Brad Pitt to get to the bottom of whatever happened and take care of it.  Some parts of it work pretty well, while others are a complete mix.  This makes for a decent but very uneven film.

This movie was very experimental.  I’ll try to recount some of the experiments without spoilers– if that turns into some weird reading I apologize.  The most obvious was the use of extreme slow motion for some of the violence in the movie.  Truly extreme slow motion with the firing of just a few rounds spread out over a couple of minutes.  It was a pretty interesting way to do it as far as I’m concerned.  Another was a long scene shot from the point of view of a character under the influence of narcotics– putting his altered state and sense of time on the screen for the audience.  This one was fairly interesting, but I think it dragged on way too long.  Another remarkable experiment was with the movie’s soundtrack, much of which was comprised of speeches by Presidents Obama and Bush (the Younger).  I think the value of experimental choices like these is going to vary for each audience member.  For me they didn’t make this movie much better than it would have been without them.

Killing Them Softly is absolutely full of dialogue– and not slick Quentin Tarantino dialogue, but extremely realistic dialogue full of the kinds of things people really say to each other.  It makes for a lot of meandering which may bother some people, but I thought it was one of the strong points of the film.  James Gandolfini is really excellent here, playing a hit man who’s coming apart like a cheap suit.  He’s as broken as his situation and it all works right.  Similar nods go to Scott McNairy and Ray Liotta who blend into their troubled characters seamlessly.  The performance that didn’t work for me, and this was a surprise, was Brad Pitt’s turn as slick hit man.  This was a character that would fit in a Tarantino or Richie movie but felt incredibly out of place to me here surrounded by flawed/pitiful characters.  Pitt was fine, I guess, but I didn’t buy the role altogether let alone his portrayal.

There is a fairly strong political undercurrent to this movie that totally didn’t work for me.  The aforementioned clips from Bush and Obama are designed to create some kind of context and form a kind of socio-economic backdrop for the setting.  This is combined with some of the rhetoric throughout the movie.  I’ll talk about this in much greater more spoilery fashion in our podcast, but basically I think the filmmaker is trying to take you to a specific conclusion, all-the-while unwittingly arguing the other side’s case.  Anyway, I think it ultimately took away from the rest of the movie and contributed to the general hit-and-miss affair Killing Them Softly turned out to be.

2 1/2 stars.

Life of Pi (3 stars)

Posted by John Dwyer on

Expectations
It’s pretty hard to pin down what I think expect from Life of Pi.  I have not read, but am gennerally familiar with Yann Martel’s novel.  I saw the previews and they looked interesting but also kind of childish, as if a children’s movie.  I’ve seen several of Ang Lee’s movies, and generally I’m a fan.  Basically, I don’t really have high hopes for this movie, but no reason to think it’s going to be a terrifying disaster either.

Review
Life of Pi is the story of a young Indian boy who goes through an incredible story, and then recounts it to a writer who is looking for a novel.  It is a beautiful spectacle of a movie– a stunning series of fantastic visuals with a vivid color palette.  There’s some excellent acting and a very challenging theme to explore.  There’s also some ineffective storytelling technique in play and a sort of generalized “miss” that I can’t quite pin down… But which keeps this very good movie from being great.

Let’s start with the bad– there’s one big problem with this movie, and I believe it can be blamed on the novel.  That’s the framing of the movie as the recounting of Pi’s story to a writer.  I haven’t read the book, so I’m not sure if it worked there, but in the movie it added exactly nothing– except maybe a performance that I didn’t care about from Rafe Spall.  It was an extraneous layer, in a movie that could have just gone ahead with a standard narration and been just as good… Or I guess better.

Despite the annoying framing device, Life of Pi is a good movie and absolutely stunning to look at at times.  The colors were bright and vivid and fantastic, and yet felt somehow real at the same time.  The Bengal Tiger, Richard Parker,  was an incredible achievement and never felt like CG.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see Life of Pi in 3D, but from what I’ve heard Life of Pi is a movie that got 3D right.

The star of this show is Pi himself, played by four different actors.  His story is what the whole shebang is about, and it sure is one helluva story.  More impressive to me, though, was that all four actors did a great job.  In particular Suraj Sharma, who gets the most screen time, is great in a challenging role (in many of the same ways Castaway was).  All the more impressive because he had no experience acting.  Child actors are always a risk for movies, but Ang Lee gets the most out of everybody who’s in the movie (except for Rafe Spall, I shouldn’t keep dissing the guy, but he didn’t do much with a framing mechanism I didn’t like in the first place… So there, or something).

I’d like to watch Life of Pi again.  Maybe in 3D this time.  It wasn’t as great as I’m sure fans of the book hoped, but it is an interesting and beautiful adventure.

3 stars.