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Showing posts with label The Battle of the Five Armies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Battle of the Five Armies. Show all posts
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Saturday, December 27, 2014
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My god do I see some shitty films. Being a film critic isn't all free pizza, soapy titwanks from PR agents, open bars and big plates of complementary croissants (though it often very much is). All too often you have to drag yourself at some ungodly hour to some frankly disgusting cinemas. With the deserved death of the piss-stained, tramp-infested labyrinth that was the Trocadero Cineworld, the Holloway Road Odeon holds the current title, with its dim bulbs, 30 year old seats and worryingly squishy lumpen carpet. These aren't necessarily the worst films I saw in 2014, but they were the shittiest times I had in a cinema:
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
'Begin Again' directed by John Carney
As I noted in my review there's nothing technically that awful about Begin Again. The principal cast does okay, the film is shot competently but unremarkably and for the most part it's inoffensive bilge. But imagine the film as that apocryphal Halloween apple with a razor blade concealed inside; the mouth-shredding sadism here taking the form of Maroon 5's Adam Levine. From the prickish tip of his stupid beard to his soppily warbling vocals to his lamely Dylan referencing waistcoat to his infuriatingly pointy shoes god I hate hate hate this man so so SO much.
And the film is saturated with both him and his limp-dick music! Songs that sound like this. Worse, everyone in the film goes all gooey and doe-eyed behaving like he's the reincarnation of Woody goddamn Guthrie. By the end of the film my eyes had narrowed to the thinnest of thin slits, my spine was curved like a cheesy quaver and my hands had turned into claws of hatred. I wanted my stare to somehow burn a hole through the screen, through the film, back in time to when they were shooting it and explode this man's head.
'Mood Indigo' directed by Michel Gondry
Hah! Turns out I was way wrong in that quote. It's dead easy to genuinely dislike Mood Indigo because it's a load of twee shite. Cast your eyes upwards to that moronic picture above of an embarrassed looking Audrey Tatou and Romain Duris sitting in that stupid looking car. What the hell is going on? Why does it have a cross on the side? Why are the wheels cross shaped? Variations on these questions fill every aspect of Mood Indigo, but the ultimate answer to them is that Michel Gondry needs someone to tap him on the shoulder and tell him that he's vanished up his own arse.
It's out of character for me to criticise a film for being overly imaginative, but it seems that panic set in early in this film's production and Gondry decided to fill the frame with whatever lol-monkey-cheese randomness that flitted through his head. A useful point of comparison are the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, which also contain bagfuls of weirdness. But Jodorowsky's weirdness always has an intentional symbolic point, which he happily outlines in his DVD commentaries. Gondry's tactic is to hope we're so distracted by all these whizzy gee-gaws that we'll not notice the film isn't shit. Well we did.
Gondry is an undoubtedly talented visual director, but this garbage marks the point where patience with his brand of kerrazy weirdness runs out. I hated watching it, feeling my respect for him gradually shrivelling the longer the film went on.
'The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies' directed by Peter Jackson
Whereas the other shitty films this year invoked bitterness, hatred and anger; the bloated conclusion to Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy just left me feeling a bit sad. I've been a fan of Peter Jackson since old times; his surrealistic low-budget punkish films like Brain Dead, Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles felt like they were made for teenage me. Then in the 90s the double-bill of The Frighteners and Heavenly Creatures cemented him as someone going places. This made the Lord of the Rings trilogy feel like the inmates had been given control of the asylum, the epic and the personal beautifully fused together. I ate up all those Extended Edition special features showing people piecing chain-mail together, getting off on the sheer care and craftsmanship that went into them.
So that the Hobbit films were so colossally shit felt like the dying of a dream. With the release of the final portion they can definitively be described as bloated, tasteless, ugly and narratively malformed pieces of shit. Peter Jackson has 'pulled a Lucas'; trying to recreate the magic of his classic works and in the process tainting them with shitty sequels. Over the last three years I've spent about nine hours watching this series; I'd have had a more productive time doing just about anything else.
SHITTIEST
'Divergent' directed by Neil Burger
One thing I appreciate most in cinema is brevity. For my money the ideal length for a movie is about 90 minutes. Obviously there are a load of excellent fat-free two hour films, but the longer the run-time the greater the tendency to lapse into flabby incoherency. Worse, there's a trend for longer and longer movies, figuring that length is roughly commensurate with epicness. This finds its logical conclusion in Divergent, a goddamn atrocious YA novel adaptation that clocks in at an arse-numbing two and a half hours.
The film looks crap, the actors keep glancing off-frame (presumably towards their trailers) and it's suffused with a kind of plasticky Sci-Fi Channel original vibe. I could feel my soul slowly leaking out of my shoes and sliding down the door. With a kind of full-body numbness rapidly setting in, the only option my crazed main saw open to me was to take a pin from my bag and begin slowly poking holes in the skin of my arm. It hurt like hell, but at least I wasn't going comatose. So Divergent, a film that made me self harm is undoubtedly the shittiest thing I saw this year.
And there's a sequel coming out in February. Oh joy.
....better pack some gauze.
23rd December: Gigs
24th December: Art
26th December: Theatre
29th December: Best films
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
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Christ almighty Peter, what happened to you? This final instalment in The Hobbit franchise marks the point where the final shreds of goodwill built up over the Lord of the Rings franchise circle the bowl before unceremoniously disappearing around the U-bend. This is a distressing to watch, akin to your teenage self's favourite band getting back together for a financially lucrative reunion tour. You're excited to see these people you loved so much rocking through their greatest hits one more time. Then you notice a slight deadness behind the eyes, a falseness in their tone, the awful, soulsucking sense that they're just going through the motions for cash.
'Going through the motions' largely sums up The Battle of the Five Armies, which can reasonably be summarised as a repackaging of the 'greatest hits' of Lord of the Rings, more specifically The Return of the King. Once again we see cities in peril, fights across huge plains and (supposedly) the fate of the world at play, but it feels hollow and worse, devoid of emotion.
In a weird narrative twist, we open the film with the true finale of The Desolation of Smaug. That film came to a curiously unfinished conclusion with Smaug bearing down on the citizens of Laketown and we jump right back into that with little time to catch our breath. Opening the film with what is essentially a finale is a bit of a gamble, but at minimum it's exciting watching a dragon wreck up a town. Once that's out of the way we reach the film proper, and launch straight into a financial dispute.
You see, Thorin, having seized the mountain of gold has suddenly turned evil for some reason. Now the homeless citizens of Laketown want some gold to rebuild their homes, and remind Thorin that he agreed to help them in exchange for weapons and shelter. Also a load of elves show up, desperately wanting some silver jewellery from the mountain for reasons that are never fully explained. A less than interesting process of negotiating treaties begins, with every side ominously murmuring that this might lead to war.
Given that the title of the film is The Battle of the Five Armies we can pretty much tell that these negotiations aren't going anywhere. Before we know it a load of orcs show up (for some reason) eventually followed by a load of dwarves, a load more elves, a bear-man, the Seventh Doctor, the monsters from Tremors, a flock of 'war bats', some armoured mountain goats and Billy Connolly. The rest of the film is essentially these people (and CG versions of them) bashing into each other over and over to increasingly lessening effect.
The main problem with this is that, save for Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins, I don't give a shit about any of these characters. The dwarves are still largely interchangeable and haven't developed a jot since they strolled into Bag End, the humans are cliches led by an Aragorn ripoff, the elves are ciphers, the orcs are evil because they're evil and even the supposedly tragic Thorin appears to have a switch on his back that flips randomly between good and bad. Even Ian McKellen's Gandalf sucks! This is hardly McKellen's fault mind you, the film relegates him to the role of pure exposition machine with no impact on the central narrative.
There's a weird depersonalisation effect at play in the huge battle that occupies much of the film. Jackson's virtual camera swoops around the battlefield watching faceless, helmeted men antiseptically dispatching other faceless, helmeted men. Some of them might be elves, some might be dwarves, some might be orcs: it's honestly difficult to tell. I guess what we're supposed to take away from this that generalised killing is occurring, but given that these are bloodless, computer-generated mannequins dying why should we care?
Worse, the big triumphant bits (you can tell because the music swells) are fluffed. The romance between Tauriel and Kili takes up an inordinate amount of screentime and you soon realise with horror that we're genuinely supposed to be caring about this. Jackson relies on these hackneyed forbidden love clichés for a decent proportion of the wallop of the finale, but you may as well be watching sticks rub together for all the passion on screen.
Now, there were a few things I did enjoy here. There's a nicely psychedelic interlude where Galadriel has some kind of tripout fight with Sauron. I have no idea how it fits into the plot but at least it looks neat enough. There's also the odd neatly framed 'painting come to life' shot; but occasional prettiness is pretty low down my list of compliments.
The one genuinely great factor is Martin Freeman; who's been the best thing in all three. Every moment he's on screen you get fragments of recognisable humanity that're entirely absent from the exhausting Götterdämmerung that surrounds him. More than ever his performance is the rock you cling to in the storm and he puts in a titanic effort to wrestle the film towards any level of quality. What's astonishing is that he very nearly succeeds; though this film certainly does suck he alone keeps it from being a complete train wreck.
It's ironic that this film is so concerned with the corrupting influence of money. Through squinted eyes it's possible to read the increasingly greedy and extravagant Thorin as Jackson himself, hell bent on wringing as much money out of this franchise as is humanly possible. What's perhaps the real tragedy is that somewhere lurking within The Hobbit trilogy is an enjoyable three hour cinematic classic, one we've been robbed of in favour of this epic grandstanding bullshit.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy will be cherished for years to come. The Hobbit trilogy will be an increasingly irrelevant and embarrassing footnote.
★★
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is released 12th December in the UK, 17th December in the US.
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