What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

My wife wants to watch the Hobbit trilogy. We saw the first film, and never got around to the other two. I don't think I can talk her out of it.

They've actually improved with age. You just need to go into them expecting them to be terrible. And skip any part where an elf is on screen. The third one is probably as close as we will get to a Warhammer movie and really has little to do with The Hobbit.

Also, play this drinking game. Any time someone is falling, take a shot.

The first two (I didn't see the third) are brutal. I went to see the second because I got dragged into it on a date. I never would have bothered after seeing the first. They tried to stretch a chldren's fairy tale into a three film epic and it fails in just about every way. Jackson engages in a fair amount of melodrama and dramatic camera motion in LotR, but in the Hobbit films he takes it to the nth degree: dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2012/12/n...itsezzzzzzzzzzz.html

My pull quote for the Hobbit films is "I wish that the Peter Jackson that directed Lord of the Rings had directed them instead of the Peter Jackson that directed King Kong".

The thing is, if you let them sort of exist as kind of a "Hobbit-influenced fantasy film", it's easier to see some of the good qualities about them. There are some really cool scenes. There are some things that are straight out of the book, and portrayed pretty well. Martin Freeman is perfect as Bilbo, and he plays well against Gandalf. The Battle of Five Armies turns two pages into two hours, but the big war stuff is pretty fun on a nerd level, albeit weightless and phony. The first film is mostly pretty good, despite the PJ excessive stuff. It's a light, sometimes charming fantasy film. The second film is where it starts to run aground, stretched out like butter over too much bread as Bilbo says.

There are a couple of terminal issues though:
- The elves are just terrible. Everything to do with the elves is awful. And they really show the cheapness of the production...witness that there really aren't that many elves in it anyway, and the Woodland realm appears to be a soundstage with like four actors on it. The ninja elves thing is lame too.

- The production, costume, and art design is WILDLY uneven. Some of it is pretty much the same as LOTR (read: awesome). But some of it is just horrendous, like Beorn and some of the dwarf costumes.

- The "bonus material" is almost uniformly bad. It's just plain old filler, like all of the crap with Azog and the god awful Elf/Dwarf love affair.

- The acting is also wildly uneven. You've got the great performances of Freeman and McKellan but they are playing against Luke Evans, Lee Pace, and whoever that dude is that played Thorin. Who are all terrible. Then, Evangeline Lilly, who does not appear to have put any effort into the role at all.

I dunno, like I said, they've kind of grown on me as a guilty pleasure...I would never defend them as "great", and they are an embarrassment after the triumph of LOTR...but they are still decent quality fantasy films. I mean, we love Beastmaster, Sword and the Sorceror, Hawk the Slayer and all of that...and these movies are better than those, for the most part.

I finally got to watch John Wick 2. More bodies, more bullets to the head, more secret hitman society madness. I liked it, but I liked the original better.

But comparing them to things like Beastmaster strikes me as kind of a stretch. The latter was an original property with a bunch of no-name actors other than Rip Torn and with the production values you'd expect from a B movie (In all honesty, they were quite a bit better than others of that type.) The Hobbit is just as well-known as LotR and they spent 3/4 of a billion (with a dollars on them. Some of that money couldn't have been used to put together a better screenplay and maybe hire some better talent than Orlando fucking Bloom? Some of that money couldn't have been used to make some of the characters slightly more relatable? You know, spend a few minutes actually involving emotion instead of one more goddamned chase scene through the Misty Mountains?

And this was part of my problem with Freeman, as I said. He's just not neurotic enough to be Bilbo. One of the central elements of Tolkien's story was that this fussy, never put upon little man was suddenly immersed in a world of danger that clearly demonstrates that he's the world's most unlikely hero. But he still becomes one by total happenstance, because that's just how life works sometimes. Remember in the book, well after the encounters with the trolls and the spiders and the goblins and Smaug, on the verge of war at the foot of the mountain, when Thorin, in a rage, asks how the elves and men could possibly have obtained the Arkenstone and Tolkien writes: "I gave it to them!", Bilbo squeaked. Freeman didn't squeak once in the two films that I saw. Instead, he was Martin Freeman; properly incredulous at what was going on around him, but still the level-headed guy that he always is. That plays well as Watson, but it's not Bilbo Baggins, who never stopped being the guy totally out of his element from beginning to end. There was no Hero's Journey in the book. It was still the story of a normal man (hobbit) in extraordinary circumstances.

And that's the problem with the whole trilogy. There's so much bombast added to EVERYTHING (Thorin sees dire enemy Azog comes through the trees. Dramatic, piano-crashing closeup on Azog, the Enemy. Dramatic piano-crashing closeup on Thorin with red backlighting so that we know he's ANGRY. Dramatic closeup with violins to Azog as he sneers so we know he's CONTEMPTUOUS of the dwarf-who-is-not-a-king.) Most video games have better dramatic technique than that and you could have easily mistaken the first film for a two-and-a-half hour video game. It reminded me of the second Star Wars prequel. The Beastmaster, at the very least, tried to tell a story. This was mostly just fireworks and melodrama.

Yeah, the idea that The Hobbit films are "better" than Beastmaster or Hawk the Slayer is laughable.

Jackwraith wrote: The first two (I didn't see the third) are brutal. I went to see the second because I got dragged into it on a date. I never would have bothered after seeing the first. They tried to stretch a chldren's fairy tale into a three film epic and it fails in just about every way. Jackson engages in a fair amount of melodrama and dramatic camera motion in LotR, but in the Hobbit films he takes it to the nth degree: dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2012/12/n...itsezzzzzzzzzzz.html

thanks, this preson has some good points. It might also be important to remember that, when Del Toro left and Jackson took over, he had to start filming almost immediately, without any script. There is some sort of video diary where Jackson relates how he sometimes wrote the next scene on the set while everyone was waiting. The script for the Lord of the Rings took them years.

Ha. That "person" is me. Thanks. Fair point about the jarring timing on Jackson.

I will never be able to read Tolkien again without picturing the Goblin King with the testicle chin and Radagast covered with birdshit.

I watched a Korean Indonesian film called The Raid: Redemption. This is a high octane action film centered around 20 cops raiding a drug tower in which a kingpin has operated for years with impunity.

It is not hyperbole to say this rivals and possibly surpasses John Wick in terms of action. See it as soon as you can. Fair warning, violence levels are off the charts.

It's a great movie, but it's Indonesian. I think the end of level boss was in The Force Awakens too.

ah, my mistake.

hotseatgames wrote: I watched a Korean Indonesian film called The Raid: Redemption. This is a high octane action film centered around 20 cops raiding a drug tower in which a kingpin has operated for years with impunity.

It is not hyperbole to say this rivals and possibly surpasses John Wick in terms of action. See it as soon as you can. Fair warning, violence levels are off the charts.

Sounds similar to Dredd, which also came out in 2012.

Shellhead wrote:

hotseatgames wrote: I watched a Korean Indonesian film called The Raid: Redemption. This is a high octane action film centered around 20 cops raiding a drug tower in which a kingpin has operated for years with impunity.

It is not hyperbole to say this rivals and possibly surpasses John Wick in terms of action. See it as soon as you can. Fair warning, violence levels are off the charts.

Sounds similar to Dredd, which also came out in 2012.

It is very similar to Dredd in plot, but Dredd has cool sci-fi action and The Raid has amazing martial arts action.