With The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the third film in his adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s slim children’s book, Peter Jackson completes his devolution as a filmmaker. Like its two previous predecessors…
In Antarctica, August is the coldest time of the year. McMurdo Station, the largest of several bases on the continent, houses up to 1200 employees during the warmer months, while only a handful remain behind in the mid-year winter. Filmmaker Anthony Powell has worked as a radio engineer in Antarctica …
Housebound from writer/director Gerard Johnstone is a curious, yet impressive film full of odd, extravagantly written characters and joyful exuberance drawn from a clever combination of frights and blackly comedic moments. There are minor flaws, but there is enough goodwill generated through the film that these are …
The below- freezing conditions, mind-affecting isolation and destructive winter snowstorms - why would anyone want to live in Antarctica? And the ones that have braved those horrible conditions, who the heck are these people? With all the possible scientific angles on that southern icy continent covered in various documentaries already, these questions remained…
Alyx Duncan’s debut feature is one of the best first films I’ve ever seen. She is absolutely assured in everything she does in this film, which is a lot. She not only wrote and directed it, but she’s also credited as one of the cinematographers and a producer and about half a dozen other jobs, all done well. She also cast her parents in the only real roles and directed them so well (they are non-professional actors) that I thought the film was a documentary. I was so convinced of this that I had to find the official page and some reviews to confirm that it was fiction.
The story is of Lee (Lee Stuart) and Jia (Meng Jia Stewart), a mixed race couple who have been together for 20 years. Though they are still separated by a language barrier, that’s about the only thing that separates them. They intuitively understand each other and at no point does either need clarification of something said. We see them moving about their small, cluttered house eating, sleeping and working while they alternatively narrate their feelings. Then, Jai reveals that she is going back to China to look after her aging parents and that Lee will be along after he gets the house in order so it can be rented, since they do not know how long they will be staying in China.
The good news is that The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is a marked improvement over The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), which I did enjoy and have come to a greater appreciation of in subsequent viewings (many, in fact, because my son adores it) and the bad news is that The Desolation of Smaug has problems of its own. Since it does not need to take the time to introduce too many characters, like the first film did, it is able to jump right into action and move the story forward at a faster pace. The trouble is that in most cases, character is bypassed in favor of plot.
Desolation of Smaug is the Hobbit film we’ve been waiting for. Peter Jackson has undoubtedly got his mojo back in his latest offering that, by comparison, makes its 2012 predecessor look like a dire effort indeed. Whereas An Unexpected Journey acted merely as a stretched out introduction to the prequel trilogy, Desolation of Smaug allows the audience to sink its teeth into its characters and story-threads whilst being lavished with nostalgic flourishes and a wider scope of Middle Earth. Jackson has hit the nail firmly on the head in this rewarding, entertaining and, most importantly, satisfying watch.
I have to admit that I am not the biggest fan of the 3D technology in general and usually prefer to watch a movie the “old-fashioned way”. However, I still wanted to experience The Hobbit – Desolation of Smaug in its High-Frame-Rate, the 48 frames per second technology that Peter Jackson seems to be so fond of. While this new innovation within filmmaking had some flaws in its prequel The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey and often resembled daytime television, the technology has amazingly improved with the second part of the trilogy and made it so much more enjoyable. Despite the major improvement on the digital artwork, there are some visual effects, such as the bumblebees for example, that are simply unnecessary and dull.
And so we come to it at last - the great sequel of our time. Concluding his monumentally successful and well-received run of the trilogy, Peter Jackson certainly goes out with a bang with his final offering. The Return of the King, winner of an astounding eleven Academy Awards, is his most ambitious and impressive cinematic offering yet. There is a reason that each Lord of the Rings film is in the top 20 of IMDb’s top 250 highest rated films with the third installment even breaking into the top 10 to rub shoulders with the likes of Pulp Fiction and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and that reason is simply that the trilogy is no less than a monumental and historical cinematic endeavour of unimaginably ambitious and daring scale executed faultlessly by a team of dedicated and devoted enthusiasts. There is little to fault in this mammoth achievement; Return of the King is, without question, one of the greatest films ever made.
Diving straight back into the juicy narrative, Jackson doesn’t leave us dying with anticipation in The Two Towers. Although deemed the worst of the trilogy, The Two Towers, with respect to its difficult position as the middle film, is possibly the best. To add some perspective, The Fellowship of the Ring had the easier charge of establishing the story and each of its characters. The Return of the King has the yet easier task of depicting the narrative’s natural, epic climax. But The Two Towers is lumped as the piggy in the middle; undoubtedly poised to fall dangerously into the realm of monotonous inter-bridges, Jackson superbly and masterfully molds this intermediate undertaking into a three hour masterpiece of stellar proportions. The narrative reaches a stunning climax in the final hour that feels natural and appropriate – nothing is forced or contrived. Furthermore, the scope of the story widens substantially, and nobody thought that was possible after the truly grand marathon that was the establishing installment. No longer are we confined to the quest and characters of the fellowship alone; trickily branching out across Middle Earth, the audience is lavished with multiple excursions to Rohan, Isengard, Fangorn forest and Osgiliath. We accompany pivotal characters on three colossal journeys, each as satisfying as the last. Nobody thought that The Fellowship of the Ring could be topped – but it just might have been.