At the end of the year don’t be surprised to see ”Ant-Man,” the latest Marvel superhero franchise starter, take the top spot on the Canadian Entomologist Magazine’s Top Films of the Year but numbers 2 through 10 as well. It not only features a man who can shrink to the size of an insect, but a supporting cast featuring colony after colony of ants. Bugheads are going to love it, and I suspect, so will fans of the Marvel Universe.
The origin story of “Ant-Man” begins with Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). He’s not a mad scientist, but he’s certainly angry. At the height of the Cold War his creation, the Pym Particle, was a breakthrough but he refused to allow its miniaturization properties to be used as a weapon. “As long as I am alive,” he says, “nobody will ever get the formula!”
Cut to present day. Pym’s Particle is still a secret from everyone, including his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) and former protégé Darren Cross (“The Strain’s” Corey Stoll). Cross is now in charge of Pym’s company and has worked to develop the technology with an eye toward selling it to the highest bidder, a.k.a., HYDRA.
In the hopes of stopping Cross, Pym and his daughter recruit cat burglar Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) to don the incredible shrinking ant suit and use his particular set of skills to break into Cross’s laboratory and destroy the miniaturization technology. If he is successful he can save the world, if he isn’t, he will be crushed like a bug underfoot.
Surely the silliest, and most definitely the smallest of all Marvel superheroes “Ant-Man” nonetheless has the same sort of swagger as the first “Iron Man” movie. It’s an origin story that uses humour to smooth over some of the rough bits of exposition. For instance, it’s self aware enough to follow a revelation of Pym’s complicated plan with a throwaway line from Rudd. “That sounds like a job for the Avengers.” It gets a laugh and stops the film from taking itself far too seriously.
As Lang Rudd has the same off-the-cuff charm that Downey brought to Tony Stark and the movie is the better for it. To pull off the story of a man who flies on the back of winged ants and is small enough to get sucked up by a vacuum cleaner you need someone with a spring in his step and a permanent wink and Rudd has both, finding just the right tone in scene after scene to make this work.
Michael Peña brings full on comic relief as Lang’s motor-mouthed friend, Lily adds strength to a character who could be spun off to her own franchise and Douglas has old school gravitas to burn, but make no mistake, this is Rudd’s movie, whether he is running through the grass with a herd of ants or slyly trying to seduce Hope.
Entomophobics may have nightmares following the film, with memories of a dog-sized ant scurrying around their dreams, but for the rest of us, “Ant-Man” is a fun, larger than life summer diversion.
Synopsis: Picking up where An Unexpected Journey left off, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and Gandalf (Ian McKellen) join with Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and his army of 12 dwarves. Their goal is to traverse Mirkwood, Esgaroth and Dale to locate the fire-breathing dragon Smaug who hoards the wealth of the Lonely Mountain. On the way they battle giant spiders, make a deal with Bard the bowman (Luke Evans), the descendant of the original Lord of Dale, and some helpful and not-so-helpful elves (including a good lookin’ and deadly She-Elf played by Evangeline Lilly).
• Richard: 4/5
• Mark: 2/5
Richard: Mark, despite the sense of mild confusion I felt as I tried to piece the story together, I really enjoyed The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. It took a lot of backstory to get to the fifth film based on Middle-earth and its inhabitants and it will help if you know your Shire from your Sauron or your Skin Changers.
But having said that, Peter Jackson has crafted a great action adventure with the same consistency of tone, style and spirit that runs through the LOTR and Hobbit movies. They feel like story shards chipped off the same block.
Mark: Richard, there are two kinds of people in this world — those who admire and enjoy the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, and those who are repelled by his neo-medieval, Druidic nonsense.
You can guess which camp I fall into. I sat through the Rings trilogy under great duress, and skipped the first Hobbit entirely. So the only question was how much I would loathe this picture. The good news is: not that much. True, the entire movie and everyone in it needs a haircut, but the set pieces worked, especially the barrel escape down the river and the entire dragon sequence. But the movie felt so long I could have flown to Tokyo for dinner and gotten back in time for the end credits.
RC: I think fans will find the length just about right… non-fans, maybe not so much. This one worked for me. There’s a Richard Attenborough old school epicness about it. It is about good and evil without troubling nuance or antiheroes.
Perhaps because Englishman Tolkien penned these action adventure stories during the Second World War when evil was clear-cut, his books are ripe with allegory but straightforward in their approach to morality and good vs. evil.
MB: A good point, but maybe it’s precisely that serious, hectoring tone that always turned me off. Evangeline Lilly, on the other hand, did not turn me off — quite the opposite.
She really holds the screen even if her ears need cosmetic surgery. But the ending — a cliffhanging cheat, if you ask me — elicited a collective groan from the audience and made the experience feel incomplete. Did you like the dark look of the picture?
RC: I did like the look. It’s darker in tone than the Hobbit books for sure, but I thought it suited Peter Jackson’s take on the story. I also liked the Walking Dead style battle scenes — lots of arrows in heads.
MB: I kept hoping for someone to show up with a gun and put them all out of my misery.
If the title “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” immediately conjures up images of hairy footed hobbits and fearsome dwarves battling a fire breathing dragon, then this movie is for you. It beautifully captures and continues the world Peter Jackson began with the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and followed up with “The Hobbit” films.
If it doesn’t mean anything to you then maybe you’ll want to brush up on your J. R. R. Tolkien before shelling out for a ticket. It took a lot of backstory to get to the fifth film based on Middle Earth and its inhabitants and you don’t want to go without knowing your Shire from your Sauron or your Skin Changers.
Picking up where “An Unexpected Journey” left off, hobbit-burglar Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) join with Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and his army of twelve fearsome dwarves. Their goal is to traverse Mirkwood, Esgaroth and Dale to locate and battle the fire-breathing dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch in fine serpentine voice) who hoards the wealth of the Lonely Mountain. On the way they battle giant spiders (a sequence that will certainly make arachnophobes grin), make a deal with Bard the bowman (Luke Evans), the descendant of the original Lord of Dale, and some helpful and not-so-helpful elves (including a good lookin’ and deadly She-Elf played by Evangeline Lilly).
Got it?
Wait! There’s more, something to do with the White Council and the Necromancer but I’m still reeling from plot overload from actually watching the movie let alone trying to unfurl the complicated story in print.
But despite the sense of mild confusion I felt as I tried to piece the story together, I really enjoyed “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.” Peter Jackson has crafted a great action adventure movie that fits in perfectly with the preceding films. There’s a remarkable consistency of tone, style and spirit that runs through the “LOTR” and “Hobbit” movies. They feel like story shards chipped off the same block.
There’s a Richard Attenborough old school epicness about them. They are about good and evil without troubling nuance or antiheroes. Perhaps because Englishman Tolkien penned these action adventure stories during the Second World War when evil was clear-cut, his books are ripe with allegory but straightforward in their approach to morality and good vs. evil.
And luckily the films work because they fully embrace Tolkien’s vision. There’s no shortage of story threads, of hard to remember names but Jackson weaves it all together seamlessly—with some “Walking Dead” style battle scenes… lots of arrows in the head—and has made a big handsome movie to get lost in.
When we think of elves at this time of year visions of Santa’s helpers fill our heads.
The cute, industrious and diminutive creatures from the North Pole can be seen everywhere in December in Christmas TV specials, greeting cards and movies like Arthur Christmas and Santa Claus: The Movie.
One of the most famous movie elves is Buddy, played by Will Ferrell in the neo-classic Elf.
“You’re not an elf,” says Leon the Snowman. “You’re six-foot-three and had a beard since you were fifteen.”
So technically he’s not really an elf, just a human raised by elves but he has more Christmas spirit than Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder and Blitzen put together.
This weekend, just weeks before December 25, Buddy is joined on the big screen by a very different kind of elf.
“She’s slightly reckless and totally ruthless and doesn’t hesitate to kill.” That’s how Evangeline Lilly describes the 600-year-old “she-elf” Tauriel from this weekend’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
The bow-and-arrow wielding character is new to the J.R.R. Tolkien movie franchise, created by director Peter Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.
“She’s our redhead,” says Boyens. “We created her for that reason. To bring that energy into the film, that feminine energy. We believe it’s completely within the spirit of Tolkien.”
Buddy and Tauriel are just two of the many kinds of movie elves.
Elves, or (Gelfling as they’re called in the flick), are the main focus of the Jim Henson film The Dark Crystal.
Dobby the House Elf was voted the No. 1 favourite magical creature in the Harry Potter series by NextMovie.com and Thor: The Dark World featured Dark Elves, an ancient race of dangerous beings whose spaceships are powered by black holes.
The cheeseball b-movie Elves features the tagline, “They’re Not Working for Santa Anymore.” Well, if not Santa, then who? Nazis, that’s who.
Finally Tom Cruise consorted with an elf named Honeythorn Gump in Legend, the Ridley Scott film The New York Times called “a slap-dash amalgam of Old Testament, King Arthur, The Lord of the Rings and any number of comic books.”
Swiss actor David Bennett played the feisty elfin sidekick who not only is the protector of the world’s last two unicorns but, along with elves Screwball, Brown Tom and Oona, helps Cruise’s character save the world from the nasty Lord of Darkness (Tim Curry).
The show Lost propelled Evangeline Lilly from unknown model to television star.
For six seasons she played Kate Austen on the hit series, earned a Golden Globe nomination, numerous Sexiest Women in the World titles and became the face of L’Oreal Paris.
But the trappings of fame didn’t sit well with the Alberta-born actress. “I’m a small town Canadian girl,” she says. “It just doesn’t jive with me.”
So instead of looking for the next big thing following Lost’s 2010 finale, she took a step back.
“My resolve to retire came when I realized it was actually the job itself that was killing me. I’m a very undramatic woman. I keep my life very simple. I don’t have a lot of emotional energy to spend. I don’t argue with my spouse. I don’t make drama where there doesn’t need to be any. I don’t have girlfriends who are dramatic. I just can’t stomach it.
“Having a job that required that I be at the height of drama emotionally for 14 hours a day, all day, every week for six years running was doing bad things to my health, to my psyche. I wasn’t in a good place. I really believe if you’re not happy, get out. It doesn’t matter how much someone is paying you or how famous you’ve become, it’s not worth it if you’re not happy and you’re not healthy.”
It took Peter Jackson and a plum role in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug to bring her out of self-imposed seclusion.
“When they asked me I was three months out of giving birth to my first son,” she says. “I thought I had retired to a life of writing and motherhood. I thought I was done with acting. And then he called. I thought, ‘This is too huge of an honour. I can’t say no to this. This is something I had dreamed about since I was a little girl,’ so I took the job.”
In the action-adventure she plays Tauriel, a 600-year-old wood elf created specially for the film. She says the character is “driven by her desire to help the vulnerable and the weak.”
We’ll see her again as Tauriel next year in The Hobbit: There and Back Again and after that, who knows, although she says, shooting The Desolation of Smaug in New Zealand was “such a positive experience that it has actually changed my mind about my profession.”
On powerful females
Evangeline Lilly likes the soft side of her current role. “One of the things I struggle with, with powerful female roles in the media right now, is that often they are associated with male violence. If a woman can kill and slaughter like a man then suddenly she’s a powerful woman, which I actually think diminishes her power. I don’t think that makes them powerful. I like that this character is a softhearted compassionate elf driven out of her need for justice and her seeking of the truth. I think that is more a distinct female power. I think in the past vulnerability and compassion have been associated with weakness and I think they give a woman her power.”
At the end of the year don’t be surprised to see ”Ant-Man,” the latest Marvel superhero franchise starter, take the top spot on the Canadian Entomologist Magazine’s Top Films of the Year but numbers 2 through 10 as well. It not only features a man who can shrink to the size of an insect, but a supporting cast featuring colony after colony of ants. Bugheads are going to love it, and I suspect, so will fans of the Marvel Universe.
