Posts Tagged ‘Lord of the Rings’

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG: 4 STARS. “big handsome movie to get lost in.”

movies-the-hobbit-desolation-of-smaug-dwarvesIf 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.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug brings Evangeline Lilly out of retirement

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By Richard Crouse Metro – Canada

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.”

Dark Skies: When sci-fi and horror come together in film By Richard Crouse Metro Canada February 20, 2013

file_205473_0_Dark_SkiesSci-fi and horror rarely mix, but when they do it can result in classics like Alien, a near perfect fusion of scientific fiction and terror. Or, when the blend isn’t right, you get flops like The Mole People.

This weekend Dark Skies hopes to hit the right balance with a story about a suburban couple, an ET disguised as a human and some good old-fashioned alien abduction.

We won’t know until opening day whether or not the movie works, but horror stories about outer space creatures have succeeded in the past.
Dark Skies,
The premise of Species is pure sci-fi. Scientists discover that alien and human DNA can be combined. Of course nothing bad will happen when you create a human with alien traits, right? A-listers like Ben Kingsley added some cache, but it was the horror of the H.R. Giger-designed alien and Natasha Henstridge’s flicking frog-like tongue that made the movie memorable.

Years before Peter Jackson hit it big with Lord of the Rings, he made a film that mixed sci-fi, horror and a big helping of humour. Bad Taste sees a small town taken over by aliens who harvest humans as ingredients for their fast-food restaurants. Über low-budget, the movie was called a “deranged, bloodthirsty heir to the Marx Brothers’ slapstick kingdom” by a BBC film reviewer. Its best joke may be on the DVD cover. The film title’s font looks like the logo of the U.S. takeout restaurant Fatburger.

It Came from Outer Space (one of the first alien invasion films), The Blob and giant ant movie Them! all combine the best elements of sci-fi and horror, but not all movies are as successful. The title Robot Monster promises some futuristic scares, but earned the title “Baddest of the B-Movies” in Michael Sauter’s book The Worst Movies of All Time mainly because the robot was actually just an actor dressed in a gorilla suit topped with a diving helmet.

The name Bela Lugosi conjures up images of horror to anyone familiar with his portrayal of Dracula, so a sci-fi movie with the genre legend should be both speculative and spooky, right? Wrong. The Golden Turkey Awards dubbed Plan 9 from Outer Space “The Worst Film Ever,” but it wasn’t Bela’s fault. He died before the movie was actually shot, but director Ed Wood Jr. used test footage of the actor in the finished film; hence the video box tagline, “Almost starring Bela Lugosi.”