RING MAN

Even though I'm not the world's biggest Tolkien fan, for some reason I keep thinking about this today.

THE CLAY'S THE THING

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of And in This Corner: Cassius Clay...

...a co-production of Black Theatre Troupe and Childsplay. Note how I work into it the fact that I once met Muhammad Ali, mostly just because I vainly wanted to mention it. A fuller account of that brief meeting may be read here.

Also check out my review of Peter Jackson's haunting, often horrifying WWI documentary They Shall Not Grow Old.

RIP to the great Dick Miller, passed on at 90. Rest well, Walter Paisley.

SHOW ME THE MONKEY

Happy New Year next Monday everybody! Chinese New Year, that is. This time we ring in the Year of the Monkey, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the nod goes to the hideous (but wonderfully stop-motion-animated) “Sumatran Rat Monkey” who gets the zombie plague rolling in Peter Jackson’s 1992 shocker Dead Alive (aka Braindead)...

 
The creature also got a nice sort-of-cameo in Jackson’s version of King Kong.

THREE, TIMES FIVE

Opening today:

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies—The third installment of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation—and embellishment upon—the Tolkien novel starts off big. The dragon Smaug, voiced by the ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, wreaks havoc on a nearby fishing village and does battle with a valiant local boy (Luke Evans). While I sat there watching this sequence, I thought it was so strong that Jackson would have a hard time topping it, and as it ended I settled in for a long evening of droning exposition and wearying, incomprehensible-to-non-geeks prophesying.

I was wrong. Hobbit Part Two was better than Hobbit Part One, and for my money, Hobbit Part Three is the most exciting of the lot. Title character Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his pals the dwarves have taken occupancy in the dragon’s treasure-filled lair, and dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) is going all Treasure of Sierra Madre with gold-fueled paranoia.

Meanwhile four other legions—the elegant, aloof elves, the ogre-ish Orcs, the humans from the fishing village and more dwarves led by Thorin’s cantankerous brother Dain (the great Billy Connolly) converge outside the lair, each with its own agenda involving Smaug’s hoarded booty. At the heart of this bombast, and comically contrasted with it, is the modest sheepishness and goodwill of Bilbo, scurrying around trying to be honest and do the right thing.

When you get past the brilliance and intricacy of Jackson’s staging, I suppose all these tempestuous fight scenes don’t have anything deeper behind them than pro wrestling. But I liked how almost every positive thing that happens in this finale happens because members of different races reach out to each other.

Now that his Hobbit saga is (presumably!) complete, I really hope that Jackson puts the Tolkien on the shelf, at least for a decade or so, and tries something different. Almost anything different will do—a car chase movie, a bachelor party comedy—as long as it doesn’t involve broadswords and shaggy beards. Middle Earth has been very good to Jackson, but I hope that now this incredibly talented filmmaker will turn his attention, and his camera, back towards regular old Earth.

The Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which I am always proud to note that I'm a founding member, has announced our 2014 Award Winners. As always, some of them reflect my voting—despite my gripes about Birdman, for instance, Michael Keaton had my vote—and others don't, but there are plenty of movies worth seeing on the list. I was particularly pleased to see the powerful and artful Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me take Best Documentary.

BEST PICTURE

Birdman

TOP TEN FILMS OF 2014 (in alphabetical order)

A Most Violent Year
Birdman
Boyhood
Gone Girl
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Guardians of the Galaxy
The Imitation Game
The Lego Movie
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash

BEST DIRECTOR

Richard Linklater, Boyhood

BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE

Michael Keaton, Birdman

BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE

Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl

BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

J. K. Simmons, Whiplash

BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game

BEST ENSEMBLE ACTING

Birdman

BEST SCREENPLAY WRITTEN DIRECTLY FOR THE SCREEN

The Grand Budapest Hotel

BEST SCREENPLAY ADAPTED FROM MATERIAL IN ANOTHER MEDIUM

Gone Girl

BEST LIVE ACTION FAMILY FILM (Rated G or PG)

Into the Woods

THE OVERLOOKED FILM OF THE YEAR

Edge of Tomorrow

BEST ANIMATED FILM

The Lego Movie

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Ida

BEST DOCUMENTARY

Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

"Everything is Awesome," The Lego Movie

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Birdman

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Birdman

BEST FILM EDITING

Birdman

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

The Grand Budapest Hotel

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

The Grand Budapest Hotel

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Intersellar

BEST STUNTS

Edge of Tomorrow

BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE ON CAMERA

Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl

BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE BEHIND THE CAMERA

Dan Gilroy, Nightcrawler

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A YOUTH IN A LEAD OR SUPPORTING ROLE: MALE

Jaeden Lieberer, St. Vincent

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A YOUTH IN A LEAD OR SUPPORTING ROLE: FEMALE

Lilla Crawford, Into the Woods

LAIR RAID

Part Two of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit opens today. This episode is called The Desolation of Smaug, and it can be dealt with briefly: It’s a much more exciting couple of hours than last year’s An Unexpected Journey, good as that film was.

No doubt this is because the first film, like the first film in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, was concerned in a rather deliberate way with delivering backstory and carefully setting up the reasons for the adventure to come. There was a lot of feasting and singing and portentous flashbacks and solemn declarations, and it seemed to take a while to get to the chases and battles.

The Desolation starts with a quick recap of Part One and ends with an infuriating—and highly effective—cliffhanger, and in between it’s very nearly non-stop action. Our hero, as before, is the hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), who along with his full-sized pal, the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), is accompanying a band of Dwarves on a quest across Tolkien’s mythic Middle Earth to recover a treasure in Dwarf-forged gold from inside a mountain.

The difficulty with getting this ancestral treasure back is that it’s guarded by Smaug, a gargantuan fire-breathing dragon who exhibits unmistakable hoarding tendencies. Bilbo is the expedition’s designated “burglar,” tasked with sneaking into Smaug’s lair and finding a McGuffin called “The Arkenstone,” a magical rock that will somehow give the Dwarves clear title to the treasure.

I think. As is so often the case for me with high fantasy stories, I got a little lost in the exposition, and was a bit unclear on the Arkenstone’s value. But it doesn’t matter much more than “the microfilm” or whatever does in a Hitchcock thriller; I just accepted that it was important that Bilbo find the thing, and that when it came to giving it up, Smaug would be a dangerously reluctant dragon.

Anyway, as no particular Tolkien buff, I can still say that I found The Hobbit: TDOS a rollicking time. It’s one showcase scene after another. We follow the lads as they encounter a giant bear who shape-shifts at times into a giant man (or maybe it’s the other way around), or escape a nest of giant spiders, or hurtle down white water rapids in empty wine casks chased by hideous Orcs—that last sequence looks ready-made for a theme park somewhere. There’s an escape from the palaces of the Elves, and a yearning between one of the Dwarves and a quite adorable She-Elf (Evangeline Lilly). And all this comes before Bilbo ever even creeps into Smaug’s lair.

When he does, Jackson gives us the most spectacular movie dragon since, at least, the terrifying monster in the splendid 1982 fantasy Dragonslayer. Voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, Smaug is a more or less traditional dragon in design, but Jackson stages an entrance for him, gradually rising from under his drifts of gold, that is nearly as good as the original King Kong’s.

A part of what makes Smaug’s introduction so hair-raising is the slyly underscaled comic takes of Martin Freeman. As Bilbo realizes the colossal monster is aware of him and he’s been caught with his hand in the ultimate cookie jar, he reacts with bemused, almost mild irritation, like somebody who’s failed to avoid a boring colleague or a tiresome neighbor.

A couple of other notes for the weekend: Those here in the Valley who might want to do the young dinosaur buffs of their acquaintance a solid might consider taking them to the Walking With Dinosaurs 3-D event tomorrow afternoon at Arizona Museum of Natural History.

Also, somebody forwarded me this year’s necrology from Turner Classic Movies. You can check it out here, it seems comprehensive compared to the one on the Oscars.

HARD HOBBIT TO BREAK

It's a big movie weekend:

When I heard that Peter Jackson’s movie version of The Hobbit was to be another trilogy, I must admit that my heart sank. A trilogy was understandable in the case of Jackson’s massive adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings because the novels were, well, you know, a trilogy.

But The Hobbit—the only book of Tolkien’s I‘ve ever read—was a one-off, a stand-alone work, self-contained, expansive but not overflowing. The tale’s subtitle is There and Back Again, but Jackson’s first third, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, doesn’t even quite get us there, let alone back again.

The thought of this deferred gratification made me a little grumpy, but having seen the film, my reaction is—what the heck, why not? If Jackson wants to give The Hobbit this crazy, geeky, hyper-detailed treatment, and has both the imaginative and technical resources to offer one lushly splendid sequence after another, then sure, I’ll go along for the ride. Sword-and-sorcery isn’t a genre I have a particular fondness for, but Tolkien was a terrific storyteller, and Jackson is at least as good in his art, so this first Hobbit movie leaves you feeling in good hands, even if it’s not your usual cup of tea.

First published in 1937, and often classed as a children’s book, The Hobbit is the story of Bilbo Baggins, a member of the titular race of short, burrow-dwelling folk of a mythic fairy-tale past. Hobbits have big, hairy, usually bare feet and are characteristically comfort-loving, unadventurous sorts, but Bilbo gets pressed into service by his friend Gandalf, a human wizard, to go on a quest with a band of warrior dwarves to recover a treasure lost generations earlier to a dragon, Smaug. The unassuming Bilbo’s role in this band is as its “burglar,” and though he has no experience at larceny, he discovers a talent for it, and for other daring skills.

The episodic adventures involve encounters and/or battles with elves, trolls, orcs (goblins, that is), giant wolves, giant eagles, sled rabbits and other fanciful beings. Bilbo, charmingly played by Martin Freeman (and, in the frame story, by Ian Holm as an older hobbit), engages in a dual of wits with the lost, corrupted cave-dweller Gollum. Here as in the earlier films, Gollum is played, behind the CGI, by Andy Serkis, and again he’s the most compelling character: chilling yet deeply pitiable, and strangely likable.

So I found the movie highly entertaining, and if you’re a Tolkien freak you probably will even more so, though of course if you’re a Tolkien freak my recommendation is unlikely to mean much to you either way. But there was something about this movie I found distracting, even though I realize that it’s likely a generational and Pavlovian response.

The screening I saw was in 48-fps 3D, a high-frame-rate format which gives the images undeniable clarity and focus. But it also gives them, for me, the over-lit look of old-school broadcast video footage—much of the time, despite the beauty of the compositions and the kinetic smoothness of the action, it was hard for me to shake the sense that I was watching an unusually well-made episode of Masterpiece Theatre from the ‘70s. Or an episode of the Tom Baker vintage of Dr. Who. Or of Days of Our Lives.

I recognize that this probably has to do with my own childhood TV-watching associations, and that it’s unlikely to bother younger viewers. But if you grew up watching TV in the ‘70s, this Hobbit may bring you perplexing flashbacks of All in the Family, Sanford and Son and Barney Miller.

As the title suggests, Roger Michell’s period piece Hyde Park on Hudson is a British film set in the U.S. It is, in part, the story of a poor relation: Margaret “Daisy” Suckley (Laura Linney), and her longtime relationship with her (suitably distant) cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Bill Murray).

Daisy is rather mysteriously invited to keep the President company, they hit it off, and before long she’s become his mistress. She loves the role, even when the presence of Eleanor (Olivia Williams) and other more veteran women in his life leaves her standing around like a teenage girl with a crush. Linney seems too mature for her part, though she isn’t, and this eventually becomes an effective source of pathos.

The other side of the movie focuses on a 1939 visit to Roosevelt’s home in rural New York by George VI of Britain (Samuel West) and his wife (Olivia Colman)—the first-ever visit to the U.S. by British monarchs—in hopes of securing American help against the Nazis. As in The King’s Speech, George is presented as a nervous, stammering young guy, irritable at being in over his head but otherwise not a bad sort. It’s an odd episode—the implication that, four decades into the 20th Century, it still took a summit between their inbred bluebloods and our inbred bluebloods to decide the fate of the world would be comic if it weren’t infuriating.

These two plot strands never quite seem to connect in any meaningful way, and on the whole Hyde Park on Hudson is sort of slow and dawdling. It isn’t a particularly good picture, but it has many good individual scenes, and the cast is great—especially Murray, who disappears into the inscrutable FDR.

It wasn’t until after the movie was over that I thought about it—that was Carl from Caddyshack, and Winger from Stripes, yet it never occurred to me to giggle at him playing an iconic historical figure. He’s long since made the transition from comedy persona to full-service character actor. Cinderella boy, outta nowhere.

Valley moviegoers who can only get to one movie this weekend, however, should consider Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat, presented by Greater Phoenix Jewish Film Festival at 2 p.m. Sunday at FilmBar. It’s a personal documentary with a quiet punch—a gradually rising tide of conflicted emotion.

It begins with Goldfinger and his family clearing out his grandmother’s Tel Aviv apartment after her death, at 98. Her books and tchochkes show that she remained culturally German, but this didn’t prepare Goldfinger for the revelation that his Zionist grandparents traveled to Palestine in the ‘30s…in the company of a Nazi and his wife.

Not just any Nazi, either, but Baron Leopold von Mildenstein, a writer for the ferociously anti-semitic Der Angriff, and later a bigwig with the SS. At the time Von Mildenstein was advocating the idea that German Jews could, as Mitt Romney might put it, “self-deport” to Palestine.

Goldfinger is startled to learn that Von Mildenstein and his father, both educated, sophisticated men, became friends on this trip, as did their wives. He’s flabbergasted when he later learns that after the war, they renewed the friendship. Before long he finds himself interviewing—almost interrogating—Von Mildenstein’s pleasant, warmhearted and utterly in-denial daughter, and his own almost more evasive mother.

The more he probes the mystery, the more baffled he becomes, and the more unsettling and ambiguous The Flat becomes. What keeps it from being depressing is the vividness of its portraits, including that of Goldfinger himself, reluctantly opening old wounds, but showing up for interviews with a nice bouquet. He’s like an apologetic Max Ophuls.

RIP to sitar master Ravi Shankar, passed on 91.

OF ALL THE UNMITIGATED GOLLUM

With part one of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy opening tomorrow…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to the creepy cave creature Gollum, as realized in the animated 1977 Rankin-Bass adaptation of The Hobbit…

The Big G was given voice in this show by the peerless Brother Theodore...

...and meaning no disrespect to the excellent Andy Serkis, Theodore could wrap his rasp around the word “Precious” like nobody else…