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
And where is Frank? I have been patiently waiting and still no mention of the guy with the big head? I gotta find me a new blog...
ReplyDeleteWhat can I say, I guess my colleagues were having none of it. "Frank" will show up here, no kidding. But you'd talk of finding a new blog, on a day when I mention your beloved Billy Connolly?
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing too surprising or outside the box here. The editing award for BIRDMAN through me a bit. It sometimes feels as if the editing award for Oscars, and I guess just in general, goes to the movie that LOOKS as if it has been properly edited. In other words, the movie with the most edits often wins. It’s interesting to go for a movie where the editing was minimal. I remember taking a film class where the professor showed a single ten minute shot from THE RED AND THE WHITE and made the point that this shot showed just as much “editing” as the Odessa Steps sequence from POTEMKIN. That’s okay in theory, and I get the point he was making, but in terms of actually splicing together two pieces of film, not so much. As someone who has shot and editing a fair amount of footage, I’ve always thought that it is damn near impossible to tell if a movie is well edited. When someone writes that the editing in a movie is good or bad, what do they mean exactly? Does that mean the scenes and the overall movie are well paced. What else are they talking about? It seems that unless you know what footage an editor had to work with, it would be difficult to know if a movie is truly edited well. Thelma Schoonmaker is praised as one of the best editors working today, but she has Scorsese shooting footage for her. Is it really that difficult to cut Scorsese’s footage together? On a similar note, it could be that the person who cut I, FRANKENSTEIN is a damn genius for being able to make something halfway coherent out of the footage he had to work with. Have you ever read Ralph Rosenblum’s book When the Shooting Stops? It’s an eye opener to the life and craft of a film editor.
ReplyDeleteI have a question, and I’m sure you cannot go into detail. I’ll often read about, say, the New York Film Critics Association and how contentious and political the voting can be. Do you find that to be the case, or is a consensus reached pretty quickly? Is this up for debate, or do you simply vote and no one really knows who is voting for what?
Hi Phil. Your point about it being hard to know if a film is well edited is fascinating and I suspect true. After I saw Coppola's original cut of Apocalypse Now it made me think that the editor there--Walter Murch, wasn't it?--was really the savior of that film. Later, when I saw the much longer, very different first cut of Tom Hanks' That Thing You Do! I thought the same feelng--that the editor had essentially turned it from a poky, overlong mess with some terrific passages into a delightful whole.
ReplyDeleteAs to your question, I've never seen any serious contentiousness among the PCS members about awards voting (sometimes about other issues, maybe, but not about that), but there used to be some politicking; members would send out mass emails pushing for their favorites. I did a bit of it myself. Sadly, the critic that I recall doing this the most, Neil Cohen, passed on a couple of years ago, & it seems to have dried up since then.
Happy Holidays to you & yours Phil!