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.

CIRCUIT TO THE CHASE

In the political thriller Closed Circuit, opening today, a truck bomb explodes in a London market, killing dozens. The surviving terrorist is assigned two lawyers—one, Martin (Eric Bana), to defend him in his public trial, the other, Claudia (Rebecca Hall) to advocate for him during the closed hearings involving classified evidence, which is kept secret even from Martin.

Claudia and Martin have an illicit romantic past—his marriage broke up over his affair with her. This creates the teeniest conflict of interest, but the lawyers, eager for the high-profile assignment, neglect to tell the judge this. Before long both of them, working separately, become aware that they’re under a near-Orwellian level of surveillance, and then that their lives are in danger, as they discover a secret at the heart of the case that the Government is willing to kill to protect. Sadly, nothing seems very implausible about any of this.

Directed by John Crowley from a script by Steven Knight, Closed Circuit hurtles forward with almost unseemly speed and economy. There isn’t a shot or a line of dialogue in the picture that could be called digressive, and the tension rises with metronomic precision, driven along by Joby Talbot’s ominous orchestral music. The atmosphere of humorless, frightened suspicion is palpable and oppressive, and the movie grips.

As usual, the acting has a lot to do with this. Bana’s charm has always been elusive to me, but here he’s supposed to be a bit of a cold fish, so he’s effective, and Hall is engaging as ever, even in this less-than-warm role. From the supporting cast comes creditable work by Ciaran Hinds, Anne-Marie Duff, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed and especially Jim Broadbent as a mild-mannered yet almost satanic Attorney General who drops into the movie now and then to level a threat in the most pleasant manner possible.

When Closed Circuit was all over, I did find myself wondering why Claudia and Martin didn’t make a point of shoving their at-risk witness in front of the TV cameras outside the Old Bailey, or why they didn’t simply say in court, in a tattletale-ish sort of voice, “M’lud, MI-5 has been trying to kill us all night.” But Closed Circuit wouldn’t be the first thriller that pulls you along so skillfully that you don’t think about its gaps in logic until after the end credits roll.

As in 1812, the British seem to have re-invaded the States—but this time they’ve targeted our multiplexes. Over the course of the week, along with Closed Circuit, at least two other movies from, by or about Brits have landed wide Yank release: the boy-band documentary One Direction: This Is Us and the Simon Pegg comedy The World’s End. The former will be discussed when it opens here Friday, so let’s talk The World’s End here…

The third entry in the “Cornetto Trilogy” of comedies written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, directed by Wright and starring Pegg and Nick Frost is now in theaters. The first, 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, is a classic both of the zombie genre and of Brit comedy; the second, the 2007 cop-movie spoof Hot Fuzz, started out perhaps even more brilliantly than Shaun but ran out of steam toward the end.

World’s End resides somewhere between the two—not quite the homerun of Shaun, but ultimately more satisfying than Hot Fuzz. The main character is Gary King (Pegg) who is trying to reunite four old school friends (Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan) to have another go at a legendary but unfinished pub crawl from 1990 in their hometown of Newtown Haven, whose major claim to fame is that it’s home to Britain’s oldest roundabout.

Gary’s a scruffy loser who never grew up, while the other four have moved on to relatively mature lives—and one, Andie (Frost) bears Gary a bitter grudge. Nonetheless, all four of his friends show up for the 12-pub crawl, their sights set to finish with a pint at the pub called The World’s End.

This middle-aged outing alone might have provided enough laughs for a movie by itself, whipped forward by the snappy comic punctuation of Wright’s editing. But about midpoint, The World’s End suddenly takes a strange sci-fi twist, as the lads realize that something has changed in Newton Haven.

Really, it’s just roughly the zillionth variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it’s an amusing one, and the motivation of the invaders links up thematically with Gary’s personality. As with Hot Fuzz, the movie is a little overambitious—it goes on a smidge too long, and not every scene works. But there are plenty of laughs, and a few touching moments, and the performances are fine, especially by the feisty, stouthearted Frost.

It should also be noted that the final decision of the aliens with regard to humanity—pronounced by Bill Nighy as the voice of “The Network”—is basically the same as that of The Pods in Jack Finney’s original novel The Body Snatchers.

BUCCANEER-PERFECT

You could learn a lot from The Pirates! Band of Misfits. I certainly did. I never knew, for instance, that Charles Darwin was a whiny sort who really just wanted to get a girlfriend, or that Jane Austen and The Elephant Man had a personal connection, or that Queen Victoria was a member of a secret society that enjoyed…well, I don’t want to give too many of the film’s astounding revelations away.

From the hero, known simply as The Pirate Captain, I learned that the best thing about piracy is Ham Night. At one point he also proclaims that the friends you make after you become famous are far better than the ones you had before, and at another point that certain undertakings are only impossible if you stop and think about them. But he too must learn his lessons—most importantly, he learns that you can’t just say “Arrrr” at the end of a sentence and think that makes everything OK.

Voiced by Hugh Grant, The Pirate Captain commands, not very despotically, a crew of sensitive-souled types such as The Pirate With a Scarf (Martin Freeman), The Pirate With Gout (Brendan Gleeson) and The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (Ashley Jensen), who may possibly be a woman in pirate drag and a false beard. He’s really not a bad sort, as pirate captains go, but he has a tragic weakness—for recognition by his peers. His lifelong ambition has been to be named Pirate of the Year, but alas the only award he’s landed so far is “Best Anecdote About a Squid.”

Many of us might regard such an accolade as achievement enough for any career, but The Pirate Captain just can’t give up on Pirate of the Year, an unrealistic goal in light of his lack of booty (in the older sense of the term). When he raids a ship that turns out to be HMS Beagle, The Captain learns from Darwin (David Tennant) that his beloved, unusually large avian mascot Polly isn’t actually a parrot at all, but rather a surviving dodo, and that if the young naturalist could present it to the Royal Academy, it would surely be named discovery of the year.

The Captain is sure that this will somehow be a stepping-stone to Pirate of the Year, so he hoists sail for London.

Adapted from Gideon Defoe’s 2004 book The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists (under which title the film has been released in the UK), this stop-motion Aardman Studios feature was directed by Peter Lord, of Chicken Run. It’s far more freewheeling and absurd than the tense, dramatic Chicken Run, however.

I loved how The Pirates! turned anachronism into a virtue, creating a mash-up of a 19th Century in which Darwin, Victoria, Jane Austen and The Elephant Man all rubbed elbows, and, for that matter, also encompassing the 17th and 18th Centuries, during which, after all, most of the so-called Golden Age of Piracy actually took place. I loved Darwin’s stone-faced simian butler, and the alternately furious and flirtatious Queen (Imelda Staunton), and the movie’s odd, persistent fixation on ham, right down to the Skull and Crossed Hambones on the flag.

Silliness like this—cheerful, defiant silliness as only the Brits, it seems, can do it—is, I think, good for one’s health from time to time, and so is the low-tech, hand-wrought madness of stop-motion animation. Both have become rarities, and their confluence makes The Pirates! a small treasure.