A self-taught critic and genuine movie geek
I’m wondering just how annoyed that guy I overheard after the first movie is, now that the trilogy is done and it’s pretty clear that they should have stuck with the original plan and made two movies instead of three. I hate to say it, I know people are enjoying them and all, but this installment in particular didn’t really do a whole lot for me.
Continue reading “The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies”
At least this time there’s a different problem with the movie — this one was edited too much, as opposed to last week, when it wasn’t edited nearly enough. It’s too bad there isn’t a way to average them out somehow, except then we’d end up with a movie about a vampire trying to find his missing wife while fending off scary hordes of rampaging Turks and reporters.
Now it’s easier to see how they managed to pad the book out to three movies — they not only added in Legolas, they wedged in a romantic subplot… and a very unlikely one, too, let me add. Of course, any overt romance in a Tolkien novel is unlikely, so whenever you see it in a movie adaptation you can be pretty sure it was added in later by command of some studio executive.
Continue reading “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”
As the movie’s opening helpfully informs us, Edgar Allan Poe was found in a bad state in October, 1849, in Baltimore, and died not long thereafter. “In a bad state”, for Poe, was very likely code for “falling down drunk”, but no one’s absolutely sure of that, or even exactly what he died of, though it certainly might have been liver failure. The movie has him found on a park bench, though some sources claim he was found in the gutter, while others say it was in a pub, but hey, I don’t think anyone’s shocked at the idea that a Hollywood movie dramatized the facts a little too much.
In ancient times, everyone lived perched on the edge of a cliff. No, seriously. In the case of the deities, I’m sure it’s for dramatic effect, but even peasants live in villages carved into the face of the living rock, overlooking a steep, sheer drop down into the unforgiving ocean. Acrophobia must not have been invented yet.
I’ve read that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when writing a Sherlock Holmes story, used to start with the solution and then fill in the plot and clues that would lead to that solution. My suspicion is that something similar happened here. I think someone said, “Hey, you know what would be really cool? If there was an airship battle over Notre Dame that knocked gargoyles off the roof!” Then someone else said that it would be even better if they were steampunky airships, and then someone else said that it would be even better if there was lots and lots of swordfighting, too.
Continue reading “The Three Musketeers”