The wrath of Tolkien, the majesty of Jackson, the fickleness of Fandom.

Wizard Peter Jackson concludes the movie trilogy that stole his baby fat. THE HOBBIT comes to a spectacular end – greed, fury, purity of heart and interspecies love – to the wonderment of appreciative moviegoers and the chagrin of sniveling purists.

THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES is not for everyone. It’s not for people who enjoy well-made movies with sweeping cinematography, unbounded excitement, hero angles, evocative soundtrack and seamless CGI. (If you don’t want to see this kind of excellence – don’t go!) It’s also not for Hobbit fans who love touting their bona fides by citing every mismatched character name or location. (There are many divergences from the source material. You know this. Don’t go, only to complain about divergences from the source material.) It’s not for people who pretend a literary-to-filmic sophistication that would have us believe they could do a better job envisioning this monument than a master filmmaker (maybe you would have put that thing here and this thing there, but YOU deal with deadlines, unions, budgets, studio assfaces and people who pretend literary-to-filmic sophistication). And finally, it’s not for YOU. Go gripe somewhere else.

If, on the other hand, you love movies, as I do, and appreciate an all-encompassing cinematic experience created with a surfeit of sincerity, with its cast and crew driving for excellence in art, entertainment, and capitalistic gain, then by all means, I’ll meet you at the corner of wealth and damnation and we’ll enter Peter Jackson’s final HOBBIT chapter together, holding hands with dandelions braided through our hair…

Somewhere between that second and third paragraph lies THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES…

Movie opens two seconds after THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG (2013): Dragon coming. Lake-town aflame. Tauriel hot.

Until Bard the bowman (Luke Evans, power mullet) twangs into Smaug’s heart the Dragon-Armor-Piercing arrow from the Plot Convenience Warehouse.

With Smaug dead, his stolen mountain of gold under Erebor is for the taking. Which Dwarf leader Thorin (Richard Armitage) immediately claims for himself, barricading this ancient Dwarf stronghold from the outside world. His contingent of waddling Dwarfs reluctantly humor his delusions of grandeur, whilst at his behest, searching in vain for one solitary jewel amongst the hoard, called the Arkenstone. However, Hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) has it in his Pocket Which Things Never Fall Out Of, and uses it as a bargaining chip to get more screentime. Thorin swoons over his gold, forsaking those less fortunate and condemning to death anyone with the bad taste to not be rich like him (aka Dragon Sickness, aka Mitt Romney Sickness). But… uh… guys, you’re sitting on a literal mountain of gold… with no dragon to guard it anymore…

Any wonder everyone wants a piece of that bitch?

Poffolas the Bowcuke

the five…

1) Bard the dragonslayer, who comes a-knockin on Erebor’s fortress, seeking his promised recompense on behalf of Lake-town, for giving the Dwarfs haven. Also needing those riches to rebuild, not that it’s anyone’s fault the Dragon fried their homes (cough–totally Dwarfs’ fault–)

2) Supermodel Elf king Thranduil (Lee Pace, whose character name is Elvish for “Men will be strangely attracted to me”) wants his share to buy hair products for his army of blondes.

3) Dain (Billy Connolly) a Glaswegian Dwarf who leads an army of drunks that just want a pint and some bangers. Dain’s specialty is shouting and headbutting, which is no acting stretch for Billy Connolly, as I’m sure this was a regular occurrence backstage after many of his standup shows.

4) Azog the Annoying, who leads the Orc army of Special Effects and wants to kill everyone just because.

5) Bolg, Azog’s ambiguously gay Burt Ward, who brings his psycho circus of goblins from Gundabad (which is the sound a Russian makes when he sneezes), and wants to kill everyone else. Just because also.

AS ONE MIGHT GUESS… the focus in this movie is completely off the title character and the One Ring he secretly carries in his pocket, that will cause so much agita a short time hence… Aside from a couple of plot points, Hobbit Bilbo Baggins is forgotten for the most part. But I’m not complaining, just observing a fact. This is a differently toned movie from its predecessors. Fer cryin out loud, it’s called THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES – and guess what happens? Five. Armies. Battle. No false advertising, no bait and switch. And the most amazing part: it never gets confusing. The director tracks all the action with a jeweler’s eye. Liam Neeson battles five guys in any TAKEN movie and our eyeballs spin at the try-hard directing. Here, five armies are pitted against each other and we never lose focus. Peter Jackson helms this sprawling battle atlas with an iron fist (with good ole Andy Serkis (Kong, Gollum, Caesar) as 2nd Unit Director!). And he is well aware that the gung-ho is only exciting because we care about all the characters stressing for oxygen within its framework; in, around and through this mighty fracas, each character’s emotional arc is given weight and played out artfully.

The badass Legolas returns!

Though Legolas (Orlando Bloom) does not appear in the book The Hobbit, we have seen him portrayed in these HOBBIT movies unlike the Legolas we grew to man-love in THE LORD OF THE RINGS movies; here, he is merely the clinical archer, with a cold affection for Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and a penchant for weird contact lenses. But that square-jawed swinger that brought down the elephant in RETURN OF THE KING (2003) is back! When he is not cockblocking Kili (Aidan Turner), he is swaggering through action sequences that make us braid dandelions through our hair. He is at the top of a tower overlooking a chasm that he needs to breach. No problem, as he characteristically squares that jaw and leaps onto a giant troll, shish-kebabs the troll through the top of its head and “guides” its stumbling death throes to head-butt the tower, which falls across the chasm and bridges it! What a badass!

As the Dragon attacks, proud Tauriel leads the refugees of Lake-town through watery channels aflame with dragonfire and— who am I kidding? All I’m thinking about is unbraiding her hair…

Anyone with a smidgeon of evolutionary knowledge will wonder at the Disneyfied “love affair” between Tauriel (an Elf) and Kili (a Dwarf). Firstly, these are not biological “humans” – their differences are not analogous to, say, Chinese and Russians; Elves and Dwarfs seem separated at a higher taxonomic level, more along the lines of Rick Santorum’s man on dog analogy. And if so, they cannot interbreed. If their chromosomes are incompatible, they would not even be attracted to one another. (Their attraction should thus be classified as “deviant.” Ask Rick Santorum. But he probably loves these movies, which shows what an ignorant hypocrite he is.)

If they are on the same species line, then sociological aspects would come into play: the female is larger and a fiercer warrior than the male, so she doesn’t require him for protection; she is self-sufficient, so doesn’t require him as provider; she is prettier (only just!), so no leaning on him for visual status, and even if she looked to him for social status (he is ascendant to the Dwarf throne; she a lowly silvan elf), she couldn’t possibly benefit from his throne as he would be kicked to the Mirkwood curb if he took a she-elf for a queen. How could this possibly be a two-way street? It would seem natural that HE would lust after HER greenery, but why on Middle Earth would she crave his stubby knob?

And even if we accept their unnatural, irrational attraction, why would Tauriel weep so inconsolably over Kili’s death, when they had never taken it to the next level – never taken it to any level other than sensuous whispering? Yet even through this weeping scene, which bleeds naiveté, we perceive the grand storytelling arc that was achieved. Thranduil had earlier mocked Tauriel’s “love” for the Dwarf, almost messing up his hair in his anger. Now, as she laments, “If this is love, I don’t want it! Why does it hurt so much?” his reply shows his heartfelt realization, “Because the love was real.” A recant of his earlier stance, and a testament to his understanding hair.

The badass from all the other Middle Earth films, Gandalf (Ian McKellen) has no such scene-stealing here, and suffers the same fate as the underused Hobbit. Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) shines as a powerhouse, repulsing Sauron from a rocky knoll, along with Hugo Weaving (hero angles) and Christopher Lee (Famous Last Words).

2 hours, 20 minutes long, yet before we know it, FIVE ARMIES is rolling through its three endings. One very emotional, one very connected to LORD OF THE RINGS, and one very Thranduil.

I still remember a time when the likes of Peter Jackson’s series of films (which have miles more credibility than the HARRY POTTERs or TWILIGHTs, and are far removed from the STAR WARS prequel debacles) would have stunned audiences into lauding him as a Kubrick; instead, the democratization of the interwebs has given the snivelers, the ungreased wheels, the platform to spew their faux-sophistication in unbridled ignorance. With unconscionable spelling. I don’t remember a time in history when such a great film was lambasted with such vitriol for no good reason. I would say to the snivelers what Emma Stone tells Michael Keaton in BIRDMAN: You’re doing this because you’re scared to death, like the rest of us, that you don’t matter. And you know what? You’re right. You don’t.

My final recommendation for the majestic epic THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES: Don’t see it. You’ll just complain.

END

The Wolverine Show, Part VII.

Wolverine goes back in time to unify the X-Men of the disco past to stop an event that brings into existence giant robots called Sentinels, who are systematically wiping out X-Men of the dystopian present. It’s a heart-gripping, tension-filled, magnificent, sprawling epic – that doesn’t make one lick of sense!

Pofftique

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST is the highly anticipated filmic version of a classic 2-issue X-Men comic thread, involving time travel, the extermination of Humanity and the extinction of X-manity. But I don’t see why there was such anticipation, because the Days Of Future Past story, from The Uncanny X-Men issues 141-142, is not well constructed, and reads like a 1960s BATMAN TV episode, with garish costumes, lots of punching, embarrassing dialogue and big dumb villains (the Sentinels and the Brotherhood of Mutants, led by Mystique). The Sentinels in the comic are made of metal, so they could have easily been destroyed by an old gay man (i.e. Magneto); the Brotherhood are straight from Adam West’s wildest, melodramatic, talky-villain dreams.

The DAYS OF FUTURE PAST movie on the other hand (written by Jane Goldman, Simon Kinberg, Matthew Vaughn, and directed by the man who brought the X-MEN movies to life, Bryan Singer), has taken every squandered idea from the comic and fleshed it into a layered, thrilling epic that exists in a world we are familiar with (rather than one populated with so many characters wearing SCREAMING YELLOW). Note that the writers of the comic (Chris Claremont and John Byrne) are not credited. Nor should they be; although worthy writers, their dated ideas feel like being kissed by your parents in front of your school friends. Plot holes are closed off, action is deadly serious; what might have been a bucking cosplay tyrannosaur is reined in with hefty dialogue scenes, touching interrelationships and Wolverine’s butt in place of Kitty Pryde (who is bland in the comics and the movies). Most importantly, instead of garish costumes, everyone’s wearing a disco inferno.

The movie sentinels don’t fall into that trap of being easily defeatable; they are now made of a polymer substance, augmented with mutant DNA, enabling them to take on each X-Man’s powers and use it against them. It’s a completely specious rationalization, but again, in this universe, at least it explains why even the most powerful mutants cannot defeat them.

The cast from both X-MEN and X-MEN: FIRST CLASS are all here: James McAvoy as young Professor Xavier (who spends his first few scenes as Eric Stoltz in PULP FICTION); Michael Fassbender as young Magneto. That guy takes it sooo seriously. I said it before, and I’ll say it again, not as joke or pun, but fact as cold as steel: Fassbender is magnetic! Even Ian McKellen, having done three movies as the character, never owned Erik Lensherr as maliciously-deliciously as Fassbender. Whenever he’s onscreen, it’s like watching a somber Nietzschean treatise on moral ambiguity. With Ian McKellen, it’s like watching Dr. Smith from LOST IN SPACE. And the myriad, creative ways Fassbender utilizes the Master of Metal’s awe-inspiring powers! When I grow up, I wanna be Magneto!

Nicholas Hoult in a large role as blue-furred Hank/Beast; Shawn Ashmore is Iceman with a beard; Daniel Cudmore is the cool steel Colossus; Lucas Till makes a cameo as energyboy Havok; and Jennifer Lawrence and her chubby cheeks return in the lead female role as naked blue Mystique.

The plot revolves around Wolverine convincing the disco X-Men to stop Mystique killing the man who invents the Sentinels, the bane of X-Men. So you can see the conundrum: Mystique is doing what any X-Man in their right mind would do. But now this wolfie guy is telling us counter intuitively that the killing of the inventor of the Sentinels will fast-track their creation, rather than stop it. Oh, and he sez he’s from The Future, so everything he sez is true…

Awesome Little-Person-with-Big-Voice, Peter Dinklage, is Bolivar Trask, who creates the Sentinels to combat the “mutant threat.” He tells congress “homo neanderthalis was completely wiped out when homo sapiens arrived on the scene. So too would be the fate of homo sapiens now that homo superior had arrived.” Meanwhile, Wolverine is still walking around as a homo erectus.

Speaking of erectus, can they make Mystique and her pussy-jitsu any more of a walking orgasm for the sake of 13-year-old boys? Not only is she 23-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, distinctly attainable to 13-year-olds were they to become rich entrepreneurs in the next 10 years, her martial arts technique involves mostly open thighs, jiggling titty and a zealot’s commitment to camel toe.

And there are some peachy new mutants to splice our DNA: Warpath (Booboo Stewart, whom we presume gets so mad over people calling him names that he “goes on the…”?), Bishop (doing the channeling-energy thing that The Bacon did in the last movie), Blink (with a cool teleporting power), Sunspot (who is basically the Human Torch redux – who’re you “superhero creators” trying to fool?), and the absolute coolest cat of all – Quicksilver (Evan Peters, who is basically The Flash, but played like a champion ADHD, with a madcap rescue scene that will guarantee he gets his own spinoff movie).

Wolverine (for the seventh time, ladies and gentlemen, Hugh Jackman, who looks like…well, a superhero) is sent back in time through the scientific process of Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) putting her hands on his temples and Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) watching and licking their lips like two dirty old men. When he arrives back in time, his muscles are already pumped, his adamantium is gone (a few good sight gags of these realizations), Nixon is the president, his nemesis Stryker is but a military lad, and his bellbottoms are pimpin’. The focus soon skews to the incredible powers of Quicksilver (being totally speedy), Mystique (being totally naked) and Magneto (being totally Fassbender). And like all time travel movies, it is artfully written that what they were trying to stop happening, happens anyway through another unforeseen pathway.

Of course, the overarching mistakes of this movie are the time travel anomalies (if we take the Laws Of Time Travel as being those laid down in BACK TO THE FUTURE all those centuries ago). But then, this movie – like any blockbuster – was not written to comply with Time Travel rules, but written to comply with Hollywood Screenplay Rules – and when held up to those rules, it’s absolutely brilliant! Heroes, villains, romantic repression, sexy bodies, world at stake, ticking clocks, character arcs, foreshadowing and payoffs… you couldn’t ask for a better example of modern screenplay construction.

Superhero movies, though they have become their own art form, are still not perceived as containing the inherent gravitas of non-superhero dramas, so we forget what great actors populate them. Jesus! Look at the talent: Shakespeare vets Stewart and McKellen, the great McAvoy and the magnificent Fassbender, the man-nificent Jackman, the small-man-nificent Dinklage, the women-ificent Jennifer Lawrence and Halle Berry (and all of the principals have won Best Actor awards in some form or other, Oscar, BAFTA, AFI, Globes, etc.).

The story just doesn’t make any sense, is all…

You see, it didn’t matter in the present whether everyone died or not – in fact, most of them die – but the movie treats the Present like a parallel timeline with the Past, but it’s not – it’s successive: the Present happens after the Past has been acted out, or after the past has been reshuffled. So why are the Present Kitty, Professor X, Magneto, and a host of new Wikipedia entries, depicted as making some kind of last stand as if Wolverine’s mission had to end for their Present to be saved? Let’s face it, as soon as Wolvie was sent back, their Present should have changed.

I mean, all that Wolverine had to do was stop Biff giving the Almanac to himself in 1955, right?

You mean the Present was not changed one jot after disco Magneto cut loose a football stadium, flew it through the air and dumped it on the White House lawn? At least 1,000,000 lives would have been skewed with that single event – not just ticket holders contacting the booking company to get their money back, but the players’ lives, the insurance companies of the game, insurance companies of the site, White House contractors hired to remove the rubble; traffic detours; water and power re-routed; a family goes without food, a baby dies that would have won Gold Medals; a woman doesn’t make it to the hospital on time to birth a baby that discovers the cure for AIDS, etc. The ramifications and concatenations would be literally endless. That’s just one event – the stadium gag – but these disco X-Men rove around smashing, flying, breaking, bashing, shooting, unmindful of the millions of time pathways they are deviating due to Wolverine affecting everything and everyone who orbits in his vicinity with his intrusive presence and whip-tanned butt.

And not even a sliver of the Present changed until that one last decision by Chubby Cheeks on whether to be or not to be?

Where’s Doc Emmett Brown when we need him?

END

Attack of the Action Sequences.

Hobbit Bilbo Baggins and the troupe of Dwarves from Erebor continue their quest through Middle Earth to reclaim the Dwarves’ homeland from the Dragon Smaug.

Along the way they are attacked by Orcs, cocooned by giant spiders, imprisoned by Elves, barreled through rapids, smuggled by a boatman, sculpt a statue of gold, and ascend through a toilet, which is ironic when they pee their pants dodging a Dragon.

Martin Freeman is still Bilbo Baggins, Richard Armitage is still Thorin BadMotorScooter, Gandalf is still badass, and everyone else is still everyone else. We are thrown into the adventure headfirst after a short flashback prelude between Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and Thorin at The Prancing Pony (a familiar tavern from THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING … or at least, it will be a familiar tavern… uh, in the future). No time for foreplay as this movie – like that other middle movie, THE TWO TOWERS – is a continuance, and expects us to know our wood elves from our cave trolls. Consequently, there is barely time for characterization, as the action sequences pile on top of us like wood elves and cave trolls.

Director Peter Jackson continues his epic fairy tale with THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG, the second part of a trilogy of films crafted around J.R.R. Tolkien’s small book, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. Once again, it’s a monumental imagining of a fantasy world that has, up to now, only been envisioned dimly in cartoons. Jackson unveils his glorious, authentic realization of a mythic world – and it makes me wonder how many hugs some people missed as children when they refuse to accept this wondrous filmic escapism for what it is, and nag nag nag that it’s  “not like the book” and nitpick esoteric minutiae.As John Wayne once said, “No one should go to the movies unless they believe in heroes.” And special effects.

And since when have books been so sacred to you people, who would rather toggle a first-person shooter than sit in the sunlight, open a thing with pages and drink in its wonder? Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guillermo del Toro (yes, that guy) have departed from Tolkien’s words considerably, but unlike some hubristic cave trolls who deign to rewrite Stephen King or Philip K. Dick, Jackson has transmorphed Tolkien’s 1930’s sensibility for a 21st century audience. His “dramatic license” keeps the tale kinetic, entertaining and – sexy.

As Liv Tyler balanced out the swimming testosterone in the LOTR series, here the sausage-fest is mitigated by the sunsparkle of Evangeline Lilly as Elf Tauriel, the most beautiful woman on Earth in this epoch (either that, or I’m looking at Orlando Bloom). Battle dynamism, magnificent bow-and-dagger choreography, sweeping arcs of dying Orcs, sex-on-the-hoof killing machine, tresses like fountains of chocolate cascading waterfall over leaf-green shoulders, opaline eyes, aquiline nose, cheekbones like battle daggers – and look! She has Steven Tyler’s lips!

Tolkien was a master tale-teller, but a product of his time, paying little pc attention to the raging homoerotic overtones of his man-quests, so Tauriel is pure invention from one of the master tale-tellers of our time.

And with Tauriel comes – Legolas! We are home again, as Orlando Bloom reprises his role as Elfin archer and Aragorn’s love interest from the LOTR movies. At one point, Legolas asks a Dwarf about an amulet that he carries, “And who is that?” The Dwarf answers, “My son, Gimli” (who, of course, would become grudging battle compatriot of Legolas in the RINGS trilogy, and the third side in the love-triangle between Aragorn and Legolas).

Dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner), voted Middle Earth People Magazine’s Sexiest Dwarf Alive, channels David Cassidy so much that Tauriel’s ears get pointier for him – but she’s Legolas’s lass! Not to worry, parents, as this love triangle is barely consummated with a few glances and spoken words between the three, rather than Legolas busting in on Tauriel and Kili doing it cave troll style. Later, Kili, though injured, shows he still got game, when Tauriel fights through Orcs to be at his side and cure him, saying to her in a delirious whisper, “You can’t be her – she walks a thousand miles away in starlight…” (Chicks – they’ll believe aything!) As his fingers cautiously intertwine with hers, “Do you think she could have loved me?” By now her little Elf-knickers have greened many times over, as she looks down at him – at us –  offering a tentative smile… it’s such a “moment” that it woke up my cave troll.

Gandalf is SUCH a badass!

After warding off Orc attacks from the Villain From The Previous Movie (Azog, a CGI bovver boy with magnificent trapezius), Gandalf tells Thorin to summon a meeting between the Seven Dwarf Kingdoms – waitaminute, are they having a laugh? You mean Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs own some kingdoms? No, dummy, seven Dwarf kingdoms! Oh, you mean seven teeny tiny kingdoms?… No, normal-sized kingdoms populated with Dwarfs! Uh, then how do the Dwarfs reach the doorknobs?…

”Let’s see what’s behind the door marked Dragon Ballz.”

Gandalf leaves the Dwarfs and Bilbo at the edge of Mirkwood Forest, to go do some other wizarding things, like washing his burlap robe before it starts standing up by itself without magic, entreating them, “Do not leave the path or you will never find it again.” After leaving the path and finding it again, they are captured by the Elves. Oh, my love thrums for those tresses like fountains cascading waterfall over leaf-green shoulders, opaline eyes, aquiline nose, cheekbones like battle daggers – wait, that’s Legolas’s father, Thranduil (Lee Pace).

Meanwhile, Gandalf is storming a haunted castle on his lonesome, with minimal help from that wizard with the jizz in his hair, Radagast (Sylvester McCoy). The evil entity Sauron appears to him, looking like the Dio devil from Holy Diver, and Gandalf engages in magic battle like the Lord of Badass that he is.

Escape from the blond beauties, the Dwarfs smuggle themselves into Laketown, via a handsome ferryman named Bard (Luke Evans, Zeus in IMMORTALS), where they meet the crusty Stephen Fry in an eccentric performance as the despot king.

Like TWO TOWERS, DESOLATION splits our heroes into three factions: the Dwarfs and Bilbo at Lonely Mountain, Dwarfs and Elves at Laketown (where it is implied that only Bard has the means to destroy the impending Dragon), and Gandalf’s wizarding solo tour.

At this point, some of the critique against DESOLATION OF SMAUG gains weight: LORD OF THE RINGS was an epic tale because nothing less than the future of Middle Earth was at stake; THE HOBBIT is being made into an epic tale, even though all that’s at stake is one Lonely Mountain. And right about the third act, we start to feel the breadth of the tale not matching the stakes. For example, why are the Orcs still obsessively pursuing the Dwarfs? Why is Legolas obsessively pursuing the Orcs? Why is Gandalf badassing about by himself? And why isn’t Kili going cave troll on Tauriel?

And if the Dwarfs fail in their quest, well, it’s just a few Dwarfs failing to take back their literal mountain of gold coins and jewelry. Huh, not so much empathetic support now for these Wall Street pricks, I’ll wager. Thorin even does a Mitt Romney and starts treating Bilbo like the 47%, as if Bilbo owes it to the Dwarfs to sneak into the gold chamber and grab their Arkenstone (for a reason yet to be established by logic or physics).

Another irksome aspect is all the action sequences where each Dwarf is as adept as a superspy. During the barrel ride, Orcs come blazing at them from all sides, yet all these faceless glorified extras display a killing proficiency that rivals Tom Cruise in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II – even Bombur the fatty-fatty-boomsticks! (Okay, maybe they’re well trained, but when they’re all running from danger in a group, they all run at the same speed, even the fatty-fatty-boomsticks! Is Middle Earth gravity different from Earth’s? When they all fall from a great height, not only are none of them hurt, but you would think that Bombur’s obesity would affect him more adversely than the rest, but no, he gets up just as quickly as the others and keeps running!) These action scenes – though excellently choreographed, especially the inspiring killing skills of the Elves – have to be this outlandish because they are couched in this supposed “epic” – but we’ve just discerned the overarching tale itself as not really that epic, so in the end the action scenes are another dissonant chord in the movie’s tone.

But this is why THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG shines like a cerulean Arkenstone amongst a sea of blood gold:

The One Ring [insert Howard Shore’s eerily hypnotic Ring theme that calms us, yet scares us, that seduces yet repulses, that sings high in our temples, yet my precious… my preciousssssss….].

The effect of the Ring features heavily in this episode; the fingerband of gold with the power to turn its wearer invisible that Bilbo found in the Goblin cave (and that he keeps secret from everyone) is starting to affect his psyche. The more he uses it, the more adverse its effect on him, never more artfully rendered than in one startling moment, when he pulls the Ring off his finger, becomes visible again, and has to clap his hand over his mouth in terror to stop himself from screaming. That one second is what this movie was made for; Martin Freeman’s acting chops could rise no higher, wrenching a look of brain-damaging horror and confusion across his face as his panicked eyes regard the “wrongness” of The Ring.

Smaug the Dragon – that’s what you’ve been waiting for, right? After that sensational giant dragon at the end of HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, Smaug better be ultra-cosmo! We know one thing about him – he’s got a gold fetish, covering himself completely in it like Scrooge McDuck. Visually, Smaug is untouchable – WETA Digital have outdone themselves – but psychologically, well, he doesn’t scare me. Because he speaks English. Like Benedict Cumberbatch. This is not Jackson’s fault, as Smaug was given dialogue by Tolkien, but when will fantasy writers realize that when animals can speak, it makes them LESS scary. Because they can be reasoned with. That’s why the dragon in HOW TO TRAIN was actually scarier. It was a dumb animal. We are much more terrified of those things that cannot communicate in any human way, that are so animalistic their small brains simply conjure survival instincts, with no room for rational thought or communication – you know, Republicans.

The end frames are a transposition of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s reaction to unleashing the power of the atomic bomb, as the Dragon Smaug is “unleashed” by the Dwarfs and Bilbo, flying toward Laketown to fulfill the prophecy of a Lake of Fire, intoning, “I am death!” (“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” Bhagavad Gita). And Bilbo looks upon the retreating Dragon, bereft, and echoes Oppenheimer’s next thought: “What have we done?” Crash to black.

Escape into DESOLATION. Your cave troll will thank you.

END

Back and There – Again…

Swooping over mountainscapes aglow with ice, through subterranean caverns ahowl with goblin revelry, over battlefields strewn with armored death, through the living forests of Mirkwood and the majestic spires of Rivendell… damn, it took me a long time to get to the theater!

The epic journey begins; the prequels, if you will, to THE LORD OF THE RINGS (2001). Genius director Peter Jackson, who brought us the RINGS trilogy in rainbow mayhem, now helms THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (from J.R.R. Tolkien‘s 1937 book The Hobbit, or There and Back Again), once again taking the stone-masoned words of Tolkien and amplifying them in sound and vision, with the soul of a necromancer, the magic of a wizard, and the balls of a balrog.

THE HOBBIT opens in Middle Earth, with Bilbo Baggins in his hobbit-hole in Bag End, Hobbiton, writing in his diary. A suitably calm introduction; also welcoming, reassuring, as we see that Bilbo is – Ian Holm. Then into the room walks Elijah Wood as Frodo! Oh, frabjous day! We are Home. Immediately charmed, creating continuity, a sense of returning to the beloved embrace of a world we left 10 years ago, that we missed like drunken lovers.

“My dear Frodo, you asked me once if I had told you everything there was to know about my adventures. Well, I can honestly say I’ve told you the truth, though I may not have told you all of it…”

While old Bilbo recounts his adventures in voiceover, in flashback we meet young Bilbo (Martin Freeman), as wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) enlists his aid to accompany a troupe of 13 Dwarfs led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) to reclaim their homeland Erebor from the Dragon Smaug; hiring Bilbo as a “burglar” because Smaug knows the smell of Dwarf but will apparently be confused by the smell of Hobbit. A big chance to take with a monster the size of a football stadium. (We are only granted visual snippets of Smaug, his full fiery fury no doubt awaiting revelation in Jackson’s next installment THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG, slated for 2013.)

With his decision to make three movies from one small book, I worried that Jackson (and co-writers Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens) would pad the films with every single poem and arcane song and afterthought from Tolkien’s Appendices. When we hear two Dwarfish songs within the first ten minutes, that doesn’t bode well. If this kept going, I thought maybe I’d sneak into SKYFALL instead…

A fish-out-of-water tale, a chase movie, a quest for home, a redemption tale, a revenge and bromance all in one. Layered like Farrah Fawcett’s hair from the ’70s. With thankfully no more singing! Awe-inspiring sights to behold at every turn; not only the imaginative dressing and CGI of the massive 360-degree sets (Mirkwood, the capacious Goblin Hall, Rivendell), the raw wilds of New Zealand thrum and shimmer as living coruscating backdrop (the location scout really deserves some extra cookies). The astonishing creatures: Stone Trolls (one dumbass comment away from being the Three-Headed Knight in MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL), the unholy Orc Azog (Manu Bennett), whose arm was claimed by Thorin; the sleeker-designed Wargs in a harrowing chase across undulating plains (magnificent scope and planning); eccentric Wizard Radagast (Sylvester McCoy – is that birdshit in his hair or dried jizz?); the bloated Goblin King (Barry Humphries) with a scrotum where his triple chin should be; the teasier-sleazier Gollum, one lisp away from being Jarjar Binks (Andy Serkis only does one scene as Gollum – from the chapter Riddles In The Dark – with even more sensors on his face to produce a more expressive gangrel creature than ever before; also employed by Jackson as the 2nd Unit director! “It wantses Action!” “It wantses Cut!” “Check the gateses.” “That’s a wraps, Precious!”)

Every detail breathtaking, every battle nail-biting, every stabbing scrotum-shriveling.

Of course, to construct a tale so action-packed compelling, it must necessarily become one long succession of “out of the frying pan, into the fire” (the title of Chapter 6 in The Hobbit), and thus one deus ex machina after another, as our heroes are pulled from, carried away from, fall out from under, or merely find a path to run away from, imminent death. The most annoying of these deus exes is – as in RETURN OF THE KING – the Eagles, Gandalf’s ever-vigilant big birdie pals. Whenever he’s in a jam, Gandalf asks a moth to summon them and sure enough they arrive, and easily un-jam Gandalf with their size and power. They can take out orcs, wargs and Nazgul fer cryin’ out loud – and when we ask the sensible question of why they don’t just fly our heroes to their destinations, we get apologist explanations like, “The Eagles are not slaves; they are a proud race and cannot be told what to do blah blah…” Well, why turn up at all? Hey Eagles, you know that Gandalf is always doing something for the good of Middle Earth, which means it would help you too, right? Why not help him by hanging around? You got better eagle-y things to do than saving your own eyries? Screee, my ass!

Poffy Baggins

Not only do Holm and Wood make cameos, but also any actor required to reprise their roles from LORD OF THE RINGS: Elf Hugo Weaving as the sweet transvestite Elrond, Christopher Lee as the white mummy Saruman, and svelte elven Cate Blanchett bringing her estrogen as Galadriel, the only woman in the cast, to balance out the dwarf sausage-fest.

One of the best things Tolkien did was write about these mythical creatures as warriors. Whereas our image of Dwarfs and Elves have been skewed by Snow White’s impotent bedwetters and Santa’s communist workforce, Peter Jackson took Tolkien’s imagery and elevated it to the best medieval hand-to-hand battle scenes in film today. Real warriors, real battle, as rabid as anything from RINGS, from beings which had the rep for being cutesy sprites and lemonheads. Revel in the man-chest of Dwalin (Graham McTavish), the ferocity of Oin (John Callen) and Gloin (Peter Hambleton), the understanding of Bofur (James Nesbitt)… And there’s Kili the bowman (Aidan Turner) channeling David Cassidy – some stunt casting For The Laydayz!

As much action that blazes across the digital magicscape (accompanied by Howard Shore‘s mystical, biblical, cosmo themes), Peter Jackson brilliantly balances poignancy and introspection: As invisible Bilbo aims to take off Gollum’s head in a sword-stroke, he sees the desolation in the creature’s eyes – as we all do in one tear-jerking moment – and spares him; when the Dwarfs heckle Bilbo about yearning for home and why he rejoined their sausage-fest when he had the chance to leave the quest, he unflinchingly replies, “Yes, I miss home and everything in it, but I have a home. And you don’t. And I will help you take it back if I can.”

Martin Freeman brings his bemused, slightly jumpy manner to Bilbo Baggins; it’s Tim Canterbury from THE OFFICE (2001) in Middle Earth! Nonetheless, it fits him like a vest of Mithril. Though he starts the adventure by channeling Ian Holm, he becomes very much his own Hobbit by the time he gives that touching monologue above. By which I mean, he becomes Tim Canterbury.

Yes, the film downplays Bilbo’s avarice in seeking his 1/14th share of the treasure; it seems like he is ALL ABOUT helping his fellow woodland creatures – but then we see how he secretly guards the Magic Ring he just found (complete with its own musical theme), how he inadvertently realized it made him invisible when worn…

With a running time of nearly three hours, we hardly notice. Before we know it, the Eagles have deposited our heroes on a lonely escarpment overlooking the 100 miles remaining to their destination, and flown off to do more important Eagle-y things. For why they couldn’t have simply flown them the rest of the way in a few minutes, see above excuse. And our heroes gaze out over the misty miles and see the sequel in post-production.

Unlike George Lucas, Peter Jackson has triumphed with this first prequel. HOBBIT aficionados will no doubt take minor issue with some filmic liberties (Azog, who does not appear in the book, becomes the villain device here, the relentless pursuer of Thorin, who must stand up to him or die trying; for dramatic purposes, the story arc centers around Thorin reconciling with Bilbo in man-appreciation), but the rest of you Shire-folk will marvel at this filmmaking juggernaut. You will gasp, you will laugh, you will weep, you will dance with chocolate in your hair. You will taste the soul of a necromancer, the magic of a wizard, and the balls of a balrog.

END

At Madame Svetlana’s House Of Clamps, let our experienced staff cater
to your every bondage and discipline need.

Mutation Elation.

They gave superheroes a new reason to be super.

X-MEN is the sometimes brooding, sometimes kick-ass, mostly campy filmic incarnation of a Marvel Comics series that added a new dimension to “super” heroes. It doesn’t quite outline the first generation of Professor Xavier’s “X-Men” but it comes close enough to raise the hairs on our bushy berserker sideburns.

In Bryan Singer‘s X-MEN, the internecine struggle between mutants of two differing ideologies reaches a zenith when Magneto (who hates humans) tries to turn the populace of New York into mutants via a big special effects machine, and the X-Men (who protect and pity humans) are there to stop him in their tight black leather.

Poffesor X

Unlike regular superheroes who were from off-planet (Krypton, Thanagar, Asgard) or whose powers came from outside forces (an intergalactic lantern, a radioactive spider, gamma rays), or who were just righteous bros in fancy panties (Batman, The Punisher, Iron Man), the Uncanny X-Men’s powers came from WITHIN; “cursed” with mutant genes, they each exhibited various powers that placed them beyond the pale of homo sapiens. Creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (1963) had hit upon an umbrella reason behind “super powers” that could be applied to any powers at all – no more need for contrived “origin tales”! He can grow more arms if they’re lopped off — uh, how? He’s a MUTANT – that is all ye know and all ye need to know. And this rationalization became so popular that it embedded itself in comicdom’s consciousness. It needs no explanation in mainstream media. My bushy sideburns leap for joy.

Within this new rubric, an irony – being mutants, these heroes were reviled by “normal” humans, even as they protected those humans from threats, the main threats coming from other mutants. An undercurrent of bigotry infuses every X-Men episode, inadvertently mirroring societal ignorance.

And director/co-writer Bryan Singer has reverently brought all these facets to life in X-MEN. It helps to have an almost perfect cast.

Sir Patrick Stewart, eternal Shakespearean, born leader, calm as stones, is telepathic Professor Xavier (aka Professor X); his brains are his brawn; from his school for mutants, some rise to become X-Men, defenders of justice, humanity, and low gas prices for the JP-7 fuel in their guzzling X-Jet. From his snazzy wheelchair, he Makes It So.

 

Famke Janssen, square-jawed Euro supermodel, is Jean Grey (aka Marvel Girl in the original 1960’s comics); another telepath, in this movie still honing her abilities, which include hotness in tight spandex and not being able to wipe Toad’s jism off her face.

Halle Berry, salubrious milk chocolate, is weathergirl Storm; sunny with a chance of bad dialogue.

James Marsden, Teen Model mannequin, is laser-eyed Cyclops; in the comics, the tactician leader of the X-team, here, a vanilla love interest for Jean, and occasional eye-juice ejaculator. Oh, he does get to give some orders, but only after Wolverine says it’s okay.

Shawn Ashmore is Bobby Drake (aka Iceman, here an Ice BOY), trying to woo his chick Rogue without actually touching her. As if mutated virgins don’t have it hard enough…

Young Anna Paquin is baby-faced Rogue (what the–?! I know, I know, fanboys: Rogue doesn’t officially enter X-Man canon until 20 years after their inception, but here she is the brunt of the plot). Her mutant power sucks… the life force out of others. She cannot touch anyone without incapacitating them as their powers flow into her. Which gives the term “unsafe sex” actual meaning for the first time in its revenue-coined history. Rogue is immediately drawn to Wolverine’s musk, and uses her life-leaching-touch thingy as an excuse not to tongue Bobby Drake.

“Not so fast, Bub. You didn’t read the “claws” about pissing me off!”

And then there is Wolverine. Australian beefcake Hugh Jackman is the mysterious Logan (sporting “Wolverine” dog tags) with adamantium skeleton and triple-claw swagger. The X-MEN movie is about Wolverine. Really. No matter the movie title and the fact that this jampacked movie brings so many comicbook heroes to life, a conscious dramatic decision was made to make this feral scrapper with the shrouded Special Forces history the focus of this X-MEN movie.

Consider: Wolverine/Logan is given all the nuances of character that only lead roles boast, while all the other heroes are merely shallow tropes. It is his throughline that is resolved (trying to discover his past); it is his power struggle with the purported “leader” Cyclops (for primacy and the girl); it is his heroic action that saves the day; he is the only character with a redemption arc. It is Wolverine whose eyes we are seeing through as he wakes in a strange environment (the X mansion), it is he who speaks for the skeptic in all of us when Xavier introduces the X-Men with their code names “Storm” and “Cyclops” (Logan: “What do they call you? Wheels”?); he and Magneto are the only characters with “introduction scenes”; and let’s face it – though surrounded by models, he’s the best lookin’ mutant for miles.

We meet Wolverine doin’ what he does best: scrappin.’ We don’t so much meet him as drink him in: shirtless, boozing, chomping a cigar as he takes down a contender in a filthy pub cage match. And the most amazing part: his hair! How did they smoosh it into that pointy-v we know and love from his brutal graphic novel adventures? When he snikt’s his adamantium claws out, it is in the best gunslinger tradition, holding off two men on either side of him. Then he saunters out of the bar with his v-shaped mullet all sassy. Except for his over-6-foot frame, Hugh Jackman is EXACTLY how we envision Wolverine. Not since Christopher Reeve as SUPERMAN has there been casting so awe-inspiring, so pitch perfect, so like-a-glove. An adamantium-clawed glove.

Film actually goes against canon in making Logan so touching. When Rogue is trying to run away, he consoles her: “Give these geeks one more shot. The Professor understands people like us.” Which only makes her untouchables ache for him even more.

There is no Angel and no Beast (two of the original X-Men), but there is — Magneto.

 

Sir Ian McKellen, also Shakespearean giant, also Japanese garden calm, is iron monger Magneto/Erik Lensherr. Now we know the comicbook Magneto is a muscly maroon mantoy, but even the visual miscasting of doddering Sir Ian cannot impede him taking the metal-bending role to the delicious limits of Dr. Zachary Smith and making it his very own, at one point tut-tutting Wolverine, lamenting, “Oh, dear boy…”

Loquacious, regal, crafty, the only mutant to use his abilities to their fullest tactical extent, Magneto is the morally ambiguous “bad guy” who mistrusts humans, especially Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) who wages congressional war on mutants. Magneto’s plan is not so much evil as vengeful: to mutate every human in New York to make them realize there is nothing to fear from mutation. Through him, we feel the analogies to Nazi Germany and modern-day Amerikan Republicans: “Women and children, whole families destroyed simply because they were born different from those in power.”

Magneto may be old, but he’s an Old Dog; what can we make of his right-hand man being a right-hand svelte blue nude chick? Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, wet dream, working blue, is shapeshifter Mystique. What better use for your right hand?

Rounding out the evil cabal are the appropriately named Tyler Mane as liony Sabretooth and Seth Green look-alike Ray Park as the tongue-twisting Toad (he was Darth Maul in PHANTOM MENACE)

The opening scenes of X-MEN are powerful, almost sinister, deadly serious and set a tone for the movie that the movie itself cannot match. A YouTube comment says it all: “If the whole movie was like this, the movie would have been epic.”

In these opening scenes, we see a young Erik Lensherr in a concentration camp discovering his latent powers over metal. And we meet shirtless Wolverine like Eastwood with claws. Then it gets progressively campy. Magneto turns Senator Kelly into a water puddle (an aqua-man, if you will – or if DC Comics will let us); the X-Men mill aimlessly through Act Two, where we discover most of them can’t act too. There is a magnificent display of Dr. Smith’s telekinetic powers over police cars and bullets, and the final ill-contrived climactic scenes illustrate how limited the writers’ imaginations are, as all these beings with various super powers stand around and get their butts kicked.

The final “showdown” is laughable, as the X-Men debate how to get fifty feet up the Statue of Liberty’s arm to rescue Rogue: “Storm, can you fly me up there?” “I don’t have that kind of control!” “Don’t take the shot – you might hit her!” “Jean, can you steady him?!” “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Eventually Cyclops takes charge and gives orders on how to do it. And Wolverine agrees, so they do.

END

When Wizards Collide.

Gandalf is SUCH a badass!

Wizard against Balrog in a film opening so power-hammering it is astonishing that writer-director Peter Jackson didn’t score a cross-promotion rollercoaster ride at Universal Studios called The Falling Balrog.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS opens at the middle of the last film, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001), as our friends (hobbits, men, elf, dwarf and lots of poo) flee through subterranean caverns, pursued by a towering flaming demon that only Gandalf (Ian McKellen) has the ‘nads to face down. When he thunders at the advancing Balrog, “YOU – SHALL – NOT – PASS!” and thwacks his staff upon the stone floor (in a sound which any comics fan should know is written as “KRA-KHOOM!”) it is every superhero personified and every man-fantasy of impressing chicks combined.

Then they both fall.

There is that “falling” metaphor passim in Tolkien’s writing. (Only to rise again – the Superman trope, which is Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, formerly Christ’s resurrection, which in turn was plagiarized from every life-death-rebirth deity that came before, from Asia to Akkadia.) Later, Aragorn is swept off a cliff by a wolf, and dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) reports to Eowyn, in a poignant moment that is moving as much for Rhys-Davies’s throat-catching performance as for his words, “He fell.”

When Gandalf is resurrected as Gandalf The White and thwarts the surprise attack of Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas – what a badass! – Aragorn, dismayed, says to him, “But you fell…”

Even the ultimate fall of Gollum into the lava in THE RETURN OF THE KING, though it means the death of that poor conflicted special effect and the destruction of the One Ring, signifies a “rebirth” of Middle-earth.

TWO TOWERS is where “that gangrel creature” Gollum (motion-captured performance by Andy Serkis) comes into his own, in a mind-blowing, pioneering special effects coup for WETA Digital, Peter Jackson’s efx company. Like an evil Gandhi on crack, Gollum allies with the two star hobbits, Frodo and Sam (Elijah Wood and Sean Astin) on their quest to Mordor; they go to destroy The One Ring, Gollum goes for any opportunity to reclaim the Ring, his “precious.” Thus opening a new era in effects creatures interacting with humans onscreen. The sightlines between Gollum and the hobbits never falter, and when they engage in physical contact, their interaction is so “real” we never doubt it, watching the movie completely entranced by its story rather than marveling at Gollum’s “reality” or how his scanty panty never falls off.

The Poffrog

In THE TWO TOWERS, all our friends from the previous film wend their separate adventures in a dynamic, kinetic story full of middles. Being that TOWERS is – ahem – Middle-earth’s middle film (the red-headed child of Peter Jackson’s nonpareil RINGS trilogy), it very sensibly has a middle, more middle, lots of other middle, a legendary medieval battle that will stamp itself into filmic history, and more middle.Frodo and Sam find Mordor with Gollum’s help, decide to backtrack and find it again from the other side; the fruity B-hobbits, Merry and Pippin (Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd) stop being carried around by orcs and get carried around by a tree; the Nazgul have graduated to riding excellent bat-winged dragons with VOOMP-VOOMP! wingbeats; sexy Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), his blonde elfin babe, Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and their husky child Gimli, run around the countryside, presumably in search of a good hot shower; while the mighty Gandalf slays a Balrog, drives the spirit of Saruman (Christopher Lee as Edgar Winter) out of Theoden King, and leads a cavalry charge on the Uruk-hai at Helm’s Deep – what a badass!

So many characters, so many strands of plot, yet Jackson holds it all together with an iron grip that never flags – from its broad battle strokes to its poignant personal relationships. Theoden King (regal Bernard Hill) wells the tears in our eyes when he weeps over his dead son, “No parent should have to bury their child”; Faramir (David Wenham) laments Boromir, “He was my brother” (even looking like Jesus – and, ironically, probably scoring more chicks for it – doesn’t help); such a cute touch that Legolas and Gimli count their battle-slain in overt jovial contest. And for the girlies, Jackson focuses maybe a little too much on Aragorn pining over his elf-boo Arwen (Liv Tyler, with pointy ears that just scream “Do me Elf-Style!”); add Arwen pining over Aragorn in slomo and whole chariots of tiresome love butter clog this film’s arteries. (And it’s hard to sympathize with Aragorn missing his pointy-eared woman, when Eowyn (svelte Miranda Otto, a shieldmaiden of Rohan) is bursting all over him like a romantic raincloud.)

Left for dead, when Aragorn arrives solo at Helm’s Deep, a grand, sweeping 360-degree pan frames him, in a scene befitting a resurrection, and necessitating the invention of big screen plasma TVs.

We wish we could comfort Eowyn more than the two-dimensionality of the silver screen would allow when Aragorn makes his grand, poo-covered entrance at Helm’s Deep: We see Eowyn, tears edging her eyes, dying to rush into his arms, suddenly halted by the sight of Legolas returning Arwen’s amulet to Aragorn (in imperceptible slomo, cos it’s romantic, see); played beautifully by Jackson, like he has hours to spend on relationships alone, when he will soon cream our bellbottoms and skull-rape our eye-sockets with…

The Battle of Helm’s Deep.

There is only one way to describe this battle scene which somehow does not lose us in its madness, conveying clearly the pitch and yaw of victories and defeats, focusing on every character involved yet encompassing the grand scope of the madding war tableau… actually, there is NO way to describe it. Just watch it. I don’t know how he did it, but Jackson keeps us hanging in suspense and excitement during every minute of what most other filmmakers usually turn into generic rumbling. A truly incredible feat of direction, editing, choreography and creativity.

I wonder what a Tolkien scholar would think of THE LORD OF THE RINGS?

In staying true to Tolkien, Jackson seems like HE is not thinking strategically, but plot deficiencies are Tolkien’s, not Jackson’s: why would Theoden King send his people cross-country to hole up in a mountain fortress with no exit strategy? Jackson rewrites certain plot points for drama, but cannot escape broad strokes: so 10,000 orcs are sent to decimate 300 people? If Saruman just ignored this veritable “village” he could still rule Middle-earth pretty much without any resistance.

At the end, while a montage of battles cascades before our wondrous orbs, Samwise Gamgee gives one of those speeches that makes your flesh crawl, “…that there’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for” (uh, isn’t that an oxymoron?), whereupon the hobbits share a moment so romantic we feel we shouldn’t be watching them.

And just like the movie, I’m going to end in the middle of–

END

Muttonchops sauteed in body oil.

X-eunt in X-asperation.

Action without heart. Spectacle without logic. Brawn without brains.

Director Brett Ratner balances on Bryan Singer’s shoulders, attempting to hold up the mutant world Singer so reverently rendered in X-MEN (2000) and X-MEN UNITED (2003). But he falls off – and helms X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, the third in the x-franchise, with as much reverence and talent as Bryan Singer’s shoe.

X-rated cameltoe.

Poffclops

Ratner and screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn feign respect, drawing in the fanboys (with teaser ads featuring edgy photography and magnificent visuals, like Angel’s breathtaking wingspan; dangling the reunion carrot of the five original Uncanny X-Men members – for the non-mutant readers, these are Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman, Angel and Beast; giving us tastes of legendary idioms, when Bobby Drake eventually goes fully Iceman for a few seconds, or Beast exclaims, “Oh my stars and garters!”) – but then tumble off the grid completely, as they kill off half the main characters, never show the original five onscreen together, twist legacy into dramatic cliché and fulfill the worst fears of intelligent moviegoers. LAST STAND is not a case of “more of the same,” but too much of the same; a runaway George Lucas effect.

Forgetting that “He who sips from many cups, drinks of none,” Ratner loads this 104-minute movie with so much content that it implodes under its own weight.

The government has isolated an antigen from scary Cameron Bright (playing Leech, a mutant who negates the powers of other mutants) and markets it as a “mutant cure,” drawing mixed reactions from mutants. Magneto (Ian McKellen) sees it as usurpation of mutants’ very souls, whilst some, like Rogue (Anna Paquin), who cannot touch anyone without draining their life-force (and whose pink x-bits have been quivering for man-flesh since she met Wolverine back in X-MEN) see it as an opportunity for some Jagger-like satisfaction.

While Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) insults everyone back at the mutant mansion of Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Cyclops (James Marsden) wastes his 3 minutes screen time weeping like a bitch over dead Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). The blue-furred, Presidential Mutant Diplomat, Beast (Kelsey Grammer, perfectly cast), attempts to find the right spin for the antigen campaign, whilst boy-band member, Warren Worthington III (aka Angel, played by Michael Murphy, doing Jay Mohr), uses up his four seconds of wingspan screen time to make good on the startling trailer and fly out on the cure.

Before anyone can say “mutant overload,” Jean (with her long, luscious, burgundy wig slightly crooked), has returned from the dead as Dark Phoenix, had Cyclops for lunch and is hot for some Wolverine on toast.

Magneto scorns Mystique (Rebecca Romjin) after she sacrifices her mutancy for him, and proves to be quite the playa, no sooner dumping the blue babe than hooking up with a Dark Phoenix.

Now this is the kind of X I like…

If all this seems confusing, rest assured, it is. LAST STAND makes little attempt at explaining relationships, superpowers or logic (except for a flashback which finds the two Shakespearean veterans, McKellen and Stewart, amusingly wrinkle-free, meeting Jean as a child, exploring the complexities of their association) and is unapologetically for fanboys who have continually sacrificed the love of a good woman for plastic-bagging their comicbooks in chronological order; ironic, considering the film-makers themselves don’t display much love or knowledge of these characters.

And Cyclops! Oh, Cyclops! I have never condoned the dismissive treatment of the Uncanny X-Men’s prime member. In the comics universe, everyone respected his authoritah – but the first two Singer movies demoted this master tactician, group leader and masculine love-interest for Jean Grey into a metrosexual strip-o-gram. We tolerated his film deficiencies because the films themselves lauded the X-Men legacy. With LAST STAND, Cyclops’s pussified ousting is unconscionable.

Screen becomes clogged with superbeings who only figure how to utilize their powers as the plot denotes, otherwise stand around doing nothing.

Only Magneto and Wolverine ever use their powers intelligently, Wolverine usually with his shirt off; alas, his action scenes are all too brief (and how does his tank top heal its holes when he is stabbed?). Magneto’s power is truly awe-inspiring and the vaunted Golden Gate Bridge sequence is remarkable.

The themes of this movie – offering homogeneity to those who feel alienated and forcing homogeneity on those who wish individuality – are lost amongst the movie’s many plot-holes and poorly-directed action. For example, why was the government transporting Juggernaut, Multiple Man and Mystique without first shooting them with the antigen? Well, so that Magneto could rescue them, of course.

That look you get when all the cool x-characters are taken…

And why does Wolverine try to stop Phoenix being shot with antigen? This would have eradicated her nihilistic death-persona and left behind a supermodel. Instead, whilst the world is being sucked into her destructive vortex, he opts to kill the Dark Phoenix (with his shirt off). Seems he’d rather have a dead Phoenix than a live Jean Grey.

Economically, the X-MEN franchise has fallen victim to its own plotline: in order to recoup its astronomical budgets, it needs to homogenize its product; in doing so, it kills off impact and integrity, thereby risking lesser income through inferior product. This will be the last collective X-Men production; the future of the X-Men lies in their spinoffs. Already, WOLVERINE has stalked into pre-production.

Yet the marketers force-feed us a cliffhanger, just in case: while Storm (Halle Berry) assumes matronly duties at the mutant school; while Beast presses White House flesh; while Wolverine insults someone and Angel flies high on CGI; while the cured Rogue and Iceman make the beast with two backs in the nearest broom closet, two sidelined Shakespearean veterans slyly find their mettle once more…

END

Leonardo, we have a problem… Tom Hanks is prettier than the women…

The Gospel According to Fluke.

Christians are a gutless lot.

Whenever a new fiction dares question their established fiction, they turn into the very backbiting, provincial bigots they accuse everyone else of being.

The “new” fiction is Dan Brown‘s novel, The Da Vinci Code. The “established” fiction is How to Murder with Impunity, otherwise known as Common Sense for Dummies, also called Prescribed Sex and Violence for Preschoolers, aka The Holy Bible (the word “holy,” as always, used in its most broad and ambiguous sense.)

Leonardo’s Vitruvian Cucumber

Through director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, Brown’s fable has been demoted to Over-Hyped Hollywood Movie, THE DA VINCI CODE, bringing out the backbiters in force, which says something about the condescending attitude religious leaders harbor towards their “sheep” (so judiciously termed), whom they do not trust to think for themselves.

In order to “save” their flock from – who knows what they’re afraid of (maybe “independent thought”)? – and proving once again that they have absolutely no faith (that’s the million dollar word, right?) in the supposedly omnipotent invisible guy they claim can do just about anything, religious leaders take it upon themselves to attempt stymieing this harmless, edge-of-boring media. Trickling this attitude down to the sheep themselves, we end up with protests and vigils and undue animosity towards free-thinkers, which of course, eventually escalates to murder and topless dancing.

I have not read the book. Apparently, it’s a page-turner. Or a well-marketed fad. But THE DA VINCI CODE movie – for all its touting of “shaking the foundations of Christianity” – is just not all that compelling.

Threatening to bog itself in esoteric jargon and weighted with faux-gravitas, this fable posits an interesting twist to that hoary tale of virgins and saviors and whores (oh my!), maintaining that Jesus took Magdalene as his wife and sired a bloodline that exists today. (I’m already feeling unholy.)

Symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks, sporting Vitruvian Man mane, and working from his Handbook on Furrowed Brows) and Detective Sophie Neveu (dull Audrey Tatou) find themselves embroiled in a murder frame-up which leads them on a Quest for The Holy Grail, no less (without the aid of Monty Python, who undertook The Quest 30 years ago on a smaller budget in a superior film).

Pursued by Detective Fache (Jean Reno), and by a self-flagellating, Opus Dei albino monk (Paul Bettany), who kills with the blessing of the church (which is what Christianity is all about), Langdon and Neveu seek asylum with the old man from Scene 24, Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen), a Grail expert, who exposits most of the “sacrilegious” aspects of this tale, invoking Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, The Knights Who Say Templar, the fictional Priory of Scion and the very real – though not self-flagellating – Opus Dei order (a kind of cult within the larger cult of the Christian church).

Trapped between the desire to deliver a “summer blockbuster” and to stay true to the cerebral nature of Brown’s text, Howard serves us a kind of COLUMBO episode on ‘ludes, where clues and riddles click into place like jigsaws. Though it delivers on the mystery and mental levels, the movie trips over in its execution.

Howard’s pacing is uncharacteristically sloppy, with an overlong third act that reveals the Grand Mystery anticlimactically and then pads itself to 145 minutes with further vapid revelations – but by then, it’s all about as relevant as the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow.

There are also unnecessarily huge production numbers for the historical flashbacks showing knights covered in medieval poo, which involves Howard helming practically a whole second movie just for these vignettes, diluting the import of the spoken word and crucifying our imagination on glaring imagery, by showing us exactly what each speaker describes, like those insufferable 1980s rock videos which used to depict every line of the song lyrics with relevant visuals.

THE DA VINCI CODE is intriguing, yet far-fetched enough not to affect any person over the Age of Reason. Unfortunately, Christianity has no place for reason.

And what most scares religious leaders is not that this world-shaking fictional “secret” is provable – exactly the opposite! The secret – that Jesus spawned descendants – is itself based on “faith”! Who is going to test Jesus for his DNA? So how can anyone prove, either through documents, riddles, or by chopping down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring, that they are of JC’s blood? The real life church is scared not because it believes its followers will intelligently discern that THE DA VINCI CODE is guff; it is scared because it knows its followers already have the propensity to believe inexplicable malarkey – they’ve been feeding it to those followers for the past 2000 years!

Lose enough followers to other religions/cults/Reason and your “church” is demoted to merely “cult” status (where it rightfully belongs), with no tax exemptions or impunity to fiddle with boys.

Langdon – with an eidetic memory (extraordinarily accurate recall) – cracks the final code on the strength of a fallacy. In recalling Newton’s grave, he remarks that “all the orbs (planets) were represented, but one – the apple that inspired Newton to work out the laws of gravity.” Firstly, Newton died in 1727, before the discoveries of Neptune (1846), Uranus (named in 1850) and Pluto (1930). How then could “all” of the orbs have been represented on his tomb? Secondly, Newton’s apple is an apocryphal tale. It is urban legend. Thirdly, relating a fruit to a planet is stretching a premise to begin with; the fact that the puzzle is solved through this fatuous symbolism only further illustrates how the church can sell provincial fables from Israel as Holy Writ. (If Christian leaders educated themselves in fallacies of this nature, they might be able to make compelling arguments against the media they fear so irrationally. But in believing they have found Truth – and hold a monopoly on it – they stop searching for it.)

As Langdon laments, “Why couldn’t Jesus be married and still be an important figure?” Why indeed? Maybe it’s because I don’t take this issue as seriously as someone who would sit on a bomb or kill another human to prove their love of invisible guys, but The Message that Langdon ultimately tries to impart is impotent and irrelevant.

Instead of standing his ground on the evidence that points to the supposed “truth” of Jesus’s bloodline, Langdon folds to the gutless notion that a lie based on faith is more honorable, or more worthy, than the truth that would destroy that faith. Why are we inculcated to believe this insanity?!

In a movie that trumpets its heresy, who is it trying to appeal to with its eleventh-hour recant? In the greatest paradoxical idiocy of all, the movie’s slogan entreats: “Seek The Truth.”

Dim the lights and I will speaketh Truth: Long before Dan Brown crafted THE DA VINCI CODE, in 932 A.D., after decoding the last writings of Joseph of Aramathea, and on occult information provided by Tim the Enchanter, King Arthur himself, at the Gorge of Eternal Peril, uttered the words which would forever rock the foundations of Christianity:

“Is that an African or a European swallow?”

END

deus ex tolkiena.

Okay, tattered robes deployed? – check; multiple story lines at the ready to entwine and entangle viewers? – check; sets constructed on a budget which would’ve stamped out hunger in Ethiopia? – check; everyone smeared in poo? – check – let’s roll!

Trust me, Movie Maniac, if you’ve not seen the first two installments of this bloated, beguiling masterpiece, or if you’ve not read Tolkein‘s rambling, roiling Lord Of The Rings book (often regarded as a trilogy), do not watch THE RETURN OF THE KING. It will only necessitate calling the Dial-A-Geek Hotline to elicit logical explanations as to how a supernatural being could manifest itself as an all-seeing Eye and then have the Abbot&Costello mentality to only monitor the spots where this Eye is actually “looking”; and why Gandalf (Ian McKellen), who rescued Frodo and Sam (Elijah Wood and Sean Astin) from Mount Doom at movie’s end with the aid of deus ex machina giant eagles, could not have done the same three hours ago and flown them to Mount Doom in the first place; and why Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) looks so masculine in RETURN OF THE KING and so effeminate in HIDALGO. Us outsiders to the Dungeons & Dragons phenomenon will never know…

If taken as a movie unto itself, it is merely noteworthy, though disjointed. But this movie should be regarded as the last three hours of a grand tale so epic and awe-inspiring that it needed nine hours to faithfully tell it. (Even so, we get the superfreaks complaining that it was too short!).

Poffygorn, son of Poffythorn

Of the eight endings in the film, there was one in which Aragorn actually found some soap. There was also another ending in which director/co-writer Peter Jackson let slide the fact that we could clearly distinguish (in rear views) the child-actors in place of Hobbits; thrown in somewhere was a happy ending, a sad ending, a token African-American ending and one which involved everyone jumping on Frodo’s bed in slow motion like a lingerie ad.

I must admit to shedding a lonely tear whenever I think of how massive the delight of J.R.R. Tolkein might have been had he the opportunity to see his masterpiece transformed into such a – well, a masterpiece. Peter Jackson is a genius – there’s no doubt about that now. And these RINGS films are unparalleled in cinematic history. Words fail. The wealth of creative staff employed by Jackson brought a depth to the visualization of Tolkein’s wonders that Tolkein himself would never have had the capacity to envision – case in point: those elephantine war-chariots. Take a close look at their armaments and battle-ornamentation and then imagine a lad from 1950’s British society seeing this onscreen – to him, this “reality” would be literally as magical as the tale he was telling.

Nonetheless, I find I am constantly torn between piling praise on Jackson’s herculean movie-making and nitpicking plot holes in the storyline, which is no fault of Jackson’s, and which, if Jackson is to remain faithful to the book, must necessarily be integral to the film’s storyline.

For example, if all elves are immortal, shouldn’t they all attain a certain age and then stop aging? Ultimately, your father should end up looking exactly like your brother – and fathers and daughters would look like brothers and sisters – correct? Yet why does Elrond (Hugo Weaving) look like Arwen’s (Liv Tyler) drunken, old, cross-dressing uncle? And why should they all go sailing off somewhere into the sunset in order to be immortal? Immortal is immortal, no matter where you spend your days cross-dressing.

In TWO TOWERS, why is Theoden’s (Bernard Hill) kingdom located so far from their stronghold, Helm’s Deep? In order to retreat to this supposedly strategic bastion, one must put the lives of the whole kingdom at stake by taking women and children over unprotected miles of open ground – good strategy! Wouldn’t it make better sense to simply make your kingdom’s residence at Helm’s Deep?

And those Dead Souls from the Mountain – did they really have to take a boat to the battle at Pelennor Fields?

And I simply cannot stomach predestination in any form; too much prophesying and foretelling and precognition and idiot phrases like, “What does your heart tell you?” If Elrond foresaw Frodo’s demise in delivering the Ring to Mount Thunder (Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) tells him this via some kind of mind-meld in TWO TOWERS, the previous film) – well, why go at all? Oh, that’s right: because we have the power to change our destiny – well then, all your prophesying and soothsaying becomes HEARSAY!

Whenever Theoden shouts orders amidst a battle, or when Saruman (Christopher Lee) speaks to 10,000 slavering orcs, I’m reminded of MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN, where Jesus speaks to the multitudes and those in the back are yelling, “Speak Up!” and “Oooo, he said, ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers!'”

Inconsistency: In TWO TOWERS, those elephantine beasts are called “oliphaunts” by Sam, yet these same beasts are called “mumakil” in RETURN OF THE KING. (mama say mama sa mama coosa?) Tolkien did not describe either beast in detail in the book.

The biggest question of all, surrounding this whole shebang, is, of course, if a supernatural entity has the wherewithal to forge a talisman of illimitable power – The One Ring, that which all the poking and puking is over – upon losing it (which would seem almost impossible in the first place, for a being who can “sense” The Ring’s presence) – well, why not simply forge another? End of story.

Poor Frodo and Viggo and Don Gandalfino, when all they had to do was tell the Big Dark Guy to make another ring and leave us be; instead spending three years putting on the sour pusses and being covered in poo.

Anyone got the Dial-A-Geek hotline number?

END

Hot women in faux-leather with bottled ‘do’s, piloting aircraft – funding problems just disappear.

X-traordinary.

In X2: X-MEN UNITED, the two factions of warring mutants we met in X-MEN (2000) unite against a common enemy: homo sapiens. And all genetic babbling breaks loose…

Pofferine

The “good” mutants (the ones tagged with the X-Men epithet) are Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Wolverine, Iceman and Rogue (joined by additional cast, Nightcrawler and Colossus); the “bad” mutants (actually, “misunderstood” mutants) are Magneto (Ian McKellen), Mystique, Pyro and Lady Deathstrike.

The opening scene with the teleporting Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) infiltrating the White House is filled with badass promise (his “bamf” teleporting sound effect is especially bamfy!), and X2 delivers in action and production values, and almost-perfect casting, but is ultimately felled by its PG-13 rating and desperate need to have as many mutants as possible suck all the oxygen out of the screentime.

(Unfortunate that X1 and X2 are now associated with these mutant movies, instead of their original references: Bell’s X1 aircraft, piloted by Chuck Yeager, the first documented to break the sound barrier in 1947. Never forget that, young-uns! Successive X-numbers denoted successive prototypes.)

Brian Cox is William Stryker, a military madman who gets the president’s okay to wipe out mutants in society. There is a subplot regarding his role in “creating” Wolverine, which is never resolved – unless you count Wolverine neck-chaining him to a helicopter while a tsunami bears down on him “resolved.”

Though much of the casting fits our preconceptions absolutely, we weep at what they’ve done to Cyclops (James Marsden), whose role is disconcertingly minimal, as it was in X-MEN. Comicbook Cyclops/Scott Summers was always the undisputed Leader of the group, exuding a patriarchal air amongst the very first x-youngsters to the present. Movie Cyclops exudes all the presence of a day-player, or some guy in a bar in Miami in an episode of GIRLS GONE WILD.

Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) is also abused somewhat. Firstly – that hair – not working, honey! Gone are comicbook Jean’s cascading, volcanic-red, lava-locks (too 80s for this modern film? – but no worse than the Animé cartoon hairstyle she now sports); will it have to come down to an episode of VH1’s 50 AWESOMELY BADDER HAIRDOS to acknowledge this soccer mom abomination? And before we know it, Jean is gone. In a dramatic high-point, sexily holding back a wall of water while simultaneously powering up the X-Jet, she is sacrificed; a device which had to occur for Jean’s overwhelming Phoenix force to achieve illimitable psionic freedom. (Somebody stop me sliding into geekery!…) In essence, in just two movies her character traverses an arc which took decades of comics to develop.

Movies unfortunately do not have the luxury of comicbook shelf-life; plots that were developed over thousands of inter-connected comics must necessarily be composited into a few films, before the franchise goes to pot with new directors, unfamiliar and unlikeable cast and widened demographic mundanity. i.e. it always ends up G-rated, with scenes of soldiers crawling out of exploded military vehicles to prove that they are still alive.

The film unflinchingly supplies each major character with an interesting arc; an almost insurmountable undertaking, considering the plethora of varied roles and interlocking story lines. Director/co-writer Bryan Singer and writers (Zak Penn, David Hayter, Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris) have done an incredible job, full tilt boogie – even day-player Cyclops gets his moment to kick butt and take names – but is ultimately taken down by a chick – girly-man style! And unfortunately, we only get one brief moment to see Colossus go full steel.

Before I go on, I must clarify: this is an excellent movie, well-filmed, well-written, well-acted – and hey! Wolverine! (Hugh Jackman) – ’nuff said! But it is not without its illogicities.

An example: Rogue (Anna Paquin) is sucked out of the disabled X-Jet and Nightcrawler bamfs out and retrieves her, bringing her back onboard safely – excellently illustrating his power’s utility – BUT – well, he’s back in the out-of-control X-Jet! Why not bamf to the ground instead, Isaac Newton? Matter of fact, why not individually bamf everyone down to the ground? This is the quandary that writers of superhero films must face: all these beings put together make up a formidable force and if they logically reasoned through any predicament, nothing could ultimately harm them.

When Wolverine barks, “Don’t we have any weapons in this heap?”, the full portent of his question hits us when Storm’s (Halle Berry) eyes go white, readying to bring the thunder – they’re ALL Lethal Weapons. Yet here is another mis-use of power from that same scene: Couldn’t Storm (who has just conjured more twisters than there were in the movie TWISTER) conjure a mighty updraft to float the X-Jet safely to earth?; couldn’t Jean (who has just utilized her telekinesis to explode a missile) also float the jet down safely?; couldn’t Iceman (still Ice-BOY here, Shawn Ashmore) create a slide of ice?; the potential list of ‘saves’ goes on – yet, it’s Airport ’75 up in that converted Blackbird and Our Man Charlton ain’t nowhere in sight. Instances like these really make you wonder whether you ARE on the Right Side, rooting for these insensate clowns, when the ostensible Bad Guy – grandiloquent Magneto – is the only one with any brains, balls or mutant clout to actually save the jet.

The DVD commentaries infuriate with their naivete: cast and crew misuse and completely misunderstand the word “evolution,” continually saying “evolve” where they should say simply “develop,” illustrating an utter ignorance of this world-shaping concept. Evolution is a process by which mutated genes, if they enable an organism to better adapt to its environment, are “selected” and passed on. Less-adaptable organisms are leached out of the pathway of Life vis a vis “natural selection.” Not being an essay on Evolution per se, this skeletal description will have to suffice to illustrate the ingenuousness of terms like “character evolution.”

The DVD also bludgeons viewers with the unsubtle message of tolerance. As if the raison d’etre of this movie is to promote tolerance and not to make sinful amounts of exploitative cash. By exploiting a minority existing in fantasy, they audaciously attach this analogy to world problems, and then pretend they care. The fact that this movie issues from one of the most insular, in-tolerant places on earth – Hollywood – makes that “message” all the more hypocritical and straight-up shameless prevarication.

The X-Men’s tolerance theme has nothing to do with why this film was made – the current rash of superhero movies is not being voraciously consumed faster than they can be made because audiences wish to imbue themselves with spiritual elevation; no, superhero-mania is the latest fad in a long line of film fads – remember all those war movies after WWII?; all the westerns of the forties through sixties; the cop films of the seventies; slasher films of the eighties; the genres of “baseball,” “family,” “romantic comedies,” et al. Superhero films now join the carousel of bankable corporate products – because the generation who grew up enamored with comics is now at an age where they are making the major business decisions in the world. So please – spare us the faux-philanthropy and get on with entertaining us for our cash.

More Wolverine and Colossus please!

END