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

Too mysterious for its own smart.

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS is director Guy Ritchie’s brash, bombastic, brainy and body-shaved sequel to his 2009 SHERLOCK HOLMES. Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) takes on Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) in a battle as much to do with wits as hits. Along with friend, confidant and eternally disgruntled crimefighting partner Dr. Watson (Jude Law), Holmes must stop an assassination at a peace conference, to avoid the world tipping into chaos (which implies the leaders of the world have anything to do with causing peace, which is exactly their opposite  function – they exist to shatter any existing peace and create interminable conflict for politics and profit – but we’ll let this movie have it’s indoctrinated stance).

The story (written by Michele and Kieran Mulroney) seems hard to follow at first, but we realize that much of it is misdirection and verbosity. We are not regarded as nitwits, so there is much to hear in quick asides and fastidious jokes; SHADOWS is a rich tapestry in a world where every wide-release movie has turned into formulaic mush due to studio constraints and short-attention-span viewers.

Robert Downey Jr. is once again hedonistically body-shaved for the role of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s persnickety detective. (Maybe his hair has all been shucked off because suits of iron can be very chafing.) The way the filmmakers set up Jude Law’s contrariness is a wonder: here are two men who we know are the best of bromancers, yet do not have one kind sentence for each other in the first two acts, Watson lamenting with every breath that he would rather be somewhere else.

Poor Rachel McAdams (as Holmes’ love interest Irene Adler) gets it early (don’t know why they tempted us with her luscious beauty if they were just going to rip it away from us). Holmes takes her death with almost nonchalant grief, for there is someone else with cheekbones just as saucy around the corner who will share this adventure with him – the gypsy flame Madame Simza (Noomi Rapace).

Stephen Fry is Holmes’ free-spirited brother Mycroft; stunning Kelly Reilly is Watson’s wife, Mary. And Paul Anderson is that trope we know and love so well – the villain’s right hand man who keeps tracking the hero and never killing him, because. Just because.

Ritchie expands on the devices he used in the last movie; the breakdown of fight sequences before they happen, crash-cutting trails of clues; artfully piecing together daunting sequences that never lose their threads. It’s an amazing piece of filmmaking, with excellent production values that drops us bodily into the world of 1890.

Listen for the theme from TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA as Holmes tries to keep up with horses while riding a mule. (Like Indiana Jones, horses are his snakes.)

It’s hard to keep up with the plot in A GAME OF SHADOWS, especially with Downey enunciating like a verbose poetry slammer; for the most part, looking and listening carefully is a rewarding experience – but sometimes we just want a shiny suit of armor to blow stuff up with a salty metal quip.

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

Justice IS blind – so can’t see Truth.

In movies, the good guys always seem to win court cases. Over an ingratiating orchestra swell, no less. But in reality, good or bad has nothing to do with the outcome of court cases. It’s how you play the game. If you can afford to be in the game in the first place.

A CIVIL ACTION is based on a real life Massachusetts court case, novelized by Jonathan Harr, about a group of families suing two factories in their Woburn locale, accusing them of polluting the town water supply and causing the leukemia deaths of their children. The factories were owned by corporations, and though a settlement was reached, even as the pittance was being paid out, it broke the back of the lawyer who represented the families and destroyed the spirits of the already-shattered families.

John Travolta is lawyer Jan Schlichtmann, who informs us during the opening credits that a lawyer would be doing his clients a disservice were he to get emotionally involved with their case. Then for dramatic arc, and in real life it would seem, Jan went against his own principles and tongue-kissed the case to bed every night and woke with its morning breath in his nostrils every day.

Robert Duvall is veteran lawyer Jerome Facher, his doddering, distracted persona disguising a clinical tactician who outplays Jan at every step of the game precisely because he is not emotionally involved. And has no desire to unearth any ethics or truth in the case. When Jan tells him that the families he represents want the truth about the contaminated water, Facher replies amusedly, “Are we talking about a court of law? A court isn’t the place to find the truth… This case stopped being about dead children the minute it entered the justice system, the minute you filed the case.”

William H. Macy is Jan’s accountant, who helplessly watches the firm go broke against his desperate mortgaging of all their homes as collateral and selling all their office furniture; Tony Shalhoub and Zeljko Ivanek are Jan’s snowed under assistants.

John Lithgow is the forceful, biased judge, who plays golf with Facher. From the outset, Jan is battling the judge’s tripwire impatience as the new guy intruding into this Old Boys’ Club.

Kathleen Quinlan heads the group of families suing for the truth (one of her sons is dead), and James Gandolfini is a factory worker who harbors damning secrets about the dumping of waste chemicals. In his words – presaging the credo of what would become his most enduring character – “I ain’t a rat!” (THE SOPRANOS would appear literally on the heels of this movie and change his career forever.)

Jan tell us: “Odds of a plaintiff’s lawyer winning in civil court are two to one against. Your odds of surviving a game of Russian Roulette are better than winning a case at trial. So why does anyone do it? They don’t. They settle. Only one and a half percent ever reach a verdict. The whole idea of lawsuits is to settle – to compel the other side to settle. And you do that by spending more money than you should, which forces them to spend more money than they should. And whoever comes to their senses first, loses. Trials are a corruption of the entire process. And only fools with something to prove end up ensnared in it. And when I say ‘prove’ I don’t mean about the case, I mean about themselves.”

The judge breaks the case into segments, the first three months boring the jury to death with geologic education, in which time Jan’s firm went broke on scientists, physical evidence, soil experts, trying to swerve the case to the emotional hammer of kids dying, all the while being shunted towards bankruptcy by the continual obfuscating and objections of Facher. (In a flashback scene, we see Facher lecturing students about objecting to every detail, pointing out that should they fall asleep in court, their first words upon awakening should be, “I object!”)

In most movies, an eleventh hour revelation drives the Good Guys towards home plate, victory, and that annoying orchestra swell, but in A CIVIL ACTION, even as Jan uncovers damning evidence that would enable him to appeal the case, with an elusive eleventh hour witness, there is no money left for “justice” to be served. And “the law” – ironically – stands in the way: the long standing principle of res judicata, “that a matter once decided in a court of law remains decided – even if that decision flew in the face of reality.”

Co-written and directed by Steven Zaillian, co-produced by Robert Redford (always into “sensible” films with something to say), A CIVIL ACTION is a success as a movie precisely because it is such a major downer. It conveys an infuriating claustrophobia, that maddening feeling that we can’t, in fact, fight City Hall, no matter what Greg Brady says.

Schlichtmann becomes a shell of a man, obsessed with trying to do the right thing, sitting in his bare office with no desk, phones and electricity cut off and no future prospects. And it’s raining outside.

A late scene shows young punks throwing firecrackers across a river on the contaminated land; one of the firecrackers lands in the river and the whole river catches alight.

Movie ends with the Environmental Protection Agency getting involved – one giant institution against another; a clash of the Titans, if you will. In Greek mythology, only a Titan could destroy another Titan; and in the modern obfuscating world of blind justice – does anyone see the irony in that phrase? – it is still impossible for an individual to destroy a Titan, even with the best intentions and the Truth on their side.

Harr’s book ends on a somber, pessimistic note, but the movie was made after the book, with more current information. Closing text informs us that the two offending corps, Grace and Beatrice Foods, were indicted by the EPA and paid 69 million dollars in cleanup costs. Jan is now representing 60 families in New Jersey in another contaminated water case.

Is this guy a sucker for punishment or what?
END

Those Comedy Traffic School guys always try too hard.

Mining the Diary, Missing the Madman.

Douglas Adams did not live to see his wondrous literary creation, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, made into this feature film. Maybe that’s fortunate.

Each individual component of this movie is well done, from Garth Jennings‘ direction, to the astoundingly creative set design (all the good guys sport spherical décor, the bad guys, cubical) and creature visualizations (the Vogons are magnificently vile prosthetic puppets), to the performances (from creatures and humans alike), to the creation of the on-screen Hitchhiker’s Guide entries, to the artful compressing of Adams’ sprawling opus into a 109 minute movie. Yet somehow, the end result of all these superior elements comes out as flollopy as a mattress from the swamps of Squornshellous Zeta.

Eternally-vexed Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman of Ricky Gervais’ THE OFFICE) is hitch-hiked off Earth by Ford Prefect (Mos Def) just before it is vaporized by Vogons to make way for a hyperspace freeway. So begins Arthur’s trek through the galaxy in the company of opportunist Ford, intergalactic rogue and President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell) and flighty Earth girl, Trillian (Zooey Deschanel), attended by “paranoid android,” Marvin (voiced by Alan Rickman).

Approaching a movie with this level of cult status is slippery from the outset. The screenplay issues from the demented pen of Adams himself, so cultists have little to complain about, though whether his second draft should have been the FINAL one – his death getting in the way – is definitely a matter for contention. Objectively, this enterprise is miles above the British television series – for production value, better acting and snappier writing – but fails in conveying a sense of empathy, because we do not get to live with these characters through weekly adventures.

The actual Guide is smartly purveyed as a computer – even in our modern day, we call laptops “notebooks” – and there are seemingly endless elements of Adams’ book incorporated into the Guide and the movie itself. The more obsessive you are, the deeper into the movie you’ll fall.

At film’s end, when the Improbability Drive turns the spaceship into various objects – as our intrepid adventurers seek the Restaurant at the End of the Universe – Adams’ face is the last image we see as the space cyclorama fades to black. We can only hope he would have been proud of the effort.

And the question remains: With the movie failing to break box-office enough to warrant funding for a big-budget followup, how many inferior sequels will be churned out to court the cultist fanboy dollar?

The answer may be as unimportant as Slartibartfast’s name.

Then again, the answer may just be 42.

END

Cosplay on top of cosplay. Welcome… to Fetish World.

V versus W: No Betta Vendetta.

…an expression of a mood, and it is a warning. The mood it expresses is that of near despair about the future of man, and the warning is that unless the course of history changes, men all over the world will lose their most human qualities, will become soulless automatons, and will not even be aware of it.
— Eric Fromm, Afterword to George Orwell’s 1984.

Conjuring icons and tableaus from humanity’s last four millennia (including Guy Fawkes, The Phantom of the Opera, Shakespeare, Huxley’s Brave New World, Batman, Harlan Ellison’s “Repent Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman, Nazism, The Man With No Name, and a thousand other quasi-plagiarisms), V FOR VENDETTA is a confluence of electric ideas and wolfen imagery that will burn itself into the cortexes of this politically-tepid generation as Orwell’s 1984 was burned into previous generations.

It may even make them do what today’s society would rather they didn’t: think.

P for Pissed Off

Whereas 1984, published in 1949, heralded the pessimism of a far-flung future, where civil liberties were nonexistent, where government held tyrannical sway over citizens’ very thoughts, manufacturing fear through canards and strong-arming via automaton Thought Police, the horror of VENDETTA’s vision is that it reflects not a distant future, but the PRESENT.

Sure, it is clothed in a fiction; of a Britain gone Beyond Big Brother, where pseudo-police called Finger Men are given carte blanche to do with suspects as they please, including cold-blooded murder and rape; where the government can manufacture a virus, release it into the public, and then use the cure as election leverage, and where elected officials have stakes in the company that sells the cure – but how is this any different from a President and his cronies profiteering from a manufactured war that costs millions of lives, holding stakes in all the weapons and oil conglomerates involved?

Just as superheroes were originally created in reaction to their social climate (Zorro, to fight the tyranny of the Spanish Californian governor; Superman, as escapist vision after the Great Depression; Captain America, to give Hitler a good old American Right Hook every so often – all three of these icons also evoked by this film), VENDETTA’s hero, simply known as “V,” is a superhero for OUR times, fighting for the same ideals as his predecessors, ramped up to 2000’s ferocity.

Wearing a permanent Guy Fawkes facemask, V (Hugo Weaving) takes his cue from Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot of 1605 (to assassinate King James I by blowing up the Houses of Parliament), motivated by the same premise – to overthrow a corrupt government. Fawkes was foiled on November 5 (hence the rhyme, “Remember, remember, the fifth of November…”). V is also the only surviving guinea pig from the manufacture of the lethal government virus, which necessitated his facemask and Bat-Zorro outfit. Hence his vendetta – against all his captors, now occupying political positions.

Departing from the storyline and ideologies of Alan Moore‘s and David Lloyd‘s 1988 graphic novel from which it was lifted (Moore and Lloyd reportedly not too rapt with the changes), writers Andy and Larry Wachowski script VENDETTA in a society of 2020, but quite easily evoke a society likely in existence today: there is nary a doubt that this is George W. Bush’s dystopian America. To take the edge off the scythe, the British government stands as allegory for the U.S. government, America having been nullified as a world power in a recent war.

On the November 5th night we meet V, he rescues Evey (Natalie Portman), just before he blows the Old Bailey courts, to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, promising in a pirated television broadcast to do the same to the Houses of Parliament next year.

Upon V’s first appearance as the suavely lethal, black-caped vigilante, loquacious to a fault, my heart actually beat faster – at last!: a character intelligent, articulate and adept at weaponry – who is not the British Bad Guy. At long last, a truly knowledgeable and literate protagonist wins the day, not some disheveled cop or loudmouth devil-brat who teaches his parents how to love again. A Hero whose abode is piled high with books, where art and learning – not a big screen TV or sports memorabilia – are given pride of place (thank American Sitcom Husbands for the shiftless male idiom); where ornate statuary and a baby grand piano reflect traditionalism and sophistication – without the snide implication that knowledge equals nerd equals FRASIER.

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
— George Orwell, 1984.

The credo that George W. Bush stakes his christian pocketbook on. And Orwell thought he was writing of a fictional future society. In VENDETTA, the doublethink is the same, media programs spewing absolute lies in their spin reportage of subversive events. (How is this any different to force-feeding creationism to schoolchildren; to reporting that America won the War In Iraq?)

In the most ironic casting since Moses became the head of the NRA, John Hurt (who played the failed rebel Winston Smith, in the film version of 1984) overlords this totalitarian social order as Supreme Chancellor Sutler, whose every ranting breath from wall-sized TV monitors is channeled into policy through his armed regimes of thoughtless drogues. (How is this any different to a President who can sign a bill against torture and then use torture whenever he feels like it; who can progress a war effort without the legal approval of congress?)

A small coterie of officials report to the Chancellor, for weekly doses of intimidation, among them, Finch (Stephen Rea), doing the “disheveled cop who finds his conscience” routine, and Creedy (Tim Pigott-Smith) as the cop who doesn’t have one.

Natalie Portman, who seems to have a proclivity for morally-ambiguous super killers – Leon, Darth Vader, and now V – effectively wipes away the stain of STAR WARS with this performance. I am in love again. Hugo Weaving, eternally hidden behind V’s mask, lets his unseen elocution fly daggers, and is doubly commended for the fact that he is so clearly understood even without the benefit of seeing his moving lips. Roger Allam is a Limbaugh clone shouting agitprop to the huddled masses, and Stephen Fry is a tragic television host who at last finds the courage to rebel.

“A building is a symbol – the more people who place their faith in that symbol the greater the statement in destroying it.”

As well as the World Trade Center, the christian-corrupted Ten Commandments are evoked, the first two abjuring false gods and graven images. Did the World Trade Center attacks leave such a deep scar because of society’s failing in affording mere physical edifices such nationalistic import? Even after business resumed through other avenues and families recovered from loss of their beloveds, the ire is still raised whenever “9-11” is mentioned disparagingly. Like right now. (To the idiots who will obviously read into this line of thought an advocacy of Al-Qaeda policy, please visit me so I can beat you with my shoe for your willful stupidity.)

“Yes! We are all individual!”

Yet for all the puling and faux-empathy, the exploitation is rampant – lest we forget the mini-flag-makers and magnetic ribbon purveyors and – most venal of all – Hollywood: at least two 2006 movies brazenly depict, in garish newspeak (read as nationalistic tunnel vision), 9-11 subject matter, whilst the propaganda-drenched TV movies all make their unscrupulous bid for their fifteen minutes of Nielsen glory (the most ironic featuring the comedian Timothy Bottoms, perfectly cast as Bush Jnr., as not only is the poor guy a dead ringer for W, his insipid acting is perfectly congruent with the insipid leadership and public persona of the real thing).

In the real world, insurgent media opens two possibilities: either the government the media rails against is NOT as corrupt or as criminally organized as it is portrayed (if it were, the insurgent media would be quashed) – OR, the government IS that corrupt, but are so insulated from due process of expulsion that they have nothing to fear.

The awful truth is that it is a little of both. Anyone who thinks otherwise has the mind of a thirteen-year-old girl.

Coincidentally, it is when Evey is dressed as a schoolgirl for a pervert bishop – how could something so wrong be so right?! – that she displays just such a naiveté and tries to betray V. It is only after a terror-filled interlude that she allies with him wholeheartedly.

There are those who accuse VENDETTA of advocating terrorism. Semantics! Guerilla tactics by allies are “covert ops,” or “freedom fighting,” whilst the same tactics, if used by the enemy, are decried as “terrorism.” Use your semantics to define the Chancellor’s acts of viral terror and disinformation, inflicted on a wide scale, killing millions; how would your semantics describe a manufactured war, taking countless lives to pad the pockets of the wealthy upper class?

How haughty for the stinking super-rich to classify any acts which diminish their unethical, blood-red wealth as “terrorist” acts. Note that “terrorists” – on both sides – never sabotage or create anarchy to specifically harm lower classes. It’s always about making statements that will make the rich and powerful take notice; the lower classes happen to be in the way.

For years it has been my contention that when all civil, legal and righteous methods to dislodge a dishonest government fail, situations will degenerate to visceral animal backbiting and pipe-hitting, as it does in the film: there is a scene where a young girl is shot in the back by a Finger Man who believes himself immune to retribution by holding up his badge – which proves impotent against a horde of citizens wielding pipes. Hard, pipe-hittin’ niggas indeed…

The Wachowski Brothers and director, James McTeigue, are all MATRIX vets. In that series, they lost themselves in the folds of their own mind-lobes with their vacuous, insular proselytizing and specious, Möbius-strip philosophizing, not to mention the overblown, mostly unnecessary effects. In VENDETTA, they have found their stride, close-reining the efx and preachiness, rather concentrating on real ideas.

“Behind this mask, there is an Idea. And Ideas are bulletproof.”

The movie conjectures that a country’s citizenry, for the most part, will unite in a putsch against their corrupt government – unfortunately, this is not the case, as evidenced in the United States of Bushtopia, where there is an even distribution of citizens across the spectrum, from those who would kiss the government’s feet in denial, no matter what crimes were perpetrated against them, to the picketers, lobbyists and congresspersons who actively work to dethrone heinous governing bodies.

“If this is what it takes to have a combover like The Donald, then so be it…”

Watch any episode of REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER and the occasional guest Republican will stand their ground like a braying ass, defending their pedestrian President against incompetence and duplicity against all evidence to the contrary. If there is one unquestioning drogue like that, there are thousands. An Idea being bulletproof unfortunately works both ways.

Like every superhero, V is a fantasy unfulfilled – he is the omniscient super being who will do the hard pipe-hittin’ when that critical mass is attained. When all sense is shunted aside – when malfeasance and misfeasance are the norm; when failure to act reaches life-threatening proportions (the infamous seven minute incognizance during The Pet Goat after being informed the country was under attack; Hurricane Katrina inaction); when ignorance is lauded for political agenda (creationism; prayer in place of progress; global warming study censored because the contracted scientists did not report what the government wanted to hear); when news reportage allows sham and glam to take precedence over substance (Michael Jackson’s insanity and Britney Spears’ ugly pregnant belly overshadowing immigration policies and homosexual rights, which in turn overshadow the national deficit and war crimes, which in turn overshadow the government’s clandestine business affiliations with their supposed enemies); when civil rights have become civil wrongs – the SENSELESS methods must necessarily be invoked. Some people just don’t understand anything BUT a pipe to the head.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

Roger Ebert opines that in an ideal state, both governments and their people should exist in harmony and that fear in either direction leads to violence. Ebert forgets that Fear is a euphemism for Respect, and vice versa. When a government believes it is so untouchable that it loses all respect for the people who voted for it, and starts instigating policy that furthers only the goals of government itself, rather than the people whom it ostensibly works for – that is when “fear” should be utilized to re-assert respect. If the only way to remove a corrupt government is via a government-endorsed method, how would the government ever be removed? Obviously by another method. Involving pipes. (In a related topic: One of V’s planted bombs illustrates that even the grandest insurgents of the future will still be courteous enough to include Roger Ebert’s Red Digital Readout, so that the defuser knows how much time he can fuss about with the red and blue wires before he arbitrarily cuts any old one.)

“The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.”

This film is a cry out to the intelligentsia of the planet to hold fast – in one way or another, justice is coming in a long black cape…

END