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Reviews
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
Basing a Clown Face on the Mona Lisa
VERY VERY MILD SPOILERS. YOU MIGHT NOT EVEN NOTICE.
Story: 10/10. It's the Hobbit. It's one of the greatest stories ever told, in my opinion.
Execution: I'm too offended to give a number.
The Hobbit is not the crowning achievement of Tolkien's. Lord of the Rings changed Fantasy Fiction forever with its anthropological depth and detailed world building. But as far as the quality of narrative, The Hobbit is an unassuming, honest story that reads brilliantly from beginning to end. By contrast, LOTR delves for long passages into desultory details of the world that are fascinating if you've already decided to make yourself love Middle Earth, but rather laborious if you haven't. Again, LOTR is ingenious, but The Hobbit is honest, good fiction, and better told in my opinion.
Why belabor this point? It's exactly what the film failed to accomplish. The book is simple, short, punchy, beautiful. The trilogy (TRILOGY!!!) of films will, in the end, go on for 9 hours.
Is there plot and/or character material to keep the story going for that long. H*** F*****G **IT B**CH NO!!!!!
The first fight scene probably lasts around thirty minutes. I am not exaggerating. The story is padded not with character or plot or setting or anything of value. It's not even padded with really cool violence. It's padded with dwarfs falling off cliffs. Seriously. Not exaggerating. You must spend a good twenty minutes of the film just watching dwarfs fall off cliffs. Then they hit their heads after 100- 300 metre drops and still feel fine. Much of the rest of the padding consists of things that could make a dwarf fall off a cliff, like orcs, or rock monsters, or more orcs, or some other less interesting monster.
It could easily be forty minutes of dwarfs falling off cliffs. I lost count when my brain turned to mush. Either way, there's probably 1.5 hours here of dwarfs fighting and falling. I'm not exaggerating.
You will spend a good 2 hours, probably 2.5 hours, watching fight scenes and landscapes. There is enough story in The Hobbit for maybe, at a serious stretch, 2 and a half hours. A punchy, compact and excellent story could not exceed 2 hours. The story of The Hobbit would make one of the best 2 hours of cinematic experience you'd ever see. It is a superb story, worthy of a superb movie. What Peter Jackson has done is not only make something offensively garish out of one of the best stories ever told but he's created an offense to art itself. He has made a clown drawing and called it the Mona Lisa.
Honestly, and again I must stress that I'm not exaggerating, I would like to see Peter Jackson punished for this. I would like to see law suits, violence, him falling off a cliff for at least 20 minutes, fighting orcs for one and a half hours. Make him fall off a cliff for 40 minutes just to be safe. Then see if he shakes his head and feels fine afterward. If so, make another two films out of it. This film is an offense to cinema, to Fantasy Fiction, to Tolkien and to the artistic traditions of our culture.
If I were in charge of the Tolkien estate, I'd be filing a law suit.
Burn, Peter Jackson. I hope you hang your head in shame for at least two hours of every day, and it should probably be two and a half hours just to be safe. If the next movie doesn't begin with a personal apology, I'm not watching it.
Olympus Has Fallen (2013)
10/10 Comedy, 4/10 Action, 1/10 Intelligence
Let's give this movie some credit. Morgan Freeman could make Pluto Nash look like a good movie if he wanted. His presence contributed something. It was a shame that his character, however, did not.
The villain was cool. The gun fights were cool. The hand-to-hand combat was PATHETIC. It all amounted to close up shots of the waist, artfully avoiding the need for choreography. Most combat was resolved with a "Sock!" punch of some kind. It was so dated, it was like watching a fight scene in the original Star Trek series, only without the surrounding plot or character interaction.
So, cool guns, cool explosions, and some watchable stock characters.
Here we get to the best part of the movie. It was hilarious. I'm sure people in the audience thought the big American accent guy at the front of the cinema must have found all the flag waving (at an obvious point that everyone knew was coming, just to avoid spoilers) quite evocative, because I literally had to bite my fingers until the pain was overwhelming to avoid bursting into laughter. I'm laughing now just thinking about it. By the movie's end, I was leaning forwards with my eyes watering and my fingers in my mouth, my girlfriend holding onto me for moral support, and when the credits finally rolled I leaned my head back and laughed for a full minute. I am glad I watched this movie.
Here's the bad part. If you're looking for something with a brain, run. Run fast, far, and never ask a patriotic American for their opinion. You will be offended in every way. I'm not slagging off patriotism, or America, but if you're dumb enough to accept the WAY they do it in this movie, take your 2-digit IQ back to the trailer park and please, please get your ilk out of Hollywood while you're at it.
Jian guo da ye (2009)
Despicable
It is rare for a movie to deserve one star. This would receive negative ten if such were possible.
This isn't just a bad movie. This was made by the state owned China Film Group to mark the 60th anniversary of their happy fascist regime. This "docu-drama" is a shameless, disgusting attempt to ram a skewed history, in which Mao is seen as a paragon of kindness, down a viewer's throat. To call this a documentary is an offense to all historians. This is history with a political agenda (not a rare thing for fascists). As a movie, it deserves one star. But again, this is not a movie. It is a shameless bid by an evil government to deify the monster who created it. IMDb should offer "black hole ratings" or something to illustrate the amount of genuine evil a film/documentary attempts to inflict on humanity. With such a rating system, this horrid spectacle would get ten out of ten.
You may be tempted to purchase this due to the martial arts stars on the cover. That's why it was purchased, as a gift, for me. Many famous Chinese actors make cameo appearances. Nothing more. Jackie Chan plays a journalist (although all he does is hand Chiang Kai-Shek a newspaper, so he could just as well be a salesman) and has a total of 2.5 seconds of screen time. I wasn't able to spot Jet Li. It isn't hard to imagine these stars being in the film just for the money, but given the content I was left to wonder if there was something more ominous at work. Again, I implore you, do not be fooled by their faces on the DVD cover into thinking that this is an actual movie.
Should you watch this out of morbid curiosity, look at the way they construct the drama. Notice the music--ominous in the background whenever the KMT is portrayed, jolly and twinkly whenever Mao shows his haircut. Mao smiles, lives (the idea that he is hiding is well hidden in the direction) in mud huts with villagers whom he always treats as equals. He is kind and a paragon of benevolence. Chiang is not portrayed as an evil man. The modern Chinese audience is too sophisticated for that. But he never takes off his military uniform. He is constantly cosseted during his time on screen.
Propaganda is in symbolism as much as content. This film is saturated with the former and heavily skews the historical accuracy of the latter. This is shameless propaganda. The more you know about politics, advertising, writing, directing, or the construction of any art, the more horrified you will be. The more you know about history, the more disgusted.