How to Train Your Dragon 2

Man, I just reviewed Paddington, which will probably make my yearly Top Ten.  How do you follow that?

Well, you could do worse than How to Train Your Dragon 2, a CGI action-adventure with beautiful animation, thrilling set-pieces, and touching emotional beats.

The film follows the continuing adventures of Hiccup and Toothless, a rider / dragon team, and the rest of the members of their Viking village as they seek to spread peace and love for dragonkind throughout their stylized version of Scandinavia.

Yes, there’s a villain.  And yes, there are more and bigger dragons, and yes, the stakes are (expectedly) higher in the sequel than in the original.  Ho hum.  Nevertheless, it’s all in the execution, and How to Train your Dragon 2 executes the material at the very highest level.  This is a wonderful adventure, technically awesome yet with a beating heart.

It just isn’t Paddington.  I think I should have watched a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad to cleanse my palate, because it turns out that a gentle little movie about a talking bear was one hard act to follow.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies has nothing much to say, but it takes an awfully long time to say it.

This, the conclusion of the three Hobbit films, tells us, once again, that a cursed object can turn everyday greed into  megalomania.  It tells us that love triangles are a cheap way to generate dramatic tension.  It tells us that somewhere between The Lord of the Rings: The Returnof the King and today, Peter Jackson forgot how to present massive battles in a way that made geographical, military, character, and thematic sense.

Either that, or I really am getting too old for this stuff.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

I am the target demographic for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.  I still have a 35-year-old copy of the source novel that has followed me from move to move.  I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I bought the extended editions of all three of those films on DVD.  Heck, I even loved the generally unappreciated first ‘Hobbit’ film, An Unexpected Journey.

Desolation of Smaug is different.  I fell asleep during the climax.

By the time the film got our titular hobbit to the treasure-laden lair of the dragon Smaug, it had taken so many detours that I’d lost interest.  A love triangle featuring two elves and a dwarf?  That idea never should have escaped the world of slash fiction.  A tedious backstory about a heroic ferryman and his family’s legacy of dragonfighting?  Meh.  Gandalf and Radagast investigating the possible appearance of the villain from The Lord of the Rings?  At least it wasn’t trade negotiations. 

And on and on and on and on.  The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug felt so bloated and meandering that it failed to generate any propulsive energy.  I began the film caring about our Hobbit’s quest to find Smaug’s mountain, but by the time the last MacGuffin showed up (some kind of glowing gem that the dwarves want), I’d lost interest and felt the need to rest my eyes.

All this means that The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, failed in its core mission: entertaining its audience.  I didn’t actively hate it, but I grew so bored I don’t even know whether I’ll queue up its final sequel, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.  It’ll take one heck of a critical reception to make me change my mind.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I took my wife and oldest child to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I loved it, which isn't saying much. I'm wedded to the source material, you see. The book was my early-adolescent gateway drug to the world of fantasy, and I loved Peter Jackson's film simply for the opportunity it gave me to spend time in its world.

This is the paragraph where I tease the plot, to help you decide whether it interests you. But this is The Hobbit we're talking about. If you don't know the plot, just go read the book. If you're a reasonably fast reader, you can plow through it in about as much time as it'd take you to get in the car, drive to the theater, see the film, and drive home.

That said, the film is a prequel done right. Yes, it puts pieces in place for the LOTR movies (discussed here, here, and here), but it tells its own story, with its own dangers and its own heroes and villains. I cared about Bilbo qua Bilbo, and not just because of the effect his actions might have on other people in other movies down the storyline. Sherlock's Martin Freeman does great work in the role, giving us the very much settled adult hobbit, as opposed to Elijah Woods's young adult Frodo. James Nesbitt, alternately chilling and charming in BBC's Jekyll, shows a whole different side as a particularly cheerful and resourceful dwarf (whose names I never could keep strait, in print or on film). And it's always nice to see 7th Doctor Sylvester McCoy getting work, this time as nature wizard Radagast the Brown.

When I inevitably purchase this film, I'll be particularly interested in watching the special features about the technical aspects of its creation.  With as much care as Peter Jackson and his team put into creating Middle Earth for The Lord of the Rings, they had to work even harder here. See, Jackson chose to film in 48 fps, the kind of super-high definition you may associate with sporting events on an HDTV. That means that spray paint over styrofoam wasn't going cut it, this time around. This stuff needed to look better that low-def real: it had to look real real. In this, Jackson succeeds perhaps too well. His vision, at 48fps 3-D, is so clear and detailed that we find ourselves moving into the uncanny valley, where our brains shift from willing suspension of disbelief to unwillingly noticing that things are not quite right. While the film's hyperreality works to breathtaking effect in sequences like the battle of the stone giants, I had to consciously suspend my disbelief when it returns to a bunch of actors on a stage who look just like a bunch of actors on a stage.

Nevertheless, I was happy to keep on believing. I cared about Bilbo, I loved the action set-pieces, and I just plain enjoyed spending 2 hours and 45 minutes in Middle Earth. I look forward to going back again.

Hanna

Hanna is terrific!

Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is smart, athletic, capable, and almost entirely innocent.  Her father (Eric Bana) taught her how to hunt, shoot, and fight, but nothing of the actual world and the people in it.  When the deliciously evil Cate Blanchett comes after them both, young Hanna must learn on the run.  And learn she does.

And so goes a fast, exciting action thriller punctuated with rousing set-pieces and propelled by a driving electronic score.  Hanna’s fights make sense in that we know who is doing what to whom and why.  Her journey makes sense both in terms of her personal development and its service to the plot.  We care about her, we hate her enemies, and we have a great time at the movies.  What more can we ask for?

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The very worst thing about INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL is John Hurt. Hurt plays an old friend and colleague of the Joneser, one who has lost his wits after peering too deeply into the eponymous Crystal Skull. The problem with this is that Hurt's performance recalls his Fool in the 1982 BBC production of KING LEAR. Attention filmmakers: if you want to drive a stake through the heart of your movie, cast a great character actor in a pale shadow of one of his career-high performances. It's a sure-fire way to get your audience thinking about how much better that other picture was than the one it's currently watching.

That may be the worst thing about Indy IV, but it has competition. The opening sequence, a car chase between people we don't care about and whom we'll never see again (punctuated with supposedly amusing animal reaction shots), starts the film on an offputting, wtf note. When the picture finally gets around to giving us Ford and Ray Winstone (clearly wishing he was in Ibiza), we've already nearly lost interest. Then Cate Blanchett shows up as the villain, she gets a boner joke, and the whole thing just runs off the rails.

Ok, I admit it. I wrote that whole paragraph just to find an excuse to work in a SEXY BEAST joke.

INDY IV is just plain boring. Dull. Flaccid. A yawner. And I like Spielberg. I like Ford. I like Allen, Winstone, LaBeouf, Blanchett, and Hurt. But my pulse never quickened. I never believed in what was happening. And at the climax, when I was supposed to be going, "Wow," I was only thinking, "Huh. Spielberg and Lucas didn't trust me enough to have the Blanchett speak Russian."

I may have seen this one for free, but I still want $10 back. For my time.

Babel

THE TRANSPORTER 2 is a better moviegoing experience than BABEL.

BABEL teaches us that guns are bad: look for a young Moroccan boy destroying a gun in a climactic fit of fury, sadness, and despair. THE TRANSPORTER 2 teaches us that guns are for losers: real men use car-fu, firehose fu, bead curtain fu, sword fu, lead pipe fu, axe fu, coconut fu, boat fu, and Gulfstream IV fu, just to name a, er, few. BABEL features heartbreaking turns from a brilliant cast featuring Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, and some cat from SNATCH. THE TRANSPORTER 2 features evil foreigners, anorexic models, and some cat from SNATCH kicking people in the face. BABEL features a girl in a schoolgirl outfit flashing her Britney at random Japanese schoolboys. THE TRANSPORTER 2 featurs a girl in a schoolgirl outfit who jacks cars with a gang of cartoonish thugs. And speaking of girls, all BABEL can give us is a clothing-challenged girl weeping on her father's shoulder, while THE TRANSPORTER 2 delivers a clothing-challenged girl in heavy mascara wielding dual automatic weapons and laying down the aforementioned bead curtain fu.

All kidding aside, BABEL is two hours of the anticipation of horror, horror, and despair. Its painfulness is outweighed only by its heavyhandedness, with self-absorbed first-worlders weighed against salt-of-the-earth second-worlders. Not only did I feel that this film was trying to manipulate me into a decidedly unpleasant emotional place, but I thought that it was doing so dishonestly. And really, enough of these "hyperlink films." I liked SHORT CUTS as much as the next guy, but there's no joy in discovering the connections the film lays out before us. Just tell me a story, goshdarnit. Entertain me. Teach and enlighten me if you can, but don't preach at me. And if you can manage it, try and mix in a little cocounut fu. Coconut fu does wonders for any film.

Hot Fuzz

HOT FUZZ is better than SHAUN OF THE DEAD. And I liked SHAUN OF THE DEAD.

SHAUN breaks down a bit in the third act, when it transitions from "zombie comedy" to "zombie horror." FUZZ, on the other hand, benefits from the action tradition it gently mocks - there's plenty of room for comedy in an action picture, and this film uses every square inch of it.

Here's the setup: Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is such a great London cop that he's superiors (Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan, and Bill Nighy) transfer him to a quiet little village in the country, where he won't make everyone else look so bad. Once he gets there, he finds that someone, presumably the creepily hale proprietor of the local supermarket (Timothy Dalton, finding the scenery delicious), is committing murder that would be most foul if it weren't in retribution for doing things like putting on laughably bad productions of "Romeo and Juliet." From there, as any action-movie aficionado can tell you, it's but a short step to massive explosions, the crackle of automatic gunfire, and a fugitive swan.

It's loads of fun, with wonderful comic turns from a cast that includes Cate Blanchett, Jim Broadbent, Paddy Considine, and even Peter Jackson. It features gags from broad to subtle, as well as surprising performances from Timothy Dalton and Paddy Considine, two actors I don't normally associate with comedy. HOT FUZZ kept me chuckling from beginning to end.

What a delightful film.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

I like the combination of the real and the fanciful in THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU. Elegance, insight, and grace infuse the (only?) real element of the film, the inner life of Steve Zissou; while the fanciful element shines with vision, creativity, and an edge toward fancy.

Steve Zissou is a man in the process of losing his illusions. His business is crumbling, his partner is leaving, and his crew yearns for the days when he had the energy to make illusions seem real. As the movie pares this character down to his vital core, it creates an increasingly fantastical world for him to inhabit. How fitting that his moment of enlightenment should come in the most fantastical scene of them all.

Holy cow, did I like this movie.