The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies is surprisingly competent in its pacing and successfully avoids the missteps of the second movie. While the movie is essentially one long action sequence, Jackson effectively turns the movie in to a series of action vignettes, each with their own escalation, climax, and relief. This results in no single action sequence overstaying its welcome and a movie which was elevated above my admittedly low expectations.

The Hobbit still has its share of problems. Some of the editing is jarring, especially within the first hour which covers the remainder of the content actually found in the book. There are a few questionable plot contrivances which left me scratching my head, including several attempts at jokes that fell completely flat. Yet over all it was not the terminal boredom inducing nightmare I had feared it would be.

A big part of the success of this movie beyond the competent pacing was the lack of any major character introductions. The movie spends most of its time ushering existing characters to their on screen finale. This gives the movie a tighter focus than the previous entries which all made a point of making ponderous character introductions or introductions that differ from the book, which often left this reader puzzled.

One surprising success of the movie was a character addition I initially took offense to. Thorin’s nemesis, Azog the Defiler, seemed like a completely unnecessary addition which did nothing to escalate the danger the company faced and seemed like a meaningless contrivance to “humanize” the goblin hordes by adding a recognizable personality to them. The addition of Azog is redeemed at his parting by achieving what the character had failed to do thus far. It took three movies, but Azog finally develops in to a competent villain whose inclusion felt necessary instead of contrived.

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I am a longtime fan of Terry Gilliam. Brazil and Time Bandits are great movies, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is my favorite film of all time, hands down. That being said, I’ll be the first to admit that his recent work can be uneven (if you saw The Brothers Grimm you’ve probably already forgotten it… and now I’ve reminded you… sorry), so it was with both hope and trepidation that I went into Gilliam’s latest film, The Zero Theorem. The movie showcases the Monty Python alum’s best and worst habits as a filmmaker, but on the whole it comes out ahead.

In many ways, Zero Theorem is a close cousin to Brazil; both feature nebbishy loners seeking meaning in a dysfunctional near­future society. Of the two, Theorem conjures a somewhat more fleshed out setting; Brazil, with its soul­crushing bureaucracy at every turn, felt like a bit of a one­note­dystopia, more a symbol than a believable world. By contrast, the society depicted in this new film is not so much evil as aggressively superficial, awash in pushy advertisements, with glowing tablets in the hand of every garishly dressed citizen. The technology of this glittering mediacracy is bolted to the surfaces of stately but dilapidated stone buildings­ a shiny new world build carelessly atop the old one. The satire is overt, but the setting still feels plausible. Read more →

There are spoilers in this review. You’ve been warned.

Scarlett Johansson has recently starred in two separate sci-fi movies: the surrealistic indie film Under The Skin, and the (relatively) mainstream Lucy. This week, I consumed an altogether unhealthy quantity of caffeine and watched both back-to-back. The following are my observations.

I started my ScarJo* binge with Under the Skin, which is unquestionably the more esoteric of the two. This was to prove a wise decision, if only because the movie left me in bad need of a pulpy cinematic palette-cleanser. The movie follows ScarJo’s unnamed character- who is probably an alien, certainly not human- as she drives through the cities and back roads of Scotland in an unmarked white van seeking male loners to seduce. Her unlucky victims are lured back to a dark void somehow contained within ScarJo’s dingy urban flat and submerged in a mysterious pool, wherein their internal organs are removed and liquefied for reasons unknown (Freud could have co-written this script). It is in these scenes that ScarJo reveals her skill at playing chillingly inhuman characters. We see her put on a seductive act to ensnare potential prey- chatting, smiling, laughing- and revert to a blank-faced cypher the moment they are out of sight. This flair for emotionless inhumanity will resurface in the next movie.

Eventually, she starts experiencing actual emotions and makes awkward attempts to become human- she tries (and fails) to eat human food; she tries (and fails) to form a non-predatory relationship with a mostly-well-intentioned human male. The ironic thing here is that the harder she tries to be a human, the less convincingly she is able to do so. Ultimately, ScarJo peels off her false skin, revealing her true form- a gaunt, black-skinned alien being. It gazes impassively down at its human mask, which continues to blink and emote. It would seem that all the emotional suffering she experienced throughout the second half of the movie was literally only skin deep. Then an evil lumberjack sets her on fire (um, spoiler).

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