Middle Earth as You've Already Seen It

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Directed by Peter Jackson
Two and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

One can call Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”, the second installment in his "Hobbit" trilogy, many things: ‘ambitious’, ‘epic’, ‘bombastic’, ‘cluttered’, ‘listless’… But if there is anything “Desolation” is not, it is ‘Tolkien’. With one book of modest length strained to the breaking point of a trilogy of three-hour movies, and much of the Middle Earth history provided in Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion” off limits to him, Jackson has found a great deal of vacuous space to be filled with his own cinematic hedonism. This includes, most notably, a showdown with the titular dragon that persists for a full hour and recalls, more than its source literature, the climactic final act of Jackson’s earlier “King Kong”. There's more than one reason we feel like we've done this before.

A Familiar Arena

The Hunger Games: Catching FireDirected by Francis Lawrence
Two and One Half Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire envisions a future in which an oligarchy rules with an iron fist, while its poverty-stricken masses are sedated by a cruel and callous ‘sport’ in which competitors are thrust into an arena and forced to fight to the death.

Confronting Our History

12 Years a Slave
Directed by Steve McQueen
Three and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

In 1841, a free black man living in New York by the name of Solomon Northup was lured to Washington D.C. by two white men, promising him some good money to be made quickly with his violin. Northup was drugged, kidnapped, and smuggled south to be sold illegally into the slave trade, where he lived for twelve years before finally being returned to his family. During Northup’s time as a slave in the Antebellum South, he observed, as an educated, erudite and thoughtful man, the ways that empathy and compassion and religion and virtually every other facet of human behavior navigated their ways around the racism innate in their culture, the ways that men could be purchased as property, forced to work without pay, and yet spoken to with respect and dignity, the ways that black men could be spoken to with respect and dignity yet still be addressed as that most execrable slur. To reconcile one’s humanity with the needs of an archaic plantation infrastructure, huge concessions were made where they must not have been made: in the realm of human decency.

Retreating Into Romance

Blue is the Warmest ColorDirected by Abdellatif Kechiche
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color” is a work of disarming emotional intensity. What begins as a coming out tale becomes a coming of age one, and graduates finally into a harsh reminder that we never exhaust the well of hard lessons we've left to learn. A relationship is a two-sided blade, and in our youth we know not how to wield it. Sex appeals to us first as an extravagance of adulthood and quickly becomes a haven from the remaining tumult of adolescence. But that haven becomes a refuge, and that refuge an asylum, an isolating force that no longer offers reprieve but collars and represses our capacity to develop as individuals. We pour all of ourselves into the symbiosis and lose our sense of self. If we’re lucky we endure this cataclysm with time to recover before adulthood strips away the barricades, before it exposes us. It was a lesson I learned the summer before college, I recall. Well, started learning anyway. It’s never a clean break.