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.

Squabbling Over Mommy

Thor: The Dark Age
Directed by Alan Taylor and James Gunn
Three Stars

By Rollan Schott

Alan Taylor’s and James Gunn’s “Thor: The Dark World”, the latest in the Marvel movie ponzi scheme, is the big, dumb comic book movie we deserve. Make of that what you will. I’ve maintained that the first “Thor” was the most turgid and listless of the Marvel superhero movies, and the most emblematic of the Marvel marketing con, wherein each Marvel movie seems to exist merely to sell the next Marvel movie. Marvel, Marvel, Marvel. The machine has been effective, but most individual installments don’t have the foundation to stand independently of the others. Each film is propping up the next, and the system barrels forward with an ever-more perilous pace of bar-raising spectacle. Given the momentum, “The Dark World”, with its bumbling, Shakespearian, Hammer-wielding barbarian, behaves like the proverbial bull in a china shop, and the effect is weirdly satisfying.

The Folly of the Foolish Kingpin

The CounselorDirected by Ridley Scott
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

And so the writer conveys story through the written word, and the filmmaker with the moving image and this is the way it is. Cormac McCarthy must be considered one of the great contemporary American novelists, and it is not insignificant that  he wrote the remarkable “The Counselor”, directed by Ridley Scott, not as a novel but a screenplay, his first in the format to be produced. The writer, confronted directly with the visual medium, has moved his stoic, worldly prose seemlessly from narration to dialog. His characters speak as if outside of themselves, meditating heedlessly about the nature of their own circumstances. They are individualistic, fully-realized and complex characters with unique perspectives, but in each of their monologues can be found a hint of McCarthy’s wry, biblical wit.

Broadcasting His Decline

Alan Partridge: Alpha PapaDirected by Declan Lowney
Three and One Half Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

Alan Partridge, the long-lived character played repeatedly by Steve Coogan in various incarnations over the past 20 or so years, is distinctly unlikable. He’s irresponsible, selfish, at times sleazy. The chronicling of his career since his first appearance in 1991 has essentially been a spectacular fall from grace due to incompetence and a complete lack of self-awareness. Partridge lay dormant for a few years in the middle of last decade, but came back with a vengeance with the publication of the viciously hilarious memoir I, Partridge in 2011 (I strongly recommend the audiobook as read by Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge), and now the feature film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa.