The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

         A more fully developed world, better drawn characters and sharper satire mark this superior sequel to 2012’s The Hunger Games. Not that The Hunger Games was that bad. It’s easy to lump this movie series in with other sci-fi/fantasy stories aimed at young adults, like Twilight. But both Catching Fire and The Hunger Games do more than coast on the appeal of their young stars. Catching Fire, in particular, is a full-blooded pop satire with a well-realized sci-fi setting and characters you want to root for. Yes, it’s still a movie that pits a couple of good-looking teenagers against the world, but here their struggles actually seem to mean something.

        When we last saw Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), she had survived the Hunger Games, a kind of mash-up between gladiatorial fights to the death and American Idol, and was headed home. When she gets a chilly house-call from the calculating President Snow (Donald Sutherland), she learns she won’t get off so easy. Her attempted double-suicide at the end of the last Hunger Games, President Snow tells her, is being viewed as a sign of rebellion against the all-powerful Capitol. This cannot be tolerated, and if she wants to avoid retaliation she and fellow victor Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) must convince the populace of their loyalty.

        The ever-earnest Katniss can’t quite pull this off, and Snow decides that the only way to get rid of her without turning her into a martyr is to throw her back into the Games where she can die by the hand of someone other than him. Like the last movie, a large amount of Catching Fire is devoted to the time before the Games begin, and it’s a lot better for it. There’s both drama and comedy in the way the rough-and-tumble Katniss tries to adjust to her new role as propaganda tool, and Donald Sutherland gets to lend his glowering charisma in an expanded part. There’s a love triangle, too. Katniss is torn between Peeta, who likes Katniss more than she likes him, and brooding childhood friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth), but her decision is never the focus of the movie. It’s all about public opinion- how to create, keep, and hold it- with the steely, likable Katniss caught in the middle.

        The behind-the-scenes lead-up to the Hunger Games is so compelling that it’s almost a disappointment when they finally begin. Like last time, Katniss must face off against a vast field of contestants, but most have a bit more personality this go-round, especially Jena Malone as an unhinged combatant prone to public acts of nudity. The action also moves at a much faster clip, as though the filmmakers know the Hunger Games are the least interesting part of The Hunger Games and want to run through them as quickly as possible.

        Catching Fire has officially become a massive box office hit, so it comes as no surprise that the producers intend to milk the series for all it’s worth. There are two more movies queued up, each based off one half of the third and final book in author Suzanne Collins’ series.  Catching Fire ends on a cliffhanger, but this nervy blockbuster gives us a reason to feel excited rather than cheated.

Ender's Game

            When it comes to Hollywood blockbusters, children have had it pretty rough of late.  Earlier this year, young Jaden Smith had to avoid death by monsters on a post-apocalyptic planet in After Earth.  In a few weeks, Katniss Everdeen and her teenage companions will be pit to the death against each other in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.  And here, pubescent Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) must survive a brutal military boot camp designed to crush the innocence out of him so he can become a leader capable of saving the world from a race of bug-eyed extra-terrestrials.  For a tent-pole action movie, Ender’s Game is restrained, briskly paced, and tightly written, but its solemnity keeps it from becoming fun or exhilarating.

            Ender’s Game begins on planet Earth, where young Ender attends a government-run academy meant to train Earth’s next generation of military talent.  Some fifty years ago, Earth narrowly avoided being conquered by an alien race known as the Formics, and its leaders have spent the time since strengthening their defenses.  Writer-director Gavin Hood drops hints about the tight controls imposed on Earth’s citizens by their government- there’s a cap on procreation, for example- but the particulars are largely skipped over so the movie can focus on Ender’s progression from boarding school brat to military leader.

            Ender rises quickly through the ranks at his school both because he’s adept at interpersonal politics, showing a knack for saying the right things at the right time in front of the right people, and because the adults in his life see something in him.  Colonel Graff, played effectively by a scowling Harrison Ford, is in charge of recruiting at the school.  He and some of the other teachers watch Ender on video monitors and talk about how he’s a genius, a natural leader, the only one capable of defeating the alien threat.  Ender is basically a another version of Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter, a pre-ordained messiah destined to save the world.  But unlike in those stories, there’s no sense that it’s at all enjoyable being Ender Wiggin, nothing to leaven the crushing responsibility of being the Chosen One.  Life at the academy is regimented and competitive.  There’s little room for joy, and Graff works overtime to make sure Ender gets less than even his fair share.  He tries to drive a wedge between Ender and the other students, the better to mold Ender into leadership material.  Some of Ender’s classmates become envious, even violent.  The adults leave Ender to deal with his enemies as they come, satisfied with his nascent brutality even as Ender is disturbed by it.  The largely unseen Formics may threaten humanity with extinction, but the movie sees these adults as the real villains.

            In the movie’s twist ending, those adults push Ender to do something unconscionable, and the final minutes raise interesting questions about the corrosive power of authority and the ambiguity of personal responsibility.  From some angles, Ender’s Game can be seen as adolescent wish fulfilment, with young viewers projecting themselves onto the stoic Ender, an incredibly gifted young man whose talents are manipulated and misused by authority figures.  That’s something of a disturbing way to hook viewers in for what is otherwise a special effects driven sci-fi spectacular, but those ideas give the movie a brooding, somber center that can’t be waved away.  Ender’s Game presents one point of view, a rather downbeat one, on what it’s like to be young.  It remains to be seen whether that will be enough for it to stand out among other movies doing the same thing.

Captain Phillips

Whether they’re plundering peaceful fishing villages in search of buried doubloons or attacking shipping vessels off the coast of Somalia, it is generally agreed upon that pirates are bad guys.  What they do is illegal and immoral and dangerous.  Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips, based off a true story of an actual pirate hijacking in 2009, does not dispute this.  But the pirates aren’t cast as snarling villains, either.  Captain Phillips is, first and foremost, an effective action movie, but it’s also a political commentary where the pirates aren’t always unsympathetic and the U.S government is just a little bit scary.

Richard Phillips is a middle-aged commercial sea captain.  He has a wife and a couple of growing children.  He is taciturn, steadfast, dependable and sort of destined to be played by Tom Hanks.  Hanks has always had a likable everyman quality to him, and as Phillips he projects a kind of grounded world-weariness that makes us root for him.  In early scenes we see him make the rounds of his ship, the MV Maersk Alabama, checking for wear and tear, making sure everything is ready for the voyage round the horn of Africa to Mombasa.  The ship is carrying food.  For Captain Phillips, this trip is just another job, and director Paul Greengrass’ focus on the mundanity of it effectively sets up the chaos to come.

Meanwhile, in Somalia, we’re introduced to Abduwali Muse, a wiry young man who volunteers to lead the hijacking of Phillips’ ship.  This is just a job for Muse as well.  After the pirates board the Alabama, Muse turns to Phillips, gun in hand, and says, almost apologetically, that this is “just business.”

Screenwriter Billy Ray draws parallels like this between Phillips and Muse early and often.  On one level, attempts to compare the two are strained, even in bad taste.   Phillips is the one shipping food to give to starving people in Monbasa, Muse the one hijacking his ship and demanding upwards of $30 million in ransom.  Muse and his crew are in the wrong, but the movie gives us little moments where we can empathize with them.  Upon learning that they’ve boarded an American ship, their faces light up like kids at Christmas.  This is a good haul, one that could keep their families fed for a long while.  They chomp a local root to keep their energy up, and you can’t watch them for long without thinking about how very, very young they all are.

But what endears them to us the most is how absolutely screwed they are.  Since the movie is based on a true story, few in the audience doubt that Captain Phillips himself will live, but we don’t know about the pirates.  As news of the hijacking spreads to the United States Navy, it quickly becomes clear that they are not going to be okay.  Greengrass depicts the military as cold, faceless, and merciless.  The Marine snipers crouching under the railings of an American battleship are drenched in shadow, the hulking, armed officers that surround Muse after he is lured onto their boat terrifying in their uniformity.   Muse’s storming of the Maersk Alabama is frightening for the crew, but the movie is more than a little wary of the U.S. government as well.

Hanks’ Captain Phillips is in the middle, a decent man who is unjustly kidnapped but still regrets what must happen to his kidnappers.  In the end, he doesn’t know how to react.  Neither does the movie, not completely, perhaps because there is no right way to react to impossible situations like this one.

Gravity

Stars.

Gravity, the movie, not the partially-understood fundamental interaction of nature, is primarily a visual exercise. And it’s a successful one. The movie is glorious to look at, full of weightless tracking shots dancing through space, eerily quiet moments of astronauts floating in zero-G, and breathless sequences where our puny human stars are thrown against floating debris, battered space stations, and the void. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Apollo 13, movies have used the unique properties of outer space to impress audiences, but Gravity doesn’t coast on the accomplishments of its predecessors. In one sequence, first-time astronaut Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) makes it safely aboard a space station. She peels off her spacesuit piece by piece and curls into a fetal position, hanging in the air, twirling slowly round for a long, silent minute. It’s a lovely moment that works because Gravity is still impressed with the visuals of weightlessness, and we're free to join it.

When the movie isn’t pausing to regard the beauty of bodies in space, it’s a small-scale survivor thriller, a disaster movie for two. Bollock’s Dr. Stone has been sent to make repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, supervised by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney). Ground control warms them that rubble from a defunct Russian satellite is hurtling their way, and soon the Hubble is busted to bits and the two astronauts are drifting through space, joined by a tether and making use of Kowalski’s rocket pack to travel to the International Space Station. Director Alfonso Cuarón comes up with wonderfully inventive ways to highlight their vulnerability by, say, attaching a camera to the front of Bollock’s suit to watch the horizon rise and fall over and over behind her as she spins, helpless, through space, or framing the characters against the softly glowing earth however many hundreds of miles below.

Gravity tries, on occasion, to be more than a showcase for visual creativity, but always comes up short. In the lead roles, Bullock and Clooney are fine, but the script doesn’t really demand they be anything more. You have to wonder why the producers would bother getting two big stars to play these roles in the first place, since their faces are often obscured by space helmets and their performances play second fiddle to the special effects. As the two drift toward the space station, they talk about the Bullock character’s life on the ground. She’s trying to forget about a traumatizing event back home, and the script takes a stab at exploring the theme of how to let go of one’s past. It never makes an impression, though. How could it, when it has to compete with an elemental battle for survival set against shots of the sun rising over planet Earth?

Gravity, then, doesn’t have the ambition of something like 2001, a movie that dealt with ideas as bold as its visuals. But that shouldn’t diminish how impressive these visuals are. These are boundary-pushing special effects at a time when it’s easy to assume that special effects have no more boundaries to push. It’s an argument for keeping movies on the big screen when the temptation is to watch everything at home at your computer. See it on the biggest screen you can and be wowed.

Movie Review: Blue Jasmine

Jasmine (Cate Blanchette), unwell.

    The success of Blue Jasmine begins and ends with Cate Blanchette.  As Jasmine, a widowed former socialite who finds herself having to leave her plush Manhatten penthouse to bunk with her working class sister in San Francisco, Blanchette is terrific.  Jasmine is fractured, cultured, and completely out of her element.  Deprived of her wealth and forced to do things like work for a living and learn how to open an internet browser, her rambling monologues about how much she enjoyed her former life begin as hilarious and quickly cross into sad and uncomfortable.  Blanchette plays the character with all of her contradictions fully intact, and gives the film a powerful, memorable center.

    Not that she deserves all of the credit.  Director/writer Woody Allen is having one of his hit years.  It’s popular to disparage Allen for not being as good as he was in the 70s and 80s, and when one considers that he used to produce great stuff like Manhatten and The Purple Rose of Cairo and Crimes and Misdemeanors on a regular basis, you can see where the instinct comes from.  But even as Allen’s output has become more scattershot in recent years, he’s still making quality movies, from Match Point to Vicky Cristina Barcelona to Midnight in Paris.  Blue Jasmine is another one, and it’s one of the meatiest he’s made in recent memory.

    Allen’s movies tend to take place in a privileged bubble.  The characters are generally wealthy, and clever, and are afforded neurosis less affluent people don’t really have the time for.  Blue Jasmine represents the first time in a while that Allen has engaged very directly with the world of today, with a story that almost seems ripped right from the headlines.  Before her trip out west, Jasmine was married to Hal (Alec Baldwin), a Bernie Madoff-esque industrialist who was carted off to jail after it’s discovered that he made his vast wealth by way of an elaborate ponzie scheme.  Jasmine knew what was going on, or didn’t, depending on when you ask her, but whatever she knew it’s clear she was enjoying her material wealth too much to speak up.

    Rooting the plot so firmly in our reality gives the movie a weight that much of Allen’s recent output, even the good stuff like the charmingly fantastical Midnight in Paris, does not have.  Blue Jasmine can easily be seen as a satire of America’s much-discussed 1%, fallen from their high places following the financial collapse of 2008.  And it has the wit to follow-through, showing Jasmine, in flashback, doing everything she can to deny knowledge of her husband’s business.  That stuff is beyond her understanding, she claims- she’d rather go shopping on Park Avenue.

    And yet Jasmine is more than a symbol of pampered obliviousness.  She’s a person, and she is cracking up.  Many lead characters in Allen’s movies are neurotic and worrisome, starting with Allen himself, but Jasmine’s problems go well beyond that.  The break from her old life was so sudden and severe that she is constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown, replaying old conversations from better days in her head when the reality of her new, workaday life begins to encroach on her.  These interludes can be extremely funny, as when Jasmine glowers glassy-eyed at her young nephews from across a corner booth in a diner and free-associates about mixing her medications.  But they’re also frightening, because we sense that she could crack wide open at any moment and not be okay ever again.

    We’re kept teetering on that edge because the script is substantial, the directing earnest, and Cate Blanchette is so very, very good in this role.  She’s both our point of entry and point of exit from the movie, and it knows she’s good enough to carry it to completion.

A-

The Wolverine

A Canadian mutant in Tokyo.

    “You don’t understand.  You aren’t Japanese.”  So says Mariko, Wolverine’s love interest, as the two of them discuss Eastern symbolism over Japanese surf and turf.  The razor-clawed mutant’s latest adventure takes him to modern-day Japan, where he gets mired in the succession crisis of a wealthy family and ends up defending heir-apparent Mariko (Tao Okamoto) from yakuza thugs, ninjas, and at long last an eight-foot tall, bone-sucking samurai robot.  The Japanese locale is admirably specific for a series generally no more concerned with setting beyond what bits of geography might and might not blow up, but the script still treats Japan and Japanese culture as a novelty- it adds a whiff of the exotic, but the movie has no interest in actually discussing it.  This is, in the end, a comic book flick, but at least it’s one with its own sense of place.

    And director James Mangold occasionally makes use of that sense of place to bring us things we haven’t seen before.  For example, we go in to the movie expecting Wolverine to fight and kill a bunch of guys in hand-to-hand action sequences.  It’s what the character is made for.  We might even expect him to do it on top of a train- there have been similar scenes in other movies, even in other superhero movies like Spiderman 2.  But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fight on top of a Japanese bullet train, where defeating the other guy isn’t nearly as difficult as not getting flung off the roof as the train zips up the coastline at 300 miles an hour.  It’s the most exciting sequence in the movie, because it’s new.

    The same cannot be said for the movie’s plot, which is thin at best and a baffling muddle at worst.  It begins in Canada, where a thickly bearded Wolverine licks his wounds following the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, when he killed would-be paramour Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) to keep her from going nuclear and annihilating the species.  He’s soon whisked off to Japan by an old friend (Will Yun Lee) he met during World War II, who now wants to use the resources he’s amassed in the meantime to eliminate Wolverine’s mutant healing ability and rid him of that pesky immortality.  The best thing about this setup is Hugh Jackman’s reaction to it.  Jackman has been playing Wolverine for years now, and he’s able to convey a world of self-loathing skepticism with the raise of an eyebrow and a derisive scoff.  The movie forgets about Wolverine’s dilemma almost as quickly as it brings it up, but Jackman’s confident, highly physical performance make me wish it hadn’t.

    Instead, the script opts for a weirdly byzantine plot featuring an increasingly complicated network of backstabbing and a large number of half-heartedly developed villains whose motives shift and blend so often I wouldn’t have known who was on whose side if they all weren’t beating each other up so often.  When the movie slows down long enough to focus on Wolverine’s pain, Wolverine’s ambivalence, Wolverine’s regret, it’s engaging, mainly because Jackman is so comfortable and convincing at playing this character.  But eventually the plot gets back on track, and we have to suffer the ride.

    But I will say this for the movie’s Japanese setting: it makes The Wolverine feel distinct.  Too often, latter additions in superhero franchises start to bleed together, hopping from one battle scene to another before setting up the sequel to come.  The Wolverine feels more like an old James Bond caper- the hero visits some faraway location, dispatches a collection of campy villains, and leaves ready for his next adventure.  Wolverine and Jackman have proved themselves sturdy enough to weather more than a few adventures.  If the screenwriters put as much effort into writing them as Jackman does into playing them out, I may even get excited about the next.

B-

Pacific Rim

    Pacific Rim has almost everything you could want out of an action movie, beginning with spectacular special effects.  The movie is about a time in the near-future when ravenous, towering monsters called Kaiju- think Godzilla and a few hundred of his closest friends- emerge from an inter-dimensional rift off the coast of Hong Kong to stomp through the great cities of the world.  To counter them, the governments of Earth combine forces to create massive mechanical men called Jaegers, fighting robots controlled by human pilots.  Pacific Rim cost $190 million to produce, and it’s one of those movies where you can really see the money up on the screen- the battles between the Kaiju and the Jaegers are flashy, weighty, and imaginative.  The spectacle of seeing a slithering, 50-story beast throw a gigantic robot into a skyscraper is almost worth the price of admission by itself.

    What’s more, Pacific Rim has a director who knows how to use special effects with style.  Before helming this summer actioneer, Guillermo Del Toro directed Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), a movie acclaimed for its bold visual style and memorable creature effects.  Del Toro shows the same panache here.  The Kaiju come in many shapes and sizes- some look like fish, some like apes, some too otherworldly to describe- but all all share a pulsing, translucent menace.  You can tell that Del Toro and his team had a blast inventing them.  Even the non-battle-royal parts of the movie are fun to look at.  Del Toro dreams up a variety of distinct looks for the heroic Jaeger pilots, and he rarely misses an opportunity to fill a frame with some interesting detail, whether it’s a piece of Kaiju brain floating in a bottle or mist escaping from a nearby pipe.

    You may have noticed that I have yet to mention much about the movie beyond the visuals.  Make no mistake: the presentation is the reason to see this movie.  The story, although imaginative in concept, is pretty familiar in execution.  It revolves around Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), a storied Jaeger pilot who quit the biz after his co-pilot died fighting a Kaiju off the coast of Alaska.  As the Kaiju threat gets worse, Becket’s old commanding officer (Idris Elba) comes to pluck him out of his self-imposed obscurity, since he’s the best at what he does, and it’s time to reassemble the team, and let’s get those sons-a-bitches and save the goddam world!

    The plot, in short, should be familiar to anyone who’s seen Top Gun or Independence Day or any movie driven mainly by testosterone and machinery.  In fact, the plot is so clichéd, and the performances so broad, that you could make the argument that Del Toro is playing at satire.  Hunnam, in particular, is so breathlessly earnest that it’s hard to believe we’re not meant to roll our eyes.  Del Toro also has fun by casting the diminutive Rinko Kikuchi as Hunnan’s rookie partner.  The two don’t have much romantic chemistry, but Hunnam and Kikuchi make a visually amusing pair, he over six feet of standard-issue American action hero and she a pixie-ish waif.

    There are other touches of levity.  Charlie Day of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is cast as a jumpy, Kaiju-obsessed scientist who wants to try and understand the Kaiju before beating the life out of them.  He travels to a slum of Hong Kong, called The Bone Slums, to question black market types who might be able to hook him up with a fresh Kaiju brain.  Day’s manic energy makes a nice contrast to the colossal, city-leveling fights that make up the movie’s core, but the best thing about his adventure are The Bone Slums themselves, which are rain-soaked, lit with piecing neon lights, and built under the massive rib-cage of a felled Kaiju.  It’s an imaginative location, and Pacific Rim is an enjoyably imaginative movie in almost every way that matters.

A-

The Way, Way Back

    There are a lot of movies like The Way, Way Back.  It’s about a young teenager named Duncan (Liam James) who spends a wet, hot American summer suffering through his adolescent malaise and learning what it means to grow up.  It recalls the wistfulness of sincere coming-of-age movies like Stand by Me and The Sandlot as well as bawdy teenage comedies like Meatballs and Caddyshack.  It’s all a little familiar, but it’s all well-done, well-acted, and earnest, and should resonate with anyone who remembers what it was like to feel strange in their own skin.

    The movie’s most interesting selling point is that is has cast Steve Carell as a total dick.  Carell plays Trent, an egotistical, patronizing blowhard who’s dating Duncan’s mother Pam (Toni Collette).  In the movie’s first scene, Trent asks the reluctant Duncan to rate himself on a scale of one to ten.  Duncan says six.  Trent says three.  It’s interesting to watch Carell, so often cast as the eternal nice guy, play this preening jackass.  The movie doesn’t show much interest in giving Trent dimension, but he is fun to root against.  Duncan has another father figure: Owen, the listless, burnout manager at Water Whiz, the water park where Duncan works for the summer.  Affably played by Sam Rockwell, Owen is easy-going where Trent is uptight, fun where Trent is a buzzkill, empowering where Trent just grinds Duncan into the dirt.  Owen is stuck in a dead-end job while Trent is a financial success, but it’s pretty clear whom Duncan prefers and where the movie wants our loyalties to lie.  Duncan’s actual father lurks off-screen, notably absent.

    Duncan’s issues with his father, and his father figures, form the emotional heart of the movie.  It’s well-tread territory, but it’s easy to sympathize with Duncan, a poor kid caught in a tough situation, and Liam James uses his awkward body language and sheepish glances to sell the angst.  Trent and Owen may be more paragons than people, Trent remaining completely free of any redeeming qualities and Owen more quick-witted and nurturing than any waterpark manager has a right to be, but at Duncan’s age it’s difficult yet to see grown-ups as full individuals, so it works.

    Like the 1980s summer comedies on which it’s based, The Way, Way Back fills out its edges with supporting players and irreverent humor.  Allison Janney lets loose as a lushy, nosy neighbor who throws lavish outdoor barbeques in her backyard.  She, Duncan’s mom, and Trent form an adult playgroup who spend their time drinking and cavorting around town, giving Duncan yet another excuse to sulk.  It’s a cartoonish character, but the always-dependable Janney wrings a few laughs out of it.  Maya Rudolph and writer-director Jim Nash round out the cast as some of Duncan’s Water Whiz co-workers.

    The movie attempts to turn Water Whiz into a symbol of Duncan’s wayward adolescence, the one place in his life where he feels safe, respected, and free to be himself.  It works, but the characters aren’t fully developed enough for it to have the weight the movie wants it to have.  I wish the screenwriters had gone a little bit further in either one of their chosen directions, earnest coming-of-age tale on the one hand or slapstick summer comedy on the other, rather than trying to split the difference.  The Way, Way Back is a good movie, but it can’t quite escape the fact that there are already a lot of movies like it, and that many of them are better.

B

Much Ado About Nothing

The best and last moment of Joss Whedon's Shakespeare adaptation.

I have no doubt that everyone involved in making Much Ado About Nothing thoroughly enjoyed themselves.  The story behind its production belies this.  Directed by Joss Whedon, the mind behind beloved cult television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly as well as box office behemoth The Avengers, shot it over the course of twelve days on and around his San Diego estate with actors who have become his friends using whatever money they could find underneath their couch cushions.  The performers mug broadly for the camera, Whedon slips in his own self-written songs, and the film is shot with the cozy intimacy of a home video.  Perhaps that’s what it should have stayed.

Like any Shakespeare adaptation, this film version of one of the Bard’s more well-known comedies lives and dies by its performances.  With a few exceptions, the performances here do not do it proud.  Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof, both members of Whedon’s regular television ensembles, play Beatrice and Benedick, the verbal sparring partners at the center of the story.  They get their lines right, all of which are lifted directly from the play’s original text without alternations for modern audiences, but do little to convince us of the motivation behind them.  I have never seen a stage adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, but I assume that with the proper buildup Beatrice and Benedick’s shift from embittered adversaries to fawning lovers can be convincing.  Here it is not.

More successful are Fran Kranz and Jillian Morgese as Claudio and Hero, the film’s other will-they-or-won’t-they tent-pole couple.  Claudio and Hero fall in love at first sight, are driven apart by trickery on the part the sinister Don John (Sean Maher), and are reunited by movie’s end.  Their journey works, likely because Fran Kranz shows an earnest believability that makes one feel for him when, say, he is tricked into believing that Hero has been unfaithful.  Acker and Denifsof rattle off their lines and are satisfied that they have just said something very clever- with Shakespeare as your writer, perhaps they figured that reading the words would be enough- Kranz seems to actually believe what he’s saying, and that makes all the difference.

The blame for the movie’s unevenness belongs to Whedon.  He cast people unfit for their parts because they were his friends and did not take the time to pull convincing performances from them because the whole project was just a fun lark anyway.  Such a lark, indeed, that doing something so aggrandized as leveling blame seems pretty fruitless.  And yet here the movie is, showing in theaters across the country to be paid for and picked apart and digested.  I have a lot of respect for Whedon as a writer and director and have no right to begrudge him his hobbies, but Much Ado About Nothing proves that thoroughly enjoying yourselves while making a movie is not enough to make a movie thoroughly enjoyable.

Grade

C

This Is The End

The term ‘self-indulgent’ often gets tossed around as a pejorative.  Self-indulgent people are to be avoided, self-indulgent books left unread, and self-indulgent movies skipped.  Why spend time with anything more pleased with how clever it is than with entertaining you?

This Is The End, a very, very high-concept comedy directed and written by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan, who also stars, is about as self-indulgent as it gets.  Rogan plays himself, Seth Rogan the actor, who lives in Los Angeles alongside his high-powered showbiz buddies.  When old friend Jay Baruchel visits, Rogan drags him to a lavish party at James Franco’s house where they run into a who’s who of famous comics, movie stars, and Rihanna, all of whom play exaggerated versions of the characters they've come to be identified with onscreen.  Seth Rogan- that’s the writer and director, not the character in the movie- has expended several million dollars to finance what is essentially an elaborate, special effects-filled parody of his life.  As far as self-indulgence goes, it’s pretty impressive.

And yet it’s hard to complain when the laughs come as reliably as they do here.  The party scene, in particular, is full of inspired comic grace notes, from digs at James Franco’s pretentious art collection to Michael Cera playing himself as a coke-hungry lecher.  For those in on the joke, it’s funny stuff.

Those not in on the joke will be entertained as well, especially after the earth around James Franco’s house opens up to swallow most of the guests whole and the land beyond his walls turns into a scorched Hellscape complete with winged demons and roving bands of cannibals.  That’s the movie’s high concept: how will a bunch of comedy actors- along with Rogan, Baruchel, and Franco, Jonah Hill and Craig Robinson also survive the initial catastrophe- deal with the coming of the Biblical apocalypse?

If you’ve seen many of the other comedies produced by Judd Apatow and his followers, you can probably guess.  They bicker, they have foul-mouthed, off the cuff conversations, and they get high while making cheap sequels to their previous hits using the camera from 127 Hours (James Franco keeps his props).  The apocalyptic material also allows for a lot of physical gags and parody- Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist each get a good workout- and the jokes come at a very fast clip.  It’s cozy, goofy, and easy to watch, and the best moments come when the actors are allowed to riff on each other for effortless comic payoffs.  The cast displays the kind of boyish, cheerfully vulgar camaraderie we’re used to from Apatow and his ilk- he’s always made movies about endearing man-children- but setting those antics against the end of the world sheds some light on how immature these characters really are.

The movie takes this idea and almost runs with it, but eventually gets back to looking like an excuse for Rogan and pals to goof off on movie screens across the country and to charge you for it.  I should be mad at them for this.  If self-indulgence means wallowing in what interests you to the exclusion of what might interest others, than This Is The End might be the most self-indulgent movie ever shot.  There are certainly moments that go too far- the ending, for example, seems too much like a reference in search of a joke.  But I can’t be mad.  The movie is made with too much good cheer, too much loopy enthusiasm.  Perhaps Rogan and company really aren’t interested in writing about anything beyond who they are and what they like, but by this point they’ve learned to do it in a way that’s infectiously entertaining enough to get past my barriers.  This Is The End is too insular to set the world on fire, but will appeal to those who can take a good inside joke.

Star Trek Into Darkness

The first thing you should know about Star Trek Into Darkness is that it is not a science fiction movie.  I mean, yes, there are spaceships and aliens and cryogenically frozen super-humans, but science fiction, real science fiction, is supposed to engage with such far-flung concepts as a way to ask and answer questions about who we are and where we’re going as a species, while Star Trek Into Darkness uses them to point the way to the next exquisitely photographed action scene.

The second thing you should know about Star Trek Into Darkness is that this is okay.  It is not a high-minded movie, but director J.J. Abrams has reassembled the likable cast from his 2009 Star Trek and thrown them into a story so fast-paced you won’t even have time to think about thinking.  In fact, the pace is so rapid that it can be disorienting, especially toward the beginning when the narrative completely reorients itself every ten or so minutes.  A playful opening that finds the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise observing an alien civilization makes it look like the movie will be about what happens when a primitive people are exposed to advanced technology.  Then it looks like it will about how Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) will deal with being relieved of his command, and finally it settles into following the manhunt for an intergalactic terrorist (Benedict Cumberbatch), with a few more twists along the way.

We’re willing to follow the knotty plot because the cast is appealing and the action sequences are entertaining.  Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, as Spock, still have a charming odd-couple rapport, although their relationship isn’t as important here as it was in the previous picture.  The scene-stealer this time around is Benedict Cumberbatch as the villainous Khan.  Like everything else in the movie, this character is introduced, developed, and denounced at an accelerated rate and could have fell flat were in not for Cumberbatch’s intensity.  He has a way of over-pronouncing his words while glaring into the camera that makes you sure he is a dangerous man.

And he is.  He leaves the Star Trek crew battled and battered but not broken or beaten, and that’s one of the movie’s problems.  This is the second of what the good folks at Paramount Pictures doubtlessly hope will be a long-running movie series, but by the end it doesn’t feel like much has changed.  The same group will be back on the same ship in a few year’s time, and unless the producers feel like putting something more at risk, return trips could quickly become tiresome.

On its own, this movie feels polished but perfunctory, with plenty of scenes that work while you watch them but without a bigger vision that will make you remember them the next morning.  You can almost see the screenwriters storyboarding the film as you watch it- something for the action junkies here, a few references to the original television series there- but there’s no through-line, no unifying idea of the kind that enervated the older Star Trek movies.  Again, that’s all okay, but that’s all it is.

The Great Gatsby

 
I have not read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in many years.  I remember it only vaguely- I know the outline of the story, recall a heavy use of symbolism, and for some reason can recite the final line, the bit about the boats and the current the past, word for word- but for the most part I treat it as one of those books I know is considered great, but about which I don’t remember enough to explain why.

I remember Moulin Rogue!, though, the 2001 jukebox musical featuring late 19th Century Parisians singing their hearts out to modern pop songs which went on to delight and bewilder audiences around the world.  Baz Luhrmann, the director of that film, brings a lot of the same high-riding anachronistica to The Great Gatsby, but in this case the material resists him.  He ends up with a movie split down the middle that will be interesting to many but satisfying to few.

Like Moulin Rogue!, this film version of The Great Gatsby begins with a writer remembering the heady days of his not-so-distant past.  He is Nick Carroway (Toby McGuire), and not so long ago he was young, idealistic, and attending sinfully lavish parties thrown by his rich next-door neighbor, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio).  The first half of the movie is dominated by a mighty shindig thrown in and around Gatsby’s sprawling bayside estate.  It’s bombastic and fantastic, a fourteen-cuts-a-second orgiastic liquor volcano kind of party where every guest is done up like a neon peacock and where important characters are introduced with flourishes of Gershwin music.  It’s also one of the duller parts of the movie.  The Great Gatsby is a story with a lot of nuance, and a garishly stylized depiction of jazz age opulence featuring songs from Beyonce and Jay Z does little to deal with it.  In Moulin Rogue!, the gaudiness was the point.  Here, it’s the prelude to the real story, and quickly wears out its welcome.

The real story, meanwhile, is rich but feels like it should be richer.  Gatsby, who is wealthy, wealthy, wealthy, but oh so alone, pines after upright New York debutante Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), with whom he shared a passionate love affair years before.  She lives across the bay and is unhappily married to the philandering Tom (Joel Edgerton).  Together they are even wealthier than Gatsby, and unlike Gatsby, their money is old.

After Gatsby enlists Nick’s help in a successful bid to reignite his affair with Daisy, the movie all but abandons the extravagance of the first half and settles into a new life as a chamber drama.  The strongest scene occurs in a hotel room where all the principal characters get to air their grievances.  There is no anachronistic music, no voiceover narration, no epileptic editing.  It’s almost disappointingly traditional, but it does a better job of getting to the meat of the story than any of the other thousand-and-one bells and whistles Luhrmann chose to hang all over this gussied-up showhorse of a feature film.

And yet it doesn’t do enough.  The characters, particularly Daisy, still seem underdeveloped, their motivations lacking, and the denouncement leaves us with no deeper insight into Gatsby than that he was a naïve man unlucky in love.  There are other missteps.  The liberal use of Fitzgerald’s text as voiceover narration is occasionally affecting but mostly useless, and the press of Significantly Symbolic Shots would have more heft if we understood what the characters wanted and needed.  Luhrmann wanted to make visually experimental music video about the roaring twenties, and he wanted to adapt The Great Gatsby.  He’s done a little of both, and ended up with neither.

Django Unchained

Here’s the thing about Django Unchained, the latest adrenaline-fueled film from genre-savant Quentin Tarantino: it’s a fine time at the movies, as kinetically entertaining and charmingly pulpy as anything its director has done over the past decade.  It stars Jamie Foxx as the titular Django, a slave in pre-Civil War America who is purchased by a German bounty hunter named King Schultz (Christoph Waltz).  Schultz needs Django’s help in identifying some wanted men who mistreated Django in the past, a gig which becomes a full-time job and eventually, after the pair discover that Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) has been purchased by deadly southern dandy Calvin Candy (Leonardo Dicaprio), a rescue operation.  For fans of Tarantino’s work, the rhythms are familiar: there are lengthy dialogue sequences where characters are built one idiosyncrasy at a time, followed by bursts of carefully choreographed violence where all the tension is gloriously released.  It’s slick, it’s smooth, it’s funny, it’s fun.

It’s also touchy, and weird, and maybe a bit offensive, because Django Unchained isn’t just a stylishly irreverent reworking of the Western, it’s a stylishly irreverent reworking of the Western that happens to be about slavery, a serious subject if there ever was one.  Hanging over the film is always this question: should a movie about such an ugly part of American history be this much fun?

It would be different if Django Unchained was just some piece of genre fluff, if it was cheap and looked cheap, if it glossed over the characters and got straight to the violence.  But like all Tarantino films, it’s built with too much care to just write off.  Take the scene where Schultz, with Django in tow, walks into a dusty western backwater and casually shoots the local lawman, who we shortly learn had a price on his head.  While waiting for the fallout, Django and Scultz sit down and share a beer in the local tavern.  As they chat, we learn how Scultz feels about the institution of slavery, how Django feels about his potential future as a bounty hunter, and sense the growing respect between the two men, all while the tension over how the townsfolk will respond to the shooting bubbles underneath.  It’s a rich scene, and one of many.

The movie reaches its high point after Django and Schultz track down Django’s wife to an opulent cotton plantation.  There they meet Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a house slave who has so thoroughly absorbed the racist beliefs of his owner that he now forces them upon others.  Stephen is a nasty piece of work, the most interesting character in the film, and an excellent showcase for the talents of Samuel L. Jackson.  He is also the most problematic character in the movie.  The ideas concerning racial self-hatred he embodies are potent, and perhaps best left to a film willing to really take the time to dig into them.

Because although Django Unchained is probably the most mature, substantive film Tarantino has made yet, it’s still ultimately a celebration of style, more interested in movies about slavery than in slavery itself.  The Stephen character, in particular, is very deftly written.  He’s a sycophantic clown when entertaining his master’s guests, an iron-hearted sadist when dealing with those who displease him, and something like an equal when giving private counsel to his owner.  There’s a lot of depth to him, but because the movie is in the final estimation a simple revenge tale as pure as Kill Bill before it, those elements aren’t given enough space.

The film climaxes with a thrilling shootout set to anachronistic music and featuring Django as a duel-wielding whirling dervish of revenge.  It’s impeccably shot and inventively staged- Tarantino continues to grow as an action director- but at this point such a scene is expected, and not entirely worthy of the carefully crafted script.  It’s been gratifying to watch Quentin Tarantino inch toward taking himself more seriously film by film, year by year, but Django Unchained is a length of the journey, not journey’s end.

Amour

Amour is about what happens when the passage of time rips your life a new one.  Georges (Jean-
Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are in their eighties.  They spent their long lives writing and teaching music.  Now they live their golden years leafing through the Sunday paper and keeping up with old pupils from within a spacious, tastefully apportioned Parisian apartment.  One day, over breakfast, Anne stares into space for several minutes, showing no sign that she is aware of the world around her.  The rest of the movie depicts her slow slide into bodily degeneration, mental collapse, and eventual death.

It’s harrowing drama as only the French can do it.  I occasionally wonder about the point of movies like this.  It’s not the kind of show people see to enjoy themselves or so they can chat about it the next day over toasted bagels in the break room.  It’s a realistic depiction of the aging process, which means that it’s slow, painful, and sometimes uncomfortable to watch, so why watch it?

Part of the reason, surely, is to appreciate the craft of the filmmakers involved.  Amour was directed by Michael Hanake, known for making movies full of uncomfortable silences pregnant with sadness and dread.  He’s unobtrusive here, moving the camera little, placing it close to or far away from his actors so as to maximize the effect of their performances.  Amour is, at base, a two-person show, and both actors do great work.  Emmanuelle Riva is particularly impressive, especially in later scenes when Anne has lost the ability to speak but uses her eyes to convey her anger over the situation in which she finds herself.  Trintignant gives a very subtle performance.  He never states outright how much his wife’s condition is affecting him, but we can tell in the offhand comments he makes to those who question him about it, in how to stoops to put together a specialized bed for his wife in their room, in how he stands over her as she gets worse and worse and worse and worse.

But excellent craft alone cannot be enough of a reason to put oneself through a wrenching watching experience such as this.  Perhaps people see a movie like Amour because they recognize their own situation in it.  I will admit that, while watching Amour, I had a hard time not thinking of my grandmother, who slipped, like Anne, deeper and deeper into disease until there was nothing left.  Different people can surely see their mothers, their wives, and their children in it, and might appreciate having a collective record of a subject about which few are willing to make a feature film.

And yet getting back in touch with memories of dying loved ones is painful in and of itself, so why do it?  I don’t know.  Maybe making and watching the movie are small acts of defiance against the process it depicts.  Amour opens with a squad of firefighters bursting into Georges and Anne’s apartment to find Anne’s body laid out on her bed, a shower of flower petals sprinkled around her.  We know she is going to die within the first minute of the movie, and still we watch the train come slowly down the tunnel, and stick around for the inevitable crunch.  Then we get to walk away.

Les Miserables

Les Miserables, the musical based on Victor Hugo’s epic novel, is not subtle.  It’s all pomp and bombast, every song rising to an explosive crescendo, every performer spilling their soul all over the stage, every theme shouted out in swooping, cacophonous leitmotif.  That earnestness has served it well, as the stage show has been consistently popular since its debut in 1985.  Without the benefit of a live setting, it’s harder to give oneself over to this screen version, but director Tom Hooper tries his damndest to show the audience a good, thoroughly miserable time.

The time is the early 19th century, the place post-Napoleonic France, by most accounts a seriously sucky point at which to be alive.  The story follows recently paroled criminal Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) over a span of years, starting immediately after his release from prison for stealing a loaf of bread, tracing his rise to an honest job as the mayor of a provincial village, and concluding with his involvement in one of France’s many failed bids for revolution.  It’s sweeping stuff, the kind of material that would seem well-suited for musical adaptation, and the songs do not let it down.  They are big.  Really big, and there are a lot of them, each one an upwards curve leading to a series of glory notes designed to catapult viewers from their seats in spasms of inspiration.  There are no small songs in Les Miserables, only small singers.

Unfortunately, the movie has a couple of those.  As Valjean, Broadway-trained Jackman acquits himself well, providing the movie with the closest thing it has to an anchor.  As penniless prostitute Fantine, co-star Anne Hathaway gets the movie’s biggest moment, a raggedly affecting rendition of self-pitying power balled ‘I Dreamed A Dream,’ filmed in an almost uncomfortably close close-up.  In a musical made up of big damn moments, it doesn’t get bigger than that.  Others don’t fare as well.  Amanda Seyfried, who plays Valjean’s adopted daughter Cosette, has a tinny voice pitched below the intensity her songs require.  Russell Crowe has already taken a lot of flack for his performance as the relentlessly principled police office Javert.  The flack is justified.  His voice is thin and soft without much texture, and whenever he sings it brings whatever emotional momentum the movie has managed to build up to a stop.

And Les Miserables, both as a stage musical and a movie, depends on that momentum to survive.  There are no great insights here: it is terrible to be poor, life is hard but rewarding, and to love is a wonderful thing.  The stage version of this show has been successful by pounding these messages relentlessly into its audience by way of soaring vocal pyrotechnics until they are too overcome to resist.  The movie strips much of that away, opting for quieter, more intimate performances shot as often as not in intense close-ups.  Sometimes, as in Fantine’s number, this works, but at others it seems like Hooper is searching for a subtlety that, despite the best efforts of his case and crew, is just not present.

Les Miserables, then, works or doesn’t depending on the song being sung that minute, without much in the way of connective tissue.  It soars, it drops, and ultimately it becomes a that-was-good, that-wasn’t, that-was-fun-what-else-is-on kind of historical epic.

Life of Pi

Life of Pi sets itself up for a fall early-on.  The movie uses a framing device: a novelist looking for an idea for his next book speaks to Pi, an Indian man living in Canada who claims to have a story that “will make you believe in God.”  That’s a tall order, and one that the movie can’t quite fill.  What it does do is deliver a colorful, impeccably photographed tale that effectively mixes action and adventure with basic philosophy.

As the movie begins, the middle-aged Pi (Irrfan Khan) talks about his whimsical upbringing in India.  The son of a zoo-owner, Pi developed an interest in world religions at an early age, cobbling together aspects of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam into his own spiritual belief system.  His conceptual interests are at odds with his business-minded father, who would prefer he focus on more practical pursuits.  Life of Pi is based on a book by Yann Martel, and the early passages of the movie display the slow-burning attention to detail one expects from a novel.  The characters describe their unhurried existence, director Ang Lee lingers on elements he finds interesting, and the audience is allowed to relax into the story.

When Pi’s father stumbles upon a business opportunity in Canada, the family and their menagerie of animals pile into a freighter and set out across the Pacific Ocean.  They are beset by a storm.  Their ship sinks in a visually spectacular and emotionally stirring sequence, and Pi ends up adrift on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a very hungry, very dangerous Bengal tiger, his family dead and his hope for rescue slim.

A teenager and a tiger, together on a lifeboat, forced to not kill each other long enough to find dry land: it’s a set-up for a tense adventure story, and the movie makes the most of it.  The tiger, who thanks to a paperwork mix-up is amusingly named Richard Parker, is not treated as a pet or a person with fur; it’s a wild animal more interested in eating Pi than befriending him, and the story’s refusal to sentimentalize him keeps things exciting.  Still, the most thrilling thing about the sea-bound sections of the movie is the photography.  As remembered by the poetically-inclined Pi, the voyage across the Pacific is presented in deep, piercing colors of ethereal beauty.  There are scenes set at night, the waters stuffed with translucent Jellyfish or massive whales, that are eerily wonderful to behold.  The visuals become wilder and weirder as the movie goes on, until at last everything is opaque symbolism, painted with tender detail by the visual effects team.

The narrative, too, eventually leaves behind the adventure thread and wafts into symbolic allegory, this time to less impressive effect.  The slow, rhythmic presentation of the visuals creates a distinct mood, strange and haunting, but by the time the movie starts to try and live up to its boast about making the audience believe in God I felt it had overreached.  It doesn’t really matter.  The movie will enthrall children because it has a tiger.  The visuals will entertain their parents, and although the promised philosophical denouncement never quite comes, the mood lingers after it’s over.

Stoker

Stoker is a slasher movie for the art-house crowd.  A mother and daughter live alone in an opulent mansion somewhere in the northeastern United States.  A long-lost relative comes to live with them, and after more than a few mysterious disappearances it becomes clear he is hiding a sinister secret.  It’s a messy, morbid tale, the kind of the material that could come across as schlocky, but the moody photography and steady, slow-burning script elevate it above the average serial killer story, if only just.

India (Mia Wasikowska) is a teenager: smart, moody, and distant.  The movie opens shortly after the death of her father, from a car accident.  When her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), a man she never knew existed, shows up at her father’s funeral, there is an immediate and mutual fascination.  Charlie is suave, smoldering and very odd.  The way he looks at India, you get the feeling his interest goes beyond the bounds of the traditional uncle-niece relationship.

Guessing just what Charlie is after takes up about the first half of the movie, but director Chan-wook Park lays on enough atmosphere to keep things entertaining.  There are a lot of surreal, almost self-consciously artistic shots peppered throughout the film- India descends into the basement of her impeccably apportioned home to fetch some ice cream from the downstairs freezer and finds herself in a shadowy underworld of craggy corners and shifting spotlights, a close-up of a brush running through a head of hair fades seamlessly into a shot of a wheat field, etc...  These are ostentatious touches, designed to set the mood and show off in about in equal measure, but they are certainly treats for the eye.

Perhaps the artsy touches are needed because the meat of the story itself is a bit undercooked.  That uncle Charlie knows more than he is letting on is clear from the start, and the revelations about just who he is and just what he has done are, while entertaining, a bit predictable.  Of course the man is a murderer; we’ve seen too many shots of him glaring purposefully into the camera while a tide of foreboding music rises to think anything else.

Goode might have been a bit too bland and fresh-faced a choice for the character: the script requires Charlie to be a cipher for too long, and Goode doesn't do enough to suggest there is real violence lurking beneath the surface.  Mia Wasikowska, however, does fine work as a girl torn between the ordinary concerns of teenage life- boys, school, clashes with her mother (Nicole Kidman)- and the darker impulses she taps into after meeting Charlie.  The bloody concluding scenes are bold and disturbing, and suggest that India be doomed to take up her uncle’s mantle as one seriously screwed up individual.

And yet there’s an air of ennui hanging over the whole production.  Serial killers are no less icons of the American cinema than are cowboys, gangsters, and soldiers, and if a filmmaker is going to use them they’re going to have to do so in a way that they haven’t been done before.  I don’t think that Stoker quite accomplishes this.  It’s flashy, seductive, even hypnotic, but after it’s over it fades quickly away.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

When director Peter Jackson first pitched his idea to adapt the sprawling, three-book Lord of the Rings series for the big screen, he intended to make two movies at a cost of 75 million dollars.  Somewhere along the line, the lineup rose from two movies to three and the budget from 75 million to amounts beyond the count of mortal men.  It was worth it, though. The Lord of the Rings movies debuted to massive critical acclaim, enormous box office receipts, and went on to inspire the kind of devotion usually reserved for Star Wars devotees and those in thrall to the heavier doomsday cults.

When it was announced that Jackson would be directing an adaptation of The Hobbit, a lighter, smaller book set before events of the Lord of the Rings but within the same sword-and-sorcery universe, fans watched this process happen in reverse.  Plans for one movie became two, then three, and soon all were wondering how the filmmakers would manage to stretch the shortest book in the set to last for three movies.

They manage about as well as can be expected, which is to say not particularly well, although the film is not a disaster. It is well-made, with sumptuous visuals, a strong cast, and careful attention to detail, but the pace is stretched out and it feels stretched out.  Despite some moments of grandeur, the most interesting thing about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is the story behind how it came to be adapted and what that says about big-budget movie-making today.

The plot: unassuming hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) lives a pleasantly sedate life in The Shire, that most bucolic of fantasy backwaters.  Adventure comes knocking in the form of gray-garbed wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellan) and a small host of nomadic dwarves led by Thorin Oakensheild (Richard Armitage) who enlist Bilbo’s help in traveling to their faraway ancestral homeland and reclaiming it from a very big, very angry, very dangerous dragon named Smaug.

That synopsis probably didn’t take long to read, but the movie takes its sweet time setting it up.  By flashback and speech, by show and by tell, Jackson and his screenwriters make sure the audience is filled in on every detail of the why and the how and the where and the what of the quest before it gets blessedly underway, occasionally taking the time to repeat themselves for those who may have missed it.

That said, there are parts of the movie that are as exciting and charming as anything from The Lord of the Rings movies or, better yet, from The Hobbit.  The best scene in the movie is a leisurely battle of wits between Bilbo, who has gotten lost in a dark, foreboding cave, and Gollum, a loathsome, bug-eyed creature who will show Bilbo the way out if he can best him in a riddle contest.  If Bilbo loses, Gollum will eat him.  The Lord of the Rings movies subsisted on spectacular battle scenes involving thousands of combatants and pyrotechnics aplenty.  An Unexpected Journey has a few of those, most of them embellished far beyond the space they occupied in the book, but they have less meaning here because the stakes are so much lower.  But in the riddle scene, we know exactly what the stakes are, and we can relax and enjoy the maze of wordplay built up as the two characters slowly circle each other.  It’s a highlight.

But Jackson, or more likely the studio executives hoping for another trilogy-sized windfall, do not or cannot stop at that.  The script pulls in additional material from all kinds of sources, including extraneous text from The Lord of the Rings novels, author J.R.R. Tolkien’s copious notes, and Peter Jackson’s imagination, to fill us in on details of the story about which we simply do not care.  Whenever the movie strays from Bilbo’s little big adventuring, it loses focus and slows down.  Maybe it couldn’t have happened any other way.  The pile of gold amassed by The Lord of the Rings movies proved too tempting, and what should have been an intimate performance has been set on a stage three times too big.