Return of the Ring

Note: I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey projected at 24 fps in 3D. The 24 fps was fine, the 3D superfluous.

Peter Jackson’s return to Middle Earth is delightful. Where Lord of the Rings told a major story with nothing less than the fate of the known world at stake, The Hobbit recounts a tale much smaller in scale. This gives Jackson, Philippa Booyens, Fran Walsh and Guillermo del Toro (who ceded directing duties to Jackson) the opportunity to play with and expand Tolkien’s universe. While The Hobbit is not the ground-breaking fantasy epic Lord of the Rings was, Jackson clothes the story with whimsy and populates it with endearing heroes. Actually, just seeing Gandalf and Gollum back on screen are alone certainly worth the effort both in terms of revisiting major fantasy characters as well as the visual effects and make-up used for each.

That’s what’s going to make the crucial difference between joy and disappointment: whether or not one accepts The Hobbit as a delightful three-hour indulgence in glorious fantasy for the filmmakers and the audience. Anyone looking for something to top Lord of the Rings in terms of scope and sheer adventure will come away disappointed. The Hobbit is best seen as a family friendly companion piece to Jackson’s magnum opus from the previous decade. Seen in this way, there’s nothing frivolous about the film, and then the long exposition will enthral, not infuriate, as peace-loving hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) is called to adventure by wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) in a quest to join a selection of dwarves headed by Aragorn-substitute Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) as they set off to reclaim their ancestral home and heritage from the dragon Smaug.

It’s a basic story, then, and Jackson and co stretch a single novel into another nine-hour epic, with parts two and three coming out in 2013 and 2014. Many have accused the film of being unnecessarily bloated and overlong, but I found myself won over by the film’s charms, from a beautiful rendition of the “Song of the Misty Mountains” that becomes a key motif in Howard Shore’s score, to touching moments between Gandalf and Galadriel (the eternally luminous Cate Blanchett) and spectacular flashbacks that flesh out characters’ backgrounds. The story also introduces another wizard, the fauna and flaura loving Radagast the Brown who adds another dimension to the story and makes it seem a little less contained. In addition, Gollum has never looked better, and once again Andy Serkis makes the character homicidal and sympathetic. 

Speaking of villainous characters: the film cleverly avoids any revealing views of Smaug but manages to establish the dragon as a figure of immense power. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will frustrate those looking for fast action, and the film is far less dark than its predecessors, opting instead for a familiar sense of questing and derring do. The film falters slightly with a clumsily conceived troll scene and there’s a bit of pandering to younger viewers, but The Hobbit manages enough excitement – especially in its final hour – to make up for some occasional and minor missteps.

No invention for Scorsese

Martin Scorsese is seen by many as the greatest living American filmmaker. Not only is he much respected as a filmmaker and storyteller, he is also involved in numerous film preservation projects. It makes sense that Scorsese would be interested in adapting Brian Selznick’s charming children’s book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a charming simple story that happens to be about preserving the cinematic past and not allowing it to go to ruin or oblivion. It is in this light that the resulting film, the multi-Oscar nominated 3-D family drama Hugo, is generally highly recommended viewing for film fans; after all, a master filmmaker (The Aviator, Shutter Island, The Departed) is making a film about (his love for) cinema itself. What a pity that Scorsese’s film ends up being nothing more than an average family drama about belonging. Anyone who maintains that Hugo is about the art of film itself should admit the film we’re watching contributes very little to the art form other than recreating some familiar images from the cinema of the past. My suspicion is that many people revere Hugo simply because of its content, and not because of innovative filmmaking, of which it demonstrates despairingly little.

The story is rather charming: an orphaned boy, Hugo (Asa Butterfield, who recently signed on to star in the forthcoming Ender’s Game adaptation) lives in the Paris train station circa 1930. He makes sure that all the station’s clocks are running on time and lives from scraps of food that he steals from vendors spread around the station. Once his work is done, Hugo focuses his attention on fixing some sort of invention that his late father (Jude Law) had left him. Desperate for parts he can use to bring the invention to life, he is caught stealing mechanical bits and parts by the local toy shop owner George (Ben Kingsley). George’s granddaughter (an impressive Chloe Grace Moretz) takes a liking to the wide-eyed, blue-eyed Hugo and undertakes to help him in his quest and in a sense protect him from the rather unfriendly George. They uncover a secret past long thought buried that can possibly revitalise not only the grumpy George but many others as well.

Meanwhile, Scorsese creates a wonderfully inhabited train station with some colourful secondary characters, my favourite of which is Sasha Baron Cohen’s station master. The actor displays some brilliant comic timing in his few scenes, and his attempts to clumsily woo Emily Mortimer’s flower seller are sweet and convincing.

Those who want to go into the film completely cold should stop reading now. To you I say: watch Hugo, expect little, and enjoy. The 3-D is rather good but, as usual, not necessary to tell this particular story. Hugo is good family entertainment but is otherwise a minor work for Scorsese at best; considering his oeuvre, this is the director at his most visually conservative, reigned in and just plain average in over fifteen years.

Now, some spoilers (I suppose).

It turns out that toy shop owner George is none other than French formalist, magician and fantasist George Melies, a filmmaker famous for A Trip to the Moon and many other silent shorts that remain visually impressive. I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of several Melies shorts last year at Open Window, and Melies emerged once more as a film pioneer. Where the Lumieres were content to put the camera down and record whatever was happening in front of it, Melies preferred to create the content of the films himself. The filmmaker ended up being one of the first filmmakers to cut trailers for movies, and in his joyous inventiveness even faked news ‘programmes’ to show to astonished audiences.

In making a film about such a creative force, Scorsese had to not only recreate some of Melies’s professional history but also imbue his own current project with an inventiveness and energy similar to what the earlier master exhibited. Scorsese pays great attention to the recreations and the details of the period, and they are little pleasures in their own right: one often hears the story of the audiences panicking at the arrival of a train on a big film screen, but it is quite lovely to see them duck as the train pulls into the station. Scorsese is clearly passionate about the period and its cultural outputs, going to great trouble to recreate some of the images now immortalised in film studies.

But recreation only gets you so far, and Hugo is an assortment of lengthy stretches where nothing significant happens (except in the plot itself) interspersed with fleeting moments where Scorsese’s genius is in full display. The shots of the City of Lights as seen from Hugo’s window are beautifully rendered, while my favourite shot in the entire film has to be when a famous art work is explicitly linked to film as an art of life and creation.

These moments are too few and over too quickly to compensate for the rest of the film, which is rather slow and plain. Poor Hugo isn’t much of a hero, and Butterfield doesn’t have to do much more than run, tear up and stand with his mouth agape. And if one should encounter the argument that Hugo is actually Melies’s story, why is the film named after the young orphan? (Note: it makes sense in the book.) There are many great films that are about the love of film as envisioned by master filmmakers: consider some of the films of Kiarostami and De Palma. And, of course, Bill Condon’s affecting Gods and Monsters, featuring the best work Brendan Fraser ever committed to screen. Hugo is not to take its place alongside these great films. It is an unexceptional film executed as straightforward entertainment and lacks any emotional or intellectual staying power. 

It would be a shame to see Scorsese accept an Oscar for such (by his own standards) pedestrian work.

A Long Time Ago in Hyboria

The remake of 1982’s “Conan the Barbarian”, one of the films of the early 1980s that helped catapult the name Schwarzenegger into fame, is a suitably brutal and bloody affair. I’m not so sure that it will do for new star Jason Momoa - who cuts a solid simmering Cimmerian and has a sense of self-awareness that Arnie didn’t have - as the film has bombed at the international box-office. There’s even been a public accountability statement from its script doctor, Sean Hood, where he addresses the film’s flaws. The new “Conan” poses no threat to existing fantasy franchises.

However, when hyperbole fades into obscurity and the dust settles on this expensive market miscalculation, then by Crom, the film is far from the “worst movie ever” disaster it’s come to be called. In fact, as has happened in the past, I had a good time watching a not-so-good movie. Somewhere between the CGI-blood, the loaded and hammy dialogue, absurd 3D violence and computerised matte-ish backgrounds, something clicked.

The film sets the tone with a striking opening scene. It takes us into the womb, showing us a peacefully floating fetus; seconds later, a blade plunges into the sack, and the screen goes red. This is not enough. The camera pulls out of the womb to reveal the agonised mother bleeding from a terrible wound. A battle rages around her. Her husband (Ron Perlman) arrives at her side. She wants to see her son once before she dies. Before you can say “WTF”, the father performs a battlefield caesarean and lays the child in his wife’s hands. “Name your son!” he commands. You know what follows.

A few scenes later, young boy Conan sees his village burned to the ground. Adult Conan (Momoa) sets off on his long gestating quest for vengeance. The man responsible for the earlier carnage is a dark lord called Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), whose daughter Marique (Rose McGowan) assists him with special skills in obtaining the last missing piece that would complete a mask that serves to eliminate the boundaries between life and death, and makes its wearer extremely powerful. Conan’s mission to avenge his people’s deaths assumes a grander scale, as destroying Zym would mean peace for the whole of Hyboria. Lang looks good with facial scars and seems to take himself seriously, while McGowan (last seen sporting a machine gun leg in “Planet Terror”) has fun with long, deadly nails and a semi-bald head. She’s not really scary, but she looks kooky enough to make you think that there is a limit to her sanity. Not unpredictably, the relationship between her and Zym brims with incestuous energy, and it would’ve been interesting to see the film push the limits with this.

Director Marcus Nispel broke onto the scene with remakes: “Friday the 13th”, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. He has a penchant for bloody messes. Yes, “mess” is ambiguous. Here he shows a good eye for action and violence, but the editing is over the top and choppy. Much of the action, as diverting as it is, is of the “if you’ve seen one…” variety, with the exception of a scene where Marique conjures warriors from the sand to face-off with Conan. This remake lacks the original’s sense of scope and the severity with which John Milius approached Robert Howard’s material, and attempts to compensate with some gratuitous nudity and absurd violence – there is a particularly notable nasal incident that inspires much cringing and flinching.

Conan of course has a love interest, Tamara (Rachel Nichols), with whom he shares a shockingly tame, safe sex scene. (Come now, this is not a spoiler. Surely no-one expects alpha male Conan to hold hands.) Their union happens in an abandoned cabin on the coast of jungle and nowhere. This is the type of film that drops an abandoned cabin into a place where no-one has any reason to habitate for the sole purpose of proving a place for the couple to get it on. What, they couldn’t find a rock pool? (Yes, I know that rocks can be sharp, pointy, dangerous. None of this is of concern to a barbarian.) This takes a special kind of narrative courage/stupidity.

I was never bored with “Conan the Barbarian”. It’s a wannabe blockbuster that’s ended up somewhere beyond B-movie status, and there is much geek and fanboy hatred towards the film from the kind of people who quote the original’s screenplay word-for-word and recreate cut scenes from the “Conan” game from a few years ago with Lego. “Conan” purists should treat this film with caution, but those open to its limited yet undeniable brand of charms can give it a shot. I heed against broadly recommending “Conan the Barbarian” to general audiences.

Note: I was reminded of that mid 1990s bomb “Cutthroat Island”, the pirate wannabe blockbuster flop that missed the pirate frenzy of the Naughties with a good decade. This too was far from terrible, yet nearly ruined careers. I will revisit both “Cutthroat” and “Conan” on DVD (in 2D!) when the time comes.