Films featuring
Cate Blanchett

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I thought I had Peter Jackson figured. He took three novels volumes of the Lord of the Rings and pared them down to three completely coherent movies. Two years later, however, his King Kong took what Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoadstack did in an economical 100 minutes and ballooned it up to three hours. The Peter Jackson who made Lord of the Rings was, to be as polite as possible, a man of generous girth. The King Kong Jackson was skinny. It was as if he took all those excess pounds and poured them into the Kong screenplay.

The Hobbit was made by a once-again rotund Jackson, which gave me hope that it would be a story more leanly and efficiently told, but early signs were not good. As a novel, The Hobbit is barely long enough to qualify as a footnote in Lord of the Rings. Yet, Jackson found a way to turn the story first into two movies and then, as it turned out, another trilogy. I was afraid we would be treated to such DVD chapter names as “Bilbo Ties His Shoes.”

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Elizabeth: The Golden Age

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Some movies are made to entertain us, others to inform, titillate or provoke. This one seems to have been made expressly for the purpose of winning the Oscars for Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction. It certainly wasn’t produced to give us a rigorously authentic account of Queen Elizabeth I (Cate Blanchett) at the time of the Spanish Armada or a deeply insightful examination of England’s Virgin Queen as a human being. While 1998’s Elizabeth was fairly sober-sided historical drama, director Shekhar Kapur has this time offered up As Ye Olde World Turns.

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The Good German

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Steven Soderbergh’s latest experiment is a clear triumph of style and technique over coherence and content. The Good German is admirable as a successful attempt to revive some lost techniques of filmmaking. Sadly, the less than clear storyline and shallow characters squander what could have been an intriguing exercise in resurrecting some of the great traditions of classic Hollywood. It’s still interesting to look at but after the stylistic novelty wears off, you’ll find yourself checking your watch regularly.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

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There’s little to say about Return of the King that I haven’t already said about the first two installments in Peter Jackson’s trilogy of Lord of the Rings movies. To my mind, it inherits the same virtues of the previous two movies while bringing the cycle to an epic and satisfying conclusion.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

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The middle entry in a trilogy often has the hardest job, picking up where the first story left off and leaving enough for the final part to build on. In other words, it has to hit the ground running, assuming you remember what you saw a year ago and then leave you hanging two or three hours later. I don’t count faux trilogies like the Indiana Jones movies, which are only called a “trilogy” because there just happened to be three movies. There was, however, no common narrative thread tying the films together, like there is for Lord of the Rings.

Like The Empire Strikes Back, The Two Towers successfully avoids the “middle movie” trap. Continue reading

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

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The first film of the Lord of the Rings trilogy had a tall order to fill. It had to establish the complex fantasy universe of Middle Earth and the peoples who inhabit it, while putting the story of the Ring into motion and accomplish this in the amount of time you could reasonably expect an audience to sit still for a movie. It probably would have been no problem to make a ten-hour film out of the first book alone.

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Aviator

The Aviator

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Making a film about Howard Hughes is quite a challenge, given that the man was largely an enigma even to those who knew him best. How do you tell the story about who struggled to hide his numerous demons and lived the last few decades of his life in virtual seclusion from the world? Director Martin Scorcese wisely chose to concentrate on the part of his life that was lived in the public eye but that is also part of the weakness of The Aviator. The facts presented here are well known to those familiar with the life of Howard Hughes and don’t really offer an incisive look at the private man.

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