THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG: CFQ Spotlight Podcast 4:47

Martin Freeman is about to discover that this gold chamber is protected by ADT (A Dragon's Threat) in THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG.
Martin Freeman is about to discover that this gold chamber is protected by ADT (A Dragon's Threat) in THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG.

The appeal of the Grand Adventure is clear and incontestable: the epic scale; the sense of mystery and adventure; the thrill of discovering what challenge, adversary, or ally awaits around the next bend. Thing is, the whole point of the exercise is to reach an ultimate goal, and that’s where Peter Jackson’s HOBBIT movies — both of them, to date — have been having problems. Picking up where the previous film, AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY, left off, THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG, seeks to continue the J.R.R. Tolkien tale of a band of dwarfs, key among them Thorin (Richard Armitage) and Kili (Aidan Turner) — aided and abetted by the hobbit Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and the wizard Gandalf  (Ian McKellan) — as they challenge the fearsome dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) and attempt to reclaim their kingdom, but gets so lost in its tangents, side-histories, and ancillary characters that it manages to botch even the key confrontation promised in the title.
Once again, the Cinefantastique Online trio of Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons diverge widely in their opinions of how well this second installment manages to deliver its ambitious tale, leading to an energetic and thought-provoking discussion. Click on the player to hear the show.

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Here's What's Going On 06/12/2013: Pics from the Next HOBBIT Film

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG gets new elves and rampaging orcs… Steel yourself for more MAN OF STEEL… Let’s go looking for the ALIEN UPRISING…
From the luxurious Cinefantastique Online studios in NYC, Dan Persons brings you up-to-date on what’s happening in the world of genre media.

bilbo with sword pointed down
Martin Freeman as Bilbo

female elf
Evangeline Lilly as Tauriel, a new character created for the film.

gandalf
Ian McKellen as Gandalf

legolas
Orlando Bloom as Legolas

monster
Azog, the Orc chieftan

hobbit desolation
THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG
THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG
THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY: CFQ Spotlight Podcast 3:50

Give Him a Ring Sometime: Martin Freeman stumbles upon a serious tactical advantage in THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY.
Give Him a Ring Sometime: Martin Freeman stumbles upon a serious tactical advantage in THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY.

The journey will be long, the challenges daunting, the popcorn very likely stale. But that doesn’t matter now — the grand epic that is the three-part, film adaptation of THE HOBBIT is upon us with the release of the first installment: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY. Having braved the onslaught of orcs, goblins, and restless eight-year-0lds, beabetterbooktalker.com‘s Andrea Lipinski joins Cinefantastique Online’s Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons to discuss whether director Peter Jackson has taken what started as a compact, nimble fantasy tale and managed to elaborate on it in a way that will make audiences eager to sign on for all three films. They also delve into the film’s introduction of High Frame Rate (HFR) projection technology, and explore what effect the process has on the viewing experience.
Also: What’s coming to theaters next week.

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – film review

What's missing from THE HOBBIT poster? The Hobbit! Sort of a metaphor for the film itself
What's missing from THE HOBBIT poster? The Hobbit! Sort of a metaphor for the film itself

If you are a fan of Peter Jackson’s LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, good fortune has smiled upon you this weekend, because THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY contains more of what you enjoyed before – much, much more. In fact, there is so much LORD OF THE RINGS that there is barely any room for THE HOBBIT. Unfortunately, instead of simply adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel, Jackson has opted to use the story as a jumping off point for a convoluted prequel that threatens to do for Middle Earth what George Lucas’s STAR WARS prequels did for a galaxy far, far away.
The strategy yields a schizoid mess that buries Tolkien’s simple tale beneath an avalanche of expository dialogue and CGI action  – the former intended to tie the events into the previous films, the latter intended to pad the story into an action-adventure epic. The problem is that, unlike before, this story is not big enough to support the epic length. Whereas THE LORD OF THE RINGS felt dense, even with each film clocking in at over three hours, THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY feels thin – a good first act (of what should have been a two-hour movie) stretched to interminable length in order to fill a feature-length running time over two and a half hours.
The result is strangely disengaging – a virtual remake, hitting all the beats of its predecessor but missing the emotional resonance. The similarity is certainly inherent in the source material (when Tolkien wrote his sequel to The Lord of the Rings, he reused many story elements from The Hobbit), but Jackson has deliberately emphasized the echoes in an effort to recreate his winning formula of expanding the author’s literary prose into stunning cinematic visuals.
For example, like THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY begins with a massive battle in which monster-thingy smites a king whose heir must set things right, and it ends with our heroes standing on a hill looking into the distance at a forbidding mountain to which they will travel in the next installment. The images look just as spectacular as before, but this time they feel like empty spectacle.
Which wouldn’t be so bad if the spectacle were a little more…well – spectacular – but Jackson seems to have lost sight of how to build thrilling action scenes in which characters are caught in dangerous situations but manage to find a way out through ingenuity or perseverance. There is a surfeit of CGI long-shots of animated characters running around toppling bridges but less of the eye-level live-action camera work that drew the audience into the action to build suspense. The aesthetic here is less LORD OF THE RINGS than it is the silly T-Rex trapeze sequence in Jackson’s KING KONG 2004 remake. In a weird way, THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY even recalls Toho’s giant monster films of the 1960s, when less and less live-action was filmed, reducing the city destruction to a series of crumbling miniatures bereft of any human scale.
Gollum (Andy Serkis) wonders "What has it got in its pocketss!"
Gollum (Andy Serkis) wonders "What has it got in its pocketss!"

Every once in a while, a scene comes alive in a way that makes a viewer yearn for what might have been. Gollum’s riddles in the dark with Bilbo are creepy and funny – the scene works as a stand-alone moment in in this film, and it foreshadows events that will happen later in LORD OF THE RINGS – without any heavy-handed cinematic threading to tie the incidents together. Ian McKellen is wonderful as ever as Gandalf: when he delivers his message in favor of mercy to Bilbo, he really does seem to be channeling a higher wisdom worth remembering. And Bilbo’s explanation of why he decides to help the dwarves is genuinely moving (Bilbo yearns for home – something the dwarves do not have).
Too bad THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY could not have focused on these considerable strengths instead of drowning them in a sea of CGI set-pieces and ill-conceived ret-conning. Tolkien’s tale is a fairly straight-forward children’s fantasy about Bilbo Baggins joining the wizard Gandalf and a dozen dwarves on a quest to reclaim their homeland from the dragon Smaug. His Lord of the Rings sequel trilogy is much deeper and darker, and Tolkien himself had to do a little revamping to stitch the two together (rewriting substantial portions of Gollum’s appearance in Chapter 5 of The Hobbit). However, when Tolkien later sat down to do a complete rewrite of The Hobbit, to bring it more in line with Lord of the Rings, he abandoned the task after three chapters, when someone told him “It’s not The Hobbit anymore.” Sadly, Peter Jackson did not heed the lesson of this anecdote. The humorous antics of the original (e.g., the three  trolls arguing over how to kill and cook Bilbo and his companions) remain, but the tone of these sequences jars with the grizzly, quasi-horror material that has been added.
In the appendix to Lord of the Rings and in various post-humously published stories, Tolkien laid out the connections (particularly in “Quest for Erebor,” in which Gandalf explains that, while the dwarves may have been concerned only with reclaiming their homeland from Smaug, Gandalf was eager to prevent the dragon from becoming an ally of the dark lord Sauron). Apparently, Jackson’s goal is to incorporate these ulterior motives and behind-the-scenes machinations into his prequel trilogy. Consequently, non-essential bits of business (e.g., the Necromancer – originally conceived as a plot device to get Gandalf off-stage for a while and later re-imagined as an incarnation of Sauron) end up being over-emphasized. Saruman (Christopher Lee), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and Eldrond (Hugo Weaving) also show up, so that Gandalf can voice to them his concern about the evil brewing in the east. As interesting and admirable as it is to use the cinematic format to synthesize these elements together in a way the novel never could, the unfortunate side effect is that poor Bilbo, the little hobbit who could, gets pushed too often to the sidelines, obscuring what should be the main narrative.* And for all its attempt to satisfy the geeks audience by maintaining continuity between the films, Bilbo’s acquisition of the Ring plays out quite differently here than in the prologue from THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.
THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY is not a complete disaster. There is still a good little movie in there, wishing it could escape from the epic aspirations forced upon it; the production values and special effects are excellent. The cast give it their all: Andy Serkis is as fun as ever as Gollum; and as Bilbo, Martin Freeman is a serviceable replacement for LORD OF THE RINGS Ian Holm (here seen only in a prologue to set up the flashback to earlier times). However, THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY continues the downward slide that has afflicted all of Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations. It bodes ill for the future films – an omen neither from Mordor nor the Lonely Mountain but from the accounting office in Hollywood that demanded another tent-pole franchise from source material ill-suited to support one.
Bilbo's "warrior face" is a bit unconvincing.
Bilbo's "warrior face" in this poster is a bit unconvincing.

[rating=2]
THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Warner Brothers, December 14, 2012). Directed by Peter Jackson. Screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro, based on Tolkien’s novel. Cast: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Ken Stott, Ian Holm, Elijah Wood, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Andy Serkis, Sylvester McCoy, Lee Pace, Barry Humphries. 169 minutes. PG-13.
FOOTNOTE:

  • In a similar way, the 1994 INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE film adaptation marred its narrative by incorporating scenes and ideas that appeared not in the original text but in its literary sequels.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS Trilogy: CFQ Spotlight Podcast 3:49

Don't Let Him Near a Zales: Elijah Wood is helpless before the power of cursed ring in THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
Don't Let Him Near a Zales: Elijah Wood is helpless before the power of cursed ring in THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

Next week sees the last, major genre film debut of the year with the release of THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY in glorious 3D and an innovative high frame-rate (HFR) projection system (advance word: bring Dramamine). The film marks the beginning of a new film franchise based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic tales of Middle Earth, but of course it isn’t the first time director Peter Jackson has visited the realm of elves, orcs, and humble, fun-loving hobbits. So while the film industry took this weekend to rally its strength by observing a moratorium in genre film debuts, Cinefantastique Online’s Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons take a look back at the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, and weigh whether, a decade later, this is a world worth revisiting.
Plus: Dan gives his capsule verdict of BAD KIDS GO TO HELL, and what’s coming to theaters next week (can you guess?).
SPECIAL FUN TECHNICAL NOTE: Did you know listening to podcasts in which the audio occasionally, randomly skips makes you more popular? It’s true! Find out for yourself by listening to this show, and just see how many New Years parties you’re invited to. (TRANSLATION: Our audio software screwed up. It doesn’t really mess up the show, but we apologize and will be better next week.)

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The Raven: The Cinefantastique Spotlight Podcast – 3:17

Tom Jones' Fans Just Throw Their Underwear on the Stage: An admirer takes his love of Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack, right) too far in THE RAVEN.
Tom Jones' Fans Just Throw Their Underwear on the Stage: An admirer takes his love of Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack, right) too far in THE RAVEN.

If truth is stranger than fiction, then can a serial killer inspired by the eminently strange writings of Edgar Allan Poe be said to be even stranger still? In THE RAVEN, a mad murderer has managed to engineer the deaths of his victims in ways that accurately (and in some cases, implausibly) replicate the works of one of the true geniuses of horror, and only Poe (John Cusack) can break the clues that will end the crime spree.
Cinefantastique Online’s Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons sit down to contrast the film with its source materials and discuss whether director James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA) has succeeded in turning Poe’s baroque fantasies into a compelling dark mystery. Also in the show: A brief conversation of THE HOBBIT’s less-than-triumphant technical sneak preview, and what’s coming to theaters.

New Bilbo & Gandalf 'Hobbit' Pics

Empire Magazine has posted two new pictures from THE HOBBIT of Martin Freeman (SHERLOCK) as Bilbo Baggins and Sir Ian McKellen (X-MEN) as a younger Gandalf.

Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge

The site also quotes director Peter Jackson regarding the company of dwarves’ attitudes towards their companions on their quest:  “They don’t know what to make of Gandalf, they think Bilbo is a wuss, and Elrond a prissy headmaster type.”
Click to Enlarge
Click to Enlarge

1st Pic of Martin Freeman as Hobbit

Entertainment Weekly featured the first picture released of Martin Freeman (SHERLOCK) as Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
They quote Jackson as saying Freeman: “…Fits the ears, and he’s got some very nice feet. I think he’s got the biggest hobbit feet we’ve had so far. They’re a little bit hard to walk in, but he’s managed to figure out the perfect hobbit gait.”

Click to Enlarge
Click to Enlarge

Rio, 007, The Crow: CFQ Round Table Podcast 2:15.1

Blue-Parrots-Rio-the-Movie

In this week’s installment of the Cinefantastique Round Table Podcast, Dan Persons, Lawrence French, and Steve Biodrowski analyze the hot topics in the world of horror, fantasy, and science fiction films: Sony Pictures will finance and distribute the new James Bond Film; Barry Cooper may star in THE CROW; Peter Jackson films THE HOBBIT in 3-D and at 48 frames per second; RIO celebrates a box office victory of SCREAM 4; and Lionsgate picks up director Barry Levinson’s docu-style eco-horror film THE BAY (aka ISOPOD). Also, Lawrence French offers a capsule review of RIO and finds it a surprisingly refreshing step up from the ICE AGE sequels.


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'The Hobbit' Casting News

 

Andy Serkis in KING KONG
Andy Serkis in KING KONG

According to Deadline, Andy Serkis (KING KONG) will reprise his voice and motion capture artist tole of Gollum for the 2-part film version of THE HOBBIT.
He joins Martin Freeman (THE HITCHIKERS GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE) as Bilbo Baggins, along with Cate Blanchett as Galadriel and Elijah Wood — who is apparently to appear as Frodo. This makes sense in the light of the fact that Ian Holm is said to be in talks to return for an appearance as the older Bilbo.
Still working out deals to reprise their LORD OF THE RINGS roles are Ian McKellen (Gandolph), Christopher Lee as Saruman, and possibly Orlando Bloom as the elven prince Legolas.
Perhaps the character appearances are part of the explanation of why it’s necessary to make a two-part film. J.R.R. Tolkien’s story may be too big to play out comfortably in a single film, but not quite long enough to justify two movies without additional scenes.  
According to The One Ring , Woods’ role as Frodo can be explained as the character reading of the events in the “Red Book of Westmarch”, which chronicles the events of The Hobbit -Or- There and Back Again, suggesting a framing story.
The article reiterates that THE HOBBIT is being made by Peter Jackson as a c0production between Warner Brothers Pictures and MGM, though due to MGM’s  bankruptcy and continuing internal problems, it is being  financed by completely by Warner Brothers Pictures, who will have World-wide  distribution rights.