Film Carew: Boxing Day Releases

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

How do foot fetishists feel about Hobbit feet? Is there a segment of pediphiles (no?) that sees those hairy, mephitic clodhoppers and feels a stirring deep in their loins? If so, they'll be excited about The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug —and, perhaps, will be the only ones— as Peter Jackson delivers a Tarantino-esque assortment of Bilbo foot-close-ups; likely to remind us all that our Burglar is a Fantastical Creature from a Mystical Realm, not a minor English comedian in the latest interminable instalment of a cinematic saga that seems like it'll never end. The 'middle episode' of any trilogy is usually the 'dark' one, but Smaug feels far more functional: spending 160 minutes(!) merely advancing a none-too-thrilling plot tangled up in the tedium of Star Wars morality. Anyone on the edge of their seat waiting to see if Good will triumph over Evil (spoiler: it will!, sure as the sun'll set on Durin's Day) won't get any answers here; it ends just when things are just starting to get interesting. Well, comparatively.

What're the cinematic rules on interspecies love? Humans and chimpanzees share 98.8% of their DNA, but we're not about to, um, go there (although that lady in Project Nim seemed borderline). So how close must the DNA similarities between elf and dwarf be for their congress not to be disturbing? Where the original Lord Of The Rings money-machine had to trim down 1500 source-text pages into three movies, this Hobbit dead-horse-flogger is about blowing up 300 pages into three movies. Which means we get newly-created characters like a sexy lady-elf (Evangeline Lilly, hauling copious Lost baggage) revisionist-history'd into the sausage-party as a go-gettin', arrow-firin', Independent Woman pt.2; even if she's still driven by the central dramatic desire BOYS! Will she stay true to Orlando Bloom and his neverending supply of nevermiss arrows? Or will she —because of a midday-soap-opera scene boasting through-the-bars romantic-talk of the I'd-Love-To-Show-You-Full-Moon-Night-On-The-Cornfields variety— follow her heart for the Handsome Dwarf all the way across unholy lines that should never be sexually crossed?

And how do you feel about unending orc carnage? Do you think that, because they have scarred faces and speak in scary subtitles and screech things like “Slay them all!” that they deserved to be indiscriminately exterminated whilst no other species is ever harmed? There's an unintentionally hilarious moment where the Handsome Dwarf gets an arrow in his leg, and the whole action stops, the music drops, and an OH NO! moment descends. One of the drunken Scottish dwarves has suffered a minor wound! But guess what: he doesn't croak. None of them do. When they're staring death in the face, imprisoned, trapped, or face-to-face with an private-school-educated dragon (the diction!), there's sheer dramatic inertia; the stakes eternally low because there's no chance things will ever go awry. Let's tally the Desolation deaths: Dwarves 0, Elves 0, Hobbits 0, Wizards who leave at inopportune times to go on mystically-summoned solo side-missions that serve as B-story ballast 0, Humans 0, Orcs 10,000 (approx), Giant Spiders 50.

"Come see New Zealand"

Where should we stand on Peter Jackson, B-movie shlock-splatterer turned A-list powerbroker? For all the nerdery of his High Frame Rate 3D CGI, and the lavish creation of the Dwarves' under-the-mountain city and their Industrial-Revolution-fetishising mines and Scrooge McDuck moneypit and Cumberbitch'd dragon dwelling therein, Jackson —the Great Patron Saint of New Zealand Tourism— is clearly most excited in a sequence in which he gets to depict our adventurers lost and disoriented in a shadowy forest populated by Giant Spiders. It suddenly looks and movies like a cheap horror-movie: jump scares, whooshing camera, discordant strings, a dwarf comically punching a giant spider in its face. It's a rare moment of lively filmmaking —of life— in a movie that plays more like a contractually-obligated dirge than the supposed shrine to boyish wonder and fantastical imagination it's meant to be.

How have Tolkienites received The Desolation Of Smaug? I don't know, and who fucking cares. Whether or not the original text had a video-game sequence where the dwarves went on a physics-defying Disneyland barrel-ride through some Extreme Sports white-water rapids, does it really matter? I know there's lots of fictional tales that've spawned religions —Star Trek, Dianetics, the Bible— but rather than there being such concern about whether this film is pleasing to Middle Earth diehards, maybe more attention should've been paid to not making it so awful. Like: actual note I actually wrote down whilst sitting in the cinema: “God I fucking hate these movies.”

THE RAILWAY MAN

Colin Firth confronts more than just the horrors of war

The Railway Man sounds a warning with its very title card, which is emblazoned with a 'Based On A True Story' every bit as big as the name of the actual film. It's everything that you dread when presented with such a prestige picture: Important, wearyingly earnest, utterly self-satisfied, parading celebrity actors gunning for Awards Show plaudits, and turning real-life tragedy into an emotionally-manipulative movie that reduces complex morality to big, dumb, obvious drama. Its true story concerns an uptight Englishman (Colin Firth!) whose stiff-upper-lip starts to wobble when he's haunted by PTSD flashbacks to his time in a Japanese POW camp in Thailand. Via the tender naggings of his devoted wife (Nicole Kidman!), he finally confronts the horrors he suffered in war, and eventually comes face-to-face with the man responsible for his torture. In reality —in the True Story upon which this is Based— the depth and currents of conflicting emotions would be profound; and anyone really wishing to see them explored in the moral-greyzone of actual-human-existence should go straight to Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act Of Killing. But, here, in the black-and-white of Jonathan Teplitzky's virtuous telemovie —with its over-the-top score and shock-tactic-filled direction and screenwritten contrivance— it's but a twee hymnal to reconciliation. One that ends as only it can, with cinema's new greatest cliché: the pictures of the real people in the credits.

PHILOMENA

Coogan 'Stays Dench' even in the chase scenes

They're the original odd couple! There's snide, cynical, ever-droll Steve Coogan, as a semi-disinterested journalist deigning to type a Human Interest feature; one of those Sunday newspaper “stories about vulnerable, weak-minded, ignorant people” penned to be read by the very same. The subject of his tabloid tearjerker is Judi Dench, an Irish pensioner haunted by the memory of the out-of-wedlock son that Dickensian nuns sold to adoptive parents whilst she toiled a slave's penance in a Magdalene laundry. Philomena —which is based on a true story, and, yes, there's pictures of the real people awaiting you in the credits— becomes a sort of mystery policier in which our mismatched buddy-cops must head out on the road, and uncover the covered-up truth about what became of this never-forgotten son. The villain they must thwart is the Catholic Church, and the central moral debate —between Coogan and Dench— is whether vengeance or forgiveness is the best recourse for healing old wounds. It sounds like powerful stuff, but director Stephen Frears makes it all very non-threatening. When Coogan calls back to his editor to update her on the story, it has the feeling of a character recapping each act as if we're back from commercial break. And scenes in which Dench happily recounts the plot of a pulp bodice-ripper, or delights at the luxuries —Mints on pillows! Buffet breakfast! Big Momma's House on pay-per-view!— of a fancy hotel effectively place a comic doily over any hard dramatic edges.

SHORT TERM 12

"I wish this film was less depressing"

“I always wanted to work with underprivileged kids!” beams Rami Malek, on his first day at a foster-care facility for teenagers —the psychologically-scarred, suicidal, and 'at risk'— who've slipped through society's cracks. It's the kind of anodyne sentiment you hear from Miss America contestants, and one of those 'underprivileged' soon puts him back in his condescending place: “what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Destin Daniel Cretton's debut feature is a cinematic tonic for the notion that philanthropy comes by chequebook or that social work is something to pad a CV. Instead, it takes place in the trenches of daily life for troubled youth and the just-as-troubled 'line workers' charged with wrangling them. Often, it gets a bit heavy-handed: Brie Larson's main character is called Grace, for fuck's sake; every time bad shit happens to one of the kids it's a symbol reflecting Larson's own failings; and there's a desperate tendency to counter-balance every dark moment with a scene of sunlit, happily-scored levity. Short Term 12 maintains a borderline-contrived hopefulness even in the face of so much dramatic hopelessness; the scars of past sufferings nothing that can't be overcome. Yet the cast —from Larson and co-star John Gallagher Jr. to magnetic debutante Keith Stanfield— are fiercely committed to their roles, and even Cretton's most theatrical moments come laced with salty emotional truths.

DRINKING BUDDIES

"Cheers! We're the best of the Boxing Day releases"

If the cliché of mumblecore movies is that they're all just people talk-talk-talking, Joe Swanberg's Drinking Buddies takes a different tack. His loosely-scripted picture is filled with mumbly, comic improv from Jake Johnson, Olivia Wilde, Anna Kendrick, and Ron Livingston, but it's more interested in what they can't —or won't— say; the real-issues nervously circled around, the elephants left to linger in the room. Moments of key drama happen between edits, reconciliations are made in silence, and Johnson and Kendrick have a conversation about when they're going to have a conversation about marriage. They're a long-term couple, but Swanberg wheels out an old rom-com set-up: they're better suited to being with Wilde and Livingston, respectively. Johnson and Wilde are workplace-bros down for boozing, shit-talkin', and inherent messiness; Kendrick and Livingston are thoughtful, anal, and overly analytical. And, as its title —and craft-brewery setting— suggests, alcohol is the definitive dramatic catalyst: the social lubricant that loosens inhibitions and inspires regrets. It's the stuff of pat three-act resolutions, but Drinking Buddies feels open-ended, even when the credits roll; this just an episode in the lives of four lived-in, genuine characters. Swanberg and his game cast dare explore the emotional complexities, conflicting desires, and neurotic anxieties of a seemingly-simple premise. When Wilde laments that being dumped makes you feel as if an atomic bomb has razed your life, but “to the rest of the world you're just a cliché,” she hints at the heart of the text: things long reduced to stereotypes by genre movies can be the grist of awkward, difficult, resolution-free experience.