Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 2014Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Electraglideinblue

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Robert Blake, Billy (Green) Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. By 1973 in the United States, film had already become chronicles of listless motion, failed ideologies, ironic Westward expansion, and rampant paranoia. American cinema was in the process of cannibalizing itself in great gulps of genre reconsideration, taking the lead of the movies-by-critics of the French New Wave and reassessing the western/film noir/thriller cycle of studio-era Hollywood through a new mirror darkly: The iconography of the hero mythology Americans hold most dear (cowboy, hardboiled detective, two-fisted man of action), forced now to be populated by incoherent psychopaths and, worse, effeminate ones–lawyers, journalists, ex-cons, ex-soldiers back from an unpopular war, unloved, disrespected, lost and still losing.

We’re the Millers (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 23, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Road Movie
Werethemillers1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, Ed Helms
screenplay by Bob Fisher & Steve Faber and Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber

by Walter Chaw Rawson Marshall Thurber’s return to the territory of the screwball gross-out comedy that put him on the map, the better-than-it-should-be Dodgeball, is the better-than-it-should-be (but not as good as Dodgeball) We’re The Millers, an essentially plotless road-trip intrigue that nonetheless glances off 2013’s concern with the decline of the middle class while providing a couple of chuckles along the way. It’s the lowbrow version of Albert Brooks’s Lost in America if looked at through a particularly sympathetic lens–a hint of a conversation about class, a whiff of something about how hard it is to make a living on streets getting meaner by the day. Ultimately, it’s probably just lucky that the cast assembled has an impressive improvisational pedigree (and that the director is open to making adjustments midstream), lending a stale comedy of mistaken identity a degree of perhaps-undeserved life. It probably doesn’t hurt that We’re the Millers never, at any point, tries to be something it’s not: rescued by a total lack of ambition.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 21, 2014Posted in1970s, 2014, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: John Carpenter, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Assaultonprecinct131

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Nancy Loomis
written and directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer Written and directed by USC film-school grad John Carpenter, Assault on Precinct 13 is the work of a man with something to prove. Carpenter had finished one film, the shot-on-16mm SF parody Dark Star, co-written with Dan O’Bannon, but he found that nobody in Hollywood took it (or him) seriously. After winning a for-hire writing gig for Columbia Pictures (Carpenter wrote the screenplay that became The Eyes of Laura Mars), he got his hands on a hundred thousand dollars and wrangled some of his friends from USC to help him make the first “real” John Carpenter film. The project, which borrowed its story from Rio Bravo and its mood from Night of the Living Dead, was a siege movie set in an abandoned police station in the fictional Anderson, CA, identified on screen as “a Los Angeles ghetto.”

Plus One (2013) – DVD

January 19, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller, Time Travel

Plusone4

+1
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Rhys Wakefield, Logan Miller, Ashley Hinshaw, Natalie Hall
screenplay by Bill Gullo
directed by Dennis Iliadis

by Walter Chaw David (Rhys Wakefield) screws up and loses girlfriend Jill (Ashley Hinshaw), only to run into her the night of a gigantic, hedonistic, Gatsby-esque party attended by rave strippers, DJs, and drug dealers. An unlikely place to stage a comeback, David, with buddy Teddy (Logan Miller), coaxes Jill into a conversation that goes south–but then the lights cut out, there’s a weird meteorite event outside, and David finds himself with the opportunity to try the conversation again: same place, different Jill. It seems that something’s created a quantum split–a little bleed-over maybe from a parallel dimension that twists time and creates doubles of all the revellers, though only a few notice. The ones who don’t party on in a kind of nightmarish inattention that reminds of the dreamscapes of Miracle Mile and After Hours; the ones who do begin to wonder what will happen when the time-slips overlap and they find themselves attempting to share the same space as their doppelgängers.

Ms. 45 (1981)

January 17, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Revenge, Theatrical

Ms45

Ms. .45
***½/****
starring Zoë Tamerlis, Bogey, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto
screenplay N. G. St. John
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I first saw Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 the way I suspect most men my age saw it: furtively, in my bedroom, on VHS. It had about it that aura of skeeviness I spent a good portion of my time hunting for at the local video store. My nose for such things had been rewarded with likes of I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left, films that never failed to be prurient in their rape sequences, no matter their nods to subsequently avenging our fair, fairly defiled, maidens. What Ferrara presents with this, arguably his second-most notorious film (The Addiction is unbelievable, and still only available on VHS), is a rape-revenge tale that does nothing to de-feminize its heroine–rather correctly, powerfully, identifying that the loci of a woman’s power is indeed her sexuality, even as that sexuality draws the objectifying, dehumanizing gaze. It’s why, after all, so many fertility goddesses are also destroyers, isn’t it? There’s a moment in the third Terminator where the female Terminator, played by the already-intimidating Kristanna Loken, makes a decision to enlarge her breasts prior to confronting a male victim. If only the rest of that film were so wise.

Stranger by the Lake (2013)

January 17, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Strangerbythelake

L’inconnu du lac
***½/****
starring Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou, Patrick d’Assumçao, Jérôme Chappatte
written and directed by Alain Guiraudie

by Angelo Muredda Late in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, a detective sent to investigate the murder of a young man at a nude male beach designated as a gay cruising spot breaks from his procedural script to unload his exasperation on a potential suspect. “You guys have a strange way of loving each other sometimes,” the investigator (Jérôme Chappatte) points out when it seems that no one can provide him with so much as the first names of their recent conquests, much less recall the moment the handsome guy with the ballcap vanished without a trace, save for his abandoned beach towel. His assessment cuts two ways in a film that, before veering into the territory of gothic sex thrillers with uncommon ease, takes a wry anthropological approach to good sex and bad love in a space designed to indulge both in their most rarefied forms. On the one hand, the detective is an anticipatory mouthpiece for the conservative critics who would rain down on the movie he’s in, eager perhaps to brand this tribe he’s wandered into as perverse, borderline sociopathic death-seekers with no regard for their fellow neighbours. Yet his curiosity and suspension of judgment might also mark him as Guiraudie’s ideal audience: a serene observer held in thrall to the strange lengths people will go to satisfy their desires.

Message from Space (1978) – DVD

January 15, 2014Posted in1970s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory
Messagefromspace1

***/**** Image C+ Sound C- Extras C Madness A
starring Vic Morrow, Sonny Chiba, Philip Casnoff, Peggy Lee Brennan
screenplay by Hiroo Matsuda
directed by Kinji Fukasaku

by Walter Chaw Essentially a big-budget, feature-film version of Calvinball if Bill Watterson were a manga artist undergoing a psychotic break, Kinji Fukasaku’s balls-insane Message from Space is a very special brand of genius. It honours no structural logic that I can discern, though it does have a kinetic kid-logic, the kind honed from endless summer afternoons tromping around with your buddies, making shit up and being happier than you’ll ever be again in your life. Message from Space captures that headiness, that heedlessness, the sort of reckless creativity that charts the course between memorable films by someone like Ed Wood and forgettable films by every other hack with the same level of talent but not the same joyful dedication. I’m not saying Message from Space is a good movie–I can’t even say that the reasons for its existence are particularly honourable (it’s an obvious Star Wars cash-grab). But I can say that Message from Space is crazy-energetic and has more delightful moments packed into it than a dozen “normal” movies. I also wouldn’t underestimate its influence on a generation of kids Star Wars-hungry during that three-year gap between the first film and The Empire Strikes Back. Herein, find the source of Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy at least, and, incidentally, the better version of Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs (and Stewart Raffill’s The Ice Pirates).

Body Bags (1993) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 13, 2014Posted in1990s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: John Carpenter, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Bodybags1

**½/**** Image A- Sound C- Extras B
starring Robert Carradine, Stacy Keach, Mark Hamill, Twiggy
written by Billy Brown & Dan Angel
directed by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer In 1989, HBO debuted a horror anthology show, “Tales from the Crypt”, based on stories from the disreputable EC comic books of the early 1950s. Jump-started by a stable of Hollywood big shots like Richard Donner, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis, the show was a hit, and the wisecracking “Crypt Keeper” who introduced each episode quickly became a pop-culture icon. HBO’s rival Showtime, known primarily for its softcore anthology “Red Shoe Diaries”, was presumably aiming to duplicate that success when it backed Body Bags, an anthology project led by co-executive producers John Carpenter and his wife, Sandy King. Despite that genre pedigree, the series never got off the ground, but a pilot was completed: three half-hour segments with a goofy framing story involving Carpenter himself doing a deadpan Betelgeuse impression among the stiffs in a city morgue. The finished omnibus aired on Showtime as a one-off in the summer of ’93.

Synchronicity: FFC Interviews Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado, writers/directors of “Big Bad Wolves”

January 12, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, Israel

Bigbadwolvesinterviewtitle

Just a couple of weeks after I caught writer-director Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s Big Bad Wolves at the 4th Mile High Horror Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino, having seen it himself at the Busan International Film Festival, declared it to be his favourite movie of 2013. Turns out QT screening the picture at a South Korean event represents a special kind of synchronicity, given that both he and South Korea’s fulsome genre cinema were key influences on Kehsales & Papushado. Seeing both of Keshales and Papushado’s films when I did (before I got a chance to screen Big Bad Wolves, I was inspired by the buzz on it to track down their 2010 debut, Rabies) felt like a bit of synchronicity in itself–or, at least, I felt lucky that I was able to catch this wave right at the moment that it crests and heads to shore. When I reached out to Mr. Keshales to see if he might be interested in an interview, he was quick to agree and then, over missed connections, a miscommunication about time zones (8 p.m. in Israel is 11 a.m. in Colorado, go figure), a bad Skype link, a newly-purchased cell-mike still package-fresh, and finally a cell call from a street in Israel (where Papushado almost got creamed by a car) to a suburb in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I was able to chat at last with Keshales and Papushado: the faces–the only ones, as it happens–of Israeli horror and a new day dawning in Israeli cinema.

Lone Survivor (2013)

January 7, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

Lonesurvivor
***/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Eric Bana
screenplay by Peter Berg, based on the book by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw Peter Berg is a great action director. He does it with verve, a good sense of space (which is increasingly rare these days), and a sense of both weight and humour. He has excellent timing, as well as an understanding of what’s meaningful visual information in there among the dross of motion and impact. Moreover, he seems obsessed with working through issues surrounding what it means to be a man–how, too often, it means your social interactions are limited to violence, threats to your sexuality, and hazing rituals dangerous and bestial. I’m a huge fan of his debut feature, Very Bad Things; visually, I think it’s wrong to underestimate how influential is his romantic rack-focus gimmick from Friday Night Lights. I love Berg’s Hancock, the movie that Man of Steel aspired to be (and if we’re talking secondary influences, Zack Snyder owes much of his cinematic vocabulary to Berg). I love The Rundown, and while Battleship is inarguably a misfire, it’s also less of a misfire than it could have been. With Lone Survivor, based on the memoir of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, the titular lone survivor of a botched four-man special forces mission in Afghanistan, Berg’s examinations of the masculine take their logical turn from bachelor parties to football to superheroes to military action. And for long moments, Lone Survivor is fantastic.

Eyes Without a Face (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 5, 2014Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller
Eyeswithoutaface1

Les yeux sans visage
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, François Guérin, Edith Scob
screenplay by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon and Claude Sautet, based on the novel by Jean Redon
directed by Georges Franju

by Walter Chaw Five films changed the conversation in 1960. They were the fire, though the embers were stoked in the years leading up to them. Looking for signposts in the Eisenhower Fifties, you find the juvenile-delinquent cycle, plus the outré horror flicks of England’s Hammer Studios, or Japan’s tokusatsu, or France’s Nouvelle Vague. More directly, you find a pair of films based on works by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Diabolique and Vertigo. But in 1960, there was this quintet, each the product of parallel genesis, each proof after a fashion of a Jungian collective unconscious, perhaps, certainly that things long-simmering inevitably boil over. There’s an idea in my head, put there by Ethan Mordden’s Medium Cool, that everything that happened in the arts in the United States throughout the Fifties points to what was about to happen in our culture in the Sixties. Mordden is the source of my favourite teaching point when it comes to the two eras: that in the Fifties, if you didn’t listen to Mother, society was doomed; and in 1960, if you listened to Mother, you were Psycho.

FFC’s Best of ’13

January 1, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Top102013

by Walter Chaw Searching for themes in 2013, you come upon the obvious ones first: the frustrations of the forty-five percenters; the growing income gap; and the death of the middle class, encapsulated in brat-taculars like The Bling Ring and Spring Breakers and prestige pics like Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, David O. Russell’s American Hustle, and, um, Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. You see this preoccupation with the economy in Nebraska‘s quest for a million-dollar Clearinghouse payday, and in Frances Halladay’s desire for a place to sleep and a career that can subsidize it (see also: To the Wonder and Byzantium). It’s there in the identity theft of Identity Theft and the motivations of the prefab family from We’re the Millers, paid off with picket fences in an ending with echoes of My Blue Heaven and Goodfellas. Consider All is Lost, an allegory for pensioners who’ve lost everything to the wolves of Wall Street, adrift on a limitless span, taking on water but plucky, damnit. Too plucky, in the case of Redford’s Everyman hero–who, frankly, would’ve better served his allegory had he drowned with salvation in sight.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

December 24, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Theatrical

Wolfofwallstreet

***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Jean Dujardin
screenplay by Terence Winter, based on the book by Jordan Belfort
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Angelo Muredda “For us, to live any other way was nuts,” Ray Liotta’s schnook turned gangster Henry Hill explains early on in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. With that, spoken over a montage of permed Italian men in tailored suits gorging themselves at an upscale restaurant, Hill at once launched a wave of lesser, faux-conflicted pictures about the swanky perks and ethical compromises of organized crime, and raised the fundamental moral question of Scorsese’s latest, The Wolf of Wall Street. An unashamedly indulgent, ribald, and formally troubled biopic of Jordan Belfort, this unofficial Goodfellas follow-up likewise revolves around the kind of work that makes living like a pig in shit possible. His kinship to Hill aside, Belfort has had an unusually clear-sailing trajectory to garner the interest of a filmmaker who tends to be drawn to Catholic tales of excess followed by redemptive suffering. Belfort is still a born stockbroker and swindler, despite his working-class origins and federal inquiries and stints in rehab; the fact that he debuted on Wall Street the day of the crash and remains in demand as a guru well after the financial crisis of 2008 seems to give Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter pause, as well the astonishing survival rate of cockroaches should. What better way to make a film about such a man, Scorsese and Winter appear to have concluded, than to structure his story as a Roman orgy?

Room 237 (2013) – Blu-ray Disc (UPDATED)

December 20, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Documentary, Esoterica, Stephen King

Room2371

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
directed by Rodney Ascher

“A story of the supernatural cannot be taken apart and analyzed too closely. The ultimate test of its rationale is whether it is good enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you submit it to a completely logical and detailed analysis it will eventually appear absurd.”
–Stanley Kubrick, interviewed by Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Part 4

by Bryant Frazer Did director Stanley Kubrick encode The Shining with an admission that he helped create phony footage of the Apollo moon-landing in 1969? Well, of course not. That’s nuts. It’s a cockamamie argument. And it’s one of several cockamamie arguments advanced by viewers given a platform for their unconventional theories in Room 237, an odd duck of a documentary about the conclusions reached by five different Kubrick fans upon very close analysis of The Shining.

American Hustle (2013)

December 19, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

Americanhustle

**/****
starring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence
screenplay by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda “The world is extremely grey,” a con artist intones in American Hustle, which, for all its ineffectual stabs at ambivalence, is a curiously prescriptive heist movie, the kind that constantly updates its ledger about who deserves what in the end, in case someone should go unrewarded. It’s hard to say when David O. Russell–a formerly prickly sort so effectively housebroken in recent years that he’s now on the fast track to Academy Award nominations four through five–became so square as to depend on this sort of moral calculus for his dramatic fulfillment: Its equally big-picture pronouncements aside, I ♥ Huckabees seems an odd way station between the redemptive U2-scored montage that closes Three Kings and the brotherly hug of The Fighter, as well as a far more pugilistic film than the one about boxing. Whatever the genesis of his newfound softness (which Russell has insisted is the mark of his maturity as an artist), it’s never been as out of synch with either his manic sensibility or his aesthetic of distended, freewheeling set-pieces and outsized actorly emoting as it is here.

Her (2013)

December 18, 2013Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Her

****/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson
written and directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw Two moments early on in Spike Jonze’s Her. The first when our hero, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), initiates his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and is asked to characterize his relationship with his mother; the second when, in flashback, Theodore and his ex, Catherine (Rooney Mara), pretend to choke each other. They’re waypoints Jonze establishes for his piece: in one direction, there’s Blade Runner and its questions of proximate humanity; in the other, there’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and its mad love. Jonze establishes, too, that this will be a work of science-fiction owing its parentage to the best sources, that its premise will be fantastic but grounded in characters and their place in the world. Of all the compliments I can think to pay this film, the best is that Her is at least the equal of its waypoints. More, when its solution recalls the metaphysical coda to the great The Incredible Shrinking Man, it’s the equal of that as well.

The Lone Ranger (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 15, 2013Posted in2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Superhero, Western

Loneranger1

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw What Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger has going for it, in addition to a genuinely ugly streak of nihilism and a surprisingly high body count, is that it doesn’t seek to “darken” its titular boy scout hero so much as offer that his brand of do-gooderism seems naïve and ineffectual in the modern conversation. It’s the same tactic taken by Arthur Penn’s own picaresque western Little Big Man, the film it most resembles right down to the framing story: an aged narrator relating his sometimes fanciful tale to a modern chronicler, used to amusing effect when the plot gets out of hand, Princess Bride-style. It’s like a lot of movies, I guess (including two Simon Wincer westerns, Quigley Down Under and Lightning Jack), which doesn’t mean it’s derivative so much as it means that it plays like any number of satires of the kind of innocence that made the Lone Ranger character a favourite of impressionable young Americans for generations. It’s more the anachronism of The Brady Bunch Movie than the update of Man of Steel, in other words–and the better for it, even if its ultimate message appears to be that the crimson tide has overtaken us, once and for all, and there’s no real room left in the world for the idealism represented by a hero with a list of creeds, the first of which is that to have friends one must first be a friend.

The Last Days on Mars (2013)

December 12, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Lastdaysonmars

*½/****
starring Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai, Olivia Williams
screenplay by Clive Dawson, based on the short story “The Animators” by Sydney J. Bounds
directed by Ruairi Robinson

by Walter Chaw Sort of expecting an impressionistic adaptation of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” cycle, imagine my surprise to discover that Ruairi Robinson’s The Last Days on Mars is a derivative, flaccid little space-set horror flick that proves the maxim that movies with “Mars” in the title tend to suck. It boasts an exceptional cast, anchored by the ever-steady Liev Schreiber, who receives strong assists from Olivia Williams, Romola Garai, and Elias fucking Koteas. And it features a script by Clive Dawson, based on a Sydney Bounds short story, that is so familiar to genre enthusiasts by now that if you can’t predict who lives, who dies first, even what the last shot will be, well, you just aren’t paying attention. See, The Last Days on Mars is about the last hours for this scientific expedition looking for proof of life. On the verge of giving up, they find proof of life. But the life is evil and it turns them into space zombies. No, seriously.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

December 12, 2013Posted in2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Fantasy, Theatrical

Hobbit2

*½/****
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Angelo Muredda And so arrives Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (hereafter Hobbit 2), landing at its appointed hour a year after its predecessor’s mixed debut like a job application received after the position has already been quietly filled. While middle entries in trilogies are always awkward stepchildren, Hobbit 2 is a very special problem case: It consists of roughly the midsection of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fleet fantasy book for children, cracked open and fattened with multi-coloured Post-it notes until the spine can bear no more. Here at last, then, we have the week-old meat of the only Hobbit adaptation Jackson could deliver, having spent a decade steering comically overextended editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a 3-hour version of King Kong, and a wrongheaded interpretation of The Lovely Bones as a Nintendo-ready CG light show.