Skip to main content
Tag

hugo weaving

Review: The Hobbit- An Unexpected Journey and Love Is All You Need

By Cinema and Reviews

It may be play­ing in cinemas but I’m not entirely con­vinced that The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – and, by exten­sion, the forth­com­ing Desolation of Smaug and There and Back Again – is actu­ally cinema. At least not cinema the way that this par­tic­u­lar old geez­er remem­bers it. First, let us put aside the tech­no­lo­gic­al innov­a­tion for a few para­graphs and focus on the story. These films have been been cre­ated to deliv­er an exper­i­ence to exist­ing fans of the Lord of the Rings films and is argu­ably even more tailored to their needs than, say, the Twilight fran­chise is to their fans. It cer­tainly makes as few con­ces­sions to the neutral.

Fans from Bratislava to Beirut want to spend as much time as pos­sible in Middle Earth and writer-director Peter Jackson deliv­ers – to the extent that sev­er­al famil­i­ar char­ac­ters make inel­eg­ant cameo appear­ances and the audi­ence gets to spend con­sid­er­able time accli­mat­ising. It really doesn’t mat­ter that I think the whole thing faffs around for far too long and already feels hyper-extended. Criticising The Hobbit for length is fall­ing in to the trap of review­ing the film you wish you were watch­ing instead of the one in front of you.

Read More

Review- Captain America: The First Avenger, Oranges and Sunshine & Precious Life

By Cinema and Reviews

Captain America posterOf all the remakes, sequels, fran­chises and com­ic book adapt­a­tions we are being offered this winter Captain America: The First Avenger is the one least likely to send a shiver of excite­ment down a Kiwi filmgoer’s spine. And yet, from rel­at­ively mod­est begin­nings a half decent adven­ture film grows – it isn’t going to change the way you think and feel about any­thing but Captain America at least won’t make you want to run scream­ing for the exits in embar­rass­ment and shame.

Steve Rogers (Chris Evans from Fantastic Four) is a weedy, sickly kid from Brooklyn – digit­ally de-hanced if that’s the oppos­ite of enhanced – who des­per­ately wants to fight the Nazis for Uncle Sam. After sev­er­al humi­li­at­ing rejec­tions kindly sci­ent­ist Stanley Tucci enlists him in an exper­i­ment­al super-soldier pro­gramme, fills him full of what looks like blue Powerade and turns him into a muscle-bound, fast-healing, über-grunt.

Read More