Very Boys Such Bromance Wow So Unlikely Alliances Much Cheekbone Part 2: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

2013: Year of the Colon.

So basically I'm linking together Thor and The Hobbit and Sherlock (forthcoming in Part 3) because they are all such utter sausage-fests about the manly bonds between manly men and why would you think we're gay we're not gay and maybe we should get a new joke for this show, Stephen Moffat.  It's particularly noticeable to me right now because I've been watching Battlestar Galactica again and I have to say, actual realistic representation of women as fifty percent of the population never felt so good. I watched a scene today where three politicians discussed the impact that a particular issue would have on an upcoming election and they were all women and nobody commented on it. I nearly wept.  Anyway, I really enjoyed The Hobbit but Middle Earth sure has been struck by some tragic ovary-targeting wasting disease.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: Review: I Knew Aidan Turner Was In It For A Reason

So on the whole, it was a ton of fun.  It has the same flaws as the first film, only bigger, and the same strengths as the first film, only bigger.  It's bigger.  Is what I'm saying.  It also has that Middle-of-a-Trilogy-itis thing where the director gets excited by not really having introduce anything or tie anything up so it's all action, bitches, because it's 2013 (well, it was) and that's what we like, amIright? This is a good thing or a bad thing depending on your tastes - some of the action sequences are epic and beautiful and brilliant and so much wow (the dwarves going all Home Alone on Smaug and DON'T FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT THE SPEED THAT GOLD MELTS AT BECAUSE THEY'RE FIGHTING A DRAGON AND THIS IS YOUR BEEF) and some were sort of 'ok so this is still happening' (endless chases through Laketown, endless). 

Like the first film, it's a big, heavy juggernaut and it takes a while to get going and it stutters and chokes a little bit to begin with but then heave-ho, everyone puts their shoulders to the wheel and suddenly its weight is helping it gather momentum and oh wait, I am really enjoying this film, whoosh dragons molten tacky gold dwarf statues fabulous elves OH IT'S OVER.  Which was also exactly like the first film.  But also like the first film, it revels in the delight of this being a familiar universe, deftly balancing new elements with old favourites. Wisely, it doesn't dwell too much on episodes like Beorn's house because it knows that we know - and it knows that we know that it knows - that Mirkwood is just around the corner and that can mean only one thing.

Hey baby.  It's been a while.

Legolas: still sexy.  Still confused as fuck.  What's going on? Who are we fighting now? Legolas doesn't care.  He's going to stand on the heads of two dwarves in barrels and shoot arrows from his seemingly infinite quiver because he literally has no other clue about what he should be doing right now and the soundtrack in his head is going "dun dun dun LEGOLAS dundunnnn".

Stumbling in the direction of something more serious, the Mirkwood elves are a perfect example of what the film does right: "less wise and more dangerous" is how they're described, and it takes everything we love about elves (shiny) and invests it with personality and flaws and other tasty and sumptuous things.  I mean, man, these elves are such bitches.  We always suspected it and we were right.  They are the Regina Georges of Middle Earth.  Take Thranduil, for example.  All he wants to do is just comb his hair because what if it gets a kink in it, and then it won't go with his glittery mini-antlers and god Legolas, daddy is busy right now with his straighteners and for the last time Tauriel, the order of precedence goes Picking Up Robes from Dry Cleaner, Booking Facial, Giant Spider Attack in that order.  If you couldn't tell, Thranduil is my new favourite character.

Sorry, we were being serious.  For me the elves worked particularly well because book-universe-wise, there is nothing to say this wasn't going on, it's a logical extension of the Mirkwood plot, and film-universe-wise, we didn't really get to see communities of other races in Lord of the Rings, just societies of humans and the tagalong duds the other races sent along ("yes Legolas, it is a very special and important mission and you should on no account try to call or write and really, stay away as long as you need to").  If the mission statement behind fleshing one small book into three films is to deliver a richer and more complex universe as a reward for investing our time in it, then showing us not only a community of elves but a community of elves that is specifically different from other elves and have their own customs and hang-ups is a very good use of time and resources.  And now I have to stop typing "community of elves" as I can no longer keep a straight face.

But as well as the excitement of meeting new characters and catching up with old ones, what really made the film worth it for me was the plethora of little moments that just flicked out the paintbrush and added a little more dimension to the cast of fantasy archetypes.  Nearly every character gets one, which is just a nice reassurance that Peter Jackson knows what he's doing as a storyteller and - moreover - has probably spent more time immersed in the Tolkien universe than anyone else ever and really actually deserves to take The Hobbit and spin it into three films of (let's face it) ultimate nerdy self-indulgence.  My favourite of these little moments has to be Legolas literally being so hugged so hard by one of the Big End of Level Boss Orcs that he nosebleeds (well, we've all had that urge).  It's great because, again, it fits with the expanded view of these new flawed, impulsive, human-like elves and along with Thranduil's magicked-away dragon-flamed face (he must get through a lot of concealer) it suggests that actually elven beauty is a very important external symbol of immortality and imperviousness to the passage of time and how elves are a race apart, standing outside the natural ebb and flow of things, but basically also because my viewing companion and I showed our age and simultaneously went "You made me bleed my own blood!"*  And after a cursory google, I found that half the internet thought the same thing, so, Orlando Bloom: bringing people together through looking confused and outraged since 2001.

Speaking of new characters, I don't think anyone was a disappointment. I'm also just not sure how absolutely necessary Stephen Fry as the Master of Clumsy Social Commentary on Good Governance was but hey, it was still all super-delightful in its way.  Bard the Bowman** and his Adorable Children were all you could ask for in the way of good, decent, not terribly interesting salt of the earth folk, even if I did spend much of their scenes going, "Why is Bard the Bowman also sometimes Orlando Bloom but maybe also Welsh?"  He's not though, it's Luke Evans, and he is definitely Welsh.  Maybe.  I mean, his kids were.  But why they emigrated from Wales to Middle Earth, I couldn't tell you.  As a side note, a friend of mine described him as "bang tidy", a phrase which - regardless of whether or not I agree with its application in this particular instance - surely deserves more exposure.  Bang tidy. Hee.

And, of course, everyone is getting their robes in a twist over the inclusion of a character who - gasp -isn't even in the book (Deviations from the source material! Imagine!) and who is - double gasp - a lady.  Well let's all just unclench because Tauriel was basically pretty great and a very welcome addition to the series.  The problem, of course, starts when female characters have to represent their entire gender because they are the only female character in the whole thing and in this respect it would be very easy to bitch about the only significant female character in the film being shoved into a love triangle of sorts*** but you know what? Eh.  Besides, it must require a lot of fortitude being an elf lady in love with a dwarf dude, it is basically like Romeo and Juliet with an added height difference.  I mean, the romance plot was obviously horribly executed, it must be said, and happened in about five minutes flat and everyone was bandying the word 'love' around after a single conversation about the relative descriptors for starlight (dwarf chat up lines, ring a ding ding) but Tauriel as a character, on her own, was boss.  I'm not hugely bummed about the film introducing this warrior-lady and then shoving her into a romance plot as she also had agency and strengths and other stuff going on, whereas ironically it was at this point I went "oh so that's why they cast Aidan Turner" because Kili really was basically there to be dwarf totty.  I was a bit sad that his bromance with Fili wasn't so in evidence but this was also the time at which the film chose to take a firm stance on that particular relationship and went with "definitely brothers, however you may interpret Fili choosing to stay behind with his dying bro instead of going on the adventure of a lifetime to the mountain he has literally been waiting to see for his entire life".  Oh shit, I've just remembered how The Hobbit ends. Oh, fuck you, Peter Jackson.

Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage continued to rom-com it as Bilbo and Thorin, with Smaug as the conniving ex ("oh you think he's into you but you just try and get him to commit, there is no way he's coming all the way down here to save you").  Less smouldering for Thorin this time and more "slow descent into madness" but that sounds like a recipe for brooding to me, so I'm still happy.  Also it must be said that while his plan to get rid of Smaug was flawlessly executed, it was also dumb as shit. Oh Thorin, he has fire literally inside him, all you did was make him more bling.  Also was there just a giant gold dwarf statue hanging around and they melted it? Or - even weirder - a mould for giant gold dwarf statues because they were in such hot demand back in the day? Yeah, that was strange. 

La la la, a quick rundown of the rest because I think you can tell by now that I liked the film and just want to make affectionate sarky comments about it.  Benedict Cumberdragon was on good form, particularly the "I like you" line, a thought which I finished as "In another life, I feel like maybe we could have lived in a flat together and solved crimes."**** The problem is that while his voice is awesome and dragon-y and villainous, he's also - in my mind - clearly actually the nicest guy in the world which kind of confused me about Smaug so I came out of the film thinking of him as that friend who you all know is kind of an arsehole but then, like, he's got a big house and loads of cool shit and he's a bit lonely, and really his douchebaggery just mostly makes you laugh and he only sometimes tries to incinerate you. I actually could have watched Smaug and Bilbo chinwag all day and it was half the movie as it was.  Loved Smaug's design too, that slightly Keira Knightley-esque amount of jaw really putting the smug in Smaug (yeah, SORRY NOT SORRY).

What else? Gandalf, yes, cool, great.  He should be nicer to Radagast, though, since something tragic is clearly going to occur to explain his absence in LOTR.  Also, actual magic! I feel like up to this point wizard-magic in the LOTR universe has been more along the lines of New Age positive thinking and supreme good luck.  I mean, Voldemort would be all up in Gandalf's grill and Gandalf would be all "it is small acts and small people who stand against the dark" and Voldemort would like "Bitch be trippin', I'mma AK that shit."  I'm sorry, I've also been watching a lot of Orange is the New Black lately.

So yeah.  In summary, I couldn't take any of it seriously, not for a moment - but in the best possible way.  It's all so dear and familiar, it basically feels like a constant stream of in-jokes, heightened to increasingly ridiculous levels, and even when it's slow or clumsy, I just - oh, Lord of the Rings universe, I can't stay mad at you.  I just can't.  I'm not sure I'll pay to see it again but when it crops up on Netflix in six months time, I will most definitely grab a bottle of cornershop plonk and be glad to make its reacquaintance.

*If that's the wording you thought in, you're referencing The Simpsons, congratulations.  If, on the other hand, you thought "Nobody makes me bleed my own blood!", you are referencing Dodgeball and might be still in your teens, and also Blades of Glory is the far superior work of that particular cinematic movement. 

**Incidentally, Bard the Bowman is the character that I assumed Richard Armitage had been cast as when I first heard he was going to be in it.  I hadn't read the book for a good fifteen years and filtering amongst my hazy watercolour recollections of it, my brain clearly felt that 'heroic lost prince man who slays dragon' was a better fit for him than 'slightly pompous and kind of useless dwarf king'.

***Personally, I feel like the inclusion of an elf v dwarf love triangle is just Peter Jackson sticking two fingers up at Twilight, but that could just be wishful thinking.
****To be discussed in rabid, devoted detail in Part 3 - coming soon! Actually soon, not 'half a year' soon.

The Hobbit: Dwarves are Heroic and In No Way Intrinsically Hilarious Because of Their Height (spoilers)

Spoilers! Heavy, heavy spoilers for The Hobbit.  But it has been around for 60 years so it's your own fault, really.

I swear to god, I have three draft posts sitting in my Posts folder, none of which were good enough to publish, even by my admittedly lax standards.  Please don't hurt me for my accidental five month hiatus.  I'm very sorry and it won't happen again (maybe). (To cut a long story short, life happened in the form of me starting an MFA and even when your MFA is in professionally playing Let's Pretend - or as it is officially known, Theatre Directing - it is still an MFA and demands much more of your time than watching X-Men cartoons and smoking out of your bedroom window.  Who knew?)

But I'm here! I am back this New Year because there has just been so much pop culture of late and I cannot possibly let it go by without whipping up a few rounds of my signature cocktail of capital letters and inappropriate drooling.  Where to begin? There's last autumn's telly-land, which saw The Hour pick up steam after a shaky start dicking about with an organised crime storyline that was somehow less believable than having a Soviet spy in the midst of a fairly inoffensive BBC news programme (um, spoilers?); however, after hanging in there only to see what the offspring of Anna Chancellor and Peter Capaldi might be like and how soon it would be taking over the world, the last two episodes were absolute barn-stormers.  Merlin ended for good with both a bang and a whimper and this truly is a tragedy for those who stuck with it from the beginning.  Although I don't think Arthur took his top off once last season, so maybe it is time to move on.  There's a whole new Twilight film to mock, coming hand in hand with the blessed knowledge that there are to be no more, hallelulah praise the Mormon Jesus that spawned this dust-bunny of menopausal fantasies and unfulfilled life prospects in the first place.  Christmas Doctor Who was tentatively promising for the coming season, starring not only a new companion but Lesbian Silurian and Lesbian Cockney, who are much more likely candidates for a spinoff than John Barrowman ever was.

But before any of that, there is a film that must be talked about.  A film that I have looked forward to, not with the pants-wetting fist-biting glee of The Avengers, but with something far more likely to warm the cockles of my Middle-Earth-loving heart.  And boy, were my cockles warmed.  I'm talking, of course, about The Hobbit.

Un petit confession, as the French say.  I love Lord of the Rings.  That's not the confession.  The confession is that I love the films.  Burdened with an English student's guilt over enjoying an adaptation before reading the source material, I turned to the books at the tender age of thirteen and commenced a three-month project of staring in horror at the bricks of text in front of me listing rhyming dwarf-dad name after rhyming dwarf-dad name.  Why was there another song in Elvish? Was I supposed to read it? Sing it? Perform an interpretative dance to it? Had it really been going on forty pages and these people were still talking about events that not only had we never encountered, but never would and would have no bearing on the plot? Even I have a saturation point when it comes to fantasy.  I OD'ed hard on A Song of Ice and Fire, making a headlong dash through the three-and-a-half-thousand odd pages of the first four books only to have some kind of breakdown around the beginning of the fifth and hurl it across the room crying, "I simply can't bear learning any more awkwardly partnered Latinate and Anglo-Saxon names!  Bear me to the fainting couch, I believe I have the vapours! AND WHO THE FUCK IS ARTHUR DAYNE?" At some point, I will pick up the fifth one again.  When the screams of beloved murdered characters have stopped echoing in the wind.

As always, I digress.  I was saddened that I did not love reading Tolkien because I had very fond memories of The Hobbit being read to me as a child.  The Hobbit is a very simple children's story, certainly not one that seems a natural fit for a series of of epic films.  But Peter Jackson cottoned on to something very clever with the LOTR films, which is that Tolkien is simply not a natural storyteller.  The universe he creates is rich in character and landscape, the morality of the books cleaves to something undeniably decent and stirring.  But by Frodo's quivery bottom lip, he cannot string a story together in a compelling way.  Peter Jackson, however, can.  Peter Jackson can sustain a story as complicated and rich as this one over nine hours and not lose anything from it that was worth keeping.  (Except the Houses of Healing in Return of the King.  That could have been kept in favour of a bit of Liv Tyler looking wry, surely.)  So if Peter Jackson turns to me and says, "Y'know, there's a lot of stuff I wanted to put in those films but couldn't", I am actually more than happy to hand him my copy of The Hobbit and say, "Okay, Pete.  Go to town on this."

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is still Tolkien's Hobbit.  It is not, as some have suggested, Lord of the Rings 4.  Which would be silly anyway, as The Hobbit is set 60 years before. Tch.  At its centre is the comfort of home, the bigness of the world, the notion that it is small acts and small people that stand against the dark.  The Hobbit is a (relatively) small story set in an epic fantasy universe and that is exactly what Jackson delivers.  When Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, he could not have known what it was the beginning of, what Middle Earth would grow to be.  Most of us reading The Hobbit for the first time did not know either - it is rare to find someone who read Lord of The Rings before its predecessor.  But we do know Lord of the Rings now.  Either we have read it or seen it or simply become unavoidably aware of it through pop cultural osmosis.  It would almost be impossible, I think, to create a version of the Hobbit in which we weren't watching it looking for the links with the story and universe we already know, and in which I wasn't asking the question, "Does Benedict Cumberbatch look sexy as a dragon?"*  Jackson has embraced this and turned The Hobbit into a kind of three hour bubble-bath for Lord of the Rings fans with a butler on hand to drop a chocolate into your mouth every now and then.  It is audacious, visually stunning, funny and, above all, surprisingly charming.  Sorry, just gagged on my own gushing there.  Let's fix that.

It's not perfect by a long chalk.  I've seen it twice and it doesn't stand up to second viewing in the way that the LOTR films yield endless delight, especially if you are a bit drunk and making once of your friends drink every time Gollum switches personalities.  After the initial thrill of being introduced to a whole new raft of characters to shout "take your shirt off" at during inappropriate moments, the second viewing had me checking my watch during the long (long, long) first hour and a half.  Then it starts getting really good (like, really good) and it's all slightly obscene looking Goblin Kings and Andy Serkis and fire and eagles and eagles on fire (except the last one) and then it ends.  Gah.  So the second one better be really good is all I'm saying because I remember the plot of The Hobbit as being there's some short dudes who go and get a slightly shorter dude and there's a dragon and some trolls and some goblins and a ring and then the dragon dies and everyone drinks lemonade. Most of those plot points have already been covered in great detail.  Peter Jackson better have something fucking spectacular up his sleeve (actually we already know he does, it's called LEGOLAS).  So if you weren't a fan before then you definitely won't be converted by this but if you were, then see it once in the cinema and then wait for the DVD so you can identify hilarious moments of homoeroticism with your friends (they really need some more women in this universe).  Also, see it in 2D and normal frame rate.  It seems much more like a film and less like a game of 'That was CGI, that was pyrotechnic, that was CGI'.

But.  Enough beating about the bush.  No, that wasn't a euphemism.  Because I know what you really want, you filthy little blog-readers you.  I know what you have been waiting for all these months, and frankly, it disgusts me.  If you think I am going to make a fool of myself disclosing the most intimate struggles of my shattered psyche in the consideration of whether it is a crime against all that is right and good to look at Richard Armitage dressed up as a dwarf and wonder whether a new and disturbing fetish has been awoken in me, well you can look elsewhere for that kind of smut because you won't find it here.  Nor will you find musings on whether Peter Jackson watched North and South before filming started and was so hopelessly smitten with Mr Armitage that he decided to put in a frankly alarming quantity of shots in which Thorin Hardwood or whatever his name is stands atop a rocky outcrop brooding so furiously on his lack of kingliness that Viggo Mortensen is considering suing.  Nor will I comment on how the background music seemed to so taken with him that the Latinate (Elvish?) chanting during that bit at the end where stands up on the tree to take down the Orc-Video-Game-End-of-Level-Boss might as well have been shrieking, "RICHARD ARMITAGE! STANDS ON TREES! RUNS THROUGH FIRE! HE IS MANLY WITH MAN PAIN IN HIS MAN EYES!"  I'm sure at some point they were considering having him saving some baby orphans from the flames on his way to the fight but it was cut for time (it was the only thing cut for time).

Nor will you be hearing anything from me about the startling coincidence that sees the three most eligible dwarves - Thorin, Suspiciously Attractive Dwarf (Kili, played by Being Human's Aidan Turner) and his brother/boyfriend** Less Attractive but Still Doable Dwarf (Fili, played by Dean O'Gorman) - sporting a noticeably smaller quantity of prothetic nose and beard accessory than the rest.  James Nesbitt as Bofur, whilst hiding his everyman charm beneath a hat that I thought was going to take flight and a moustache that looked sad independently of Nebitt's own facial expression, could still legitimately have replaced all of his lines with "I'm James Nesbitt.  And now you want to have a pint with me."  Elijah Woods puts in a brief appearance as Frodo and I had to stop myself from standing up and congratulating Ian Holmes on having such a fine-looking nephew and asking if the cheekbones ran on the other side of the family and, if so, were there cousins? (I, by the way, was convinced that Elijah Woods has a painting in an attic somewhere looking like shit because as far as I could tell, he hasn't aged a day, but everyone disagreed with me on this point and said he looked haunted by the loss of times past.)  All this and the elves won't even make a proper appearance until Part 2.  (Although special points for Flight of the Conchord's Brett Mckenzie reprising his internet-stealing silent cameo from Fellowship of the Ring complete with a new elvish name that means 'singer' and even more special points for Lee Pace who you probably know as the guy who made pies and resurrected the dead in Pushing Daisies as LEGOLAS' DAD ON A FUCKING ELK LOOKING FABULOUS.)

So put that in your elongated Gandalf pipe and choke on it, good reader.  The various aesthetic qualities of the cast will emphatically not be reflected on in any way, not even how good Saint Cate Blanchett is at turning slowly in a shimmery dress (twice).  This is a new, more mature Jane Shakespeare and you can take your filthy gutter-dwelling minds elsewhere for that kind of thing.  Also Martin Freeman just deserves, like, ALL THE HUGS and those pointy little hobbit ears are really working for me.  He is everything you could want and more (less? There's a height joke in there somewhere) as Bilbo, and I very much admired his choice to play his scenes with Thorin as a particularly egregious rom-com. ("I'm just a hobbit.  Standing in front of a dwarf.  Asking him to love him.")

All in all, I really liked it the first time and bit less the second time but, as you can tell, I'm loving the prospect of cracking out the wine and settling down with the DVD to holler in a manner most women reserve for the stripper on their hen night.  Bring on Part 2.  In Pete We Trust.

*In the event, we will have to wait until the next film to find out, and yes, I am aware that Smaug will be CGI and not Cumberbatch in a dragon suit but it should be.
**Seriously, what's the deal here?  I'm pretty sure they're related in the book but they seemed to spend an awful lot of time going off to bond and then coming back looking flustered and out of breath.  Why were they the only two dwarfs up in the middle of the night tending the campfire?  Why were they sharing an eagle when there were clearly enough for everyone to have their own?  If they weren't looking out for the horses, then what were they doing? It's a conspiracy.