Boyhood (2014)

I watched Boyhood a couple of weeks ago with my girlfriend. It came up in conversation yesterday. She asked me if we were drunk when we watched it, because she remembers nothing about it. I reassured her that we were stone-cold sober, but I then realised that I barely remember anything about it either. Seriously, what even happened in that film? Was there an actual plot other than "young kid grows into older kid"? 

"But you're missing the point of the film! It's realism. It's depicting real life, maaaaaan." 

I (as well as the majority of the human race) watch films for two main reasons:

1. To get a couple of hours of escapism. I want to experience something extraordinary that I wouldn't normally, in my everyday life. 
2. To see interesting, complex characters reacting in their own interesting way to the real world. 

I do not, however, watch films to see normal, boring people living their normal, boring lives. I didn't care about any of the characters. None of them really had any depth beyond their familial roles. Not a single interesting event happened to warrant their dull personalities. If I wanted to experience the mundanity of real life, I wouldn't waste a tenner on a ticket in order to do so. 

"Boy" from Boyhood (I don't even remember his name) progressing from small child to edgy teen.

"But did you know that Boyhood was shot over twelve years?!"

I do appreciate that, but it's not really enough to compensate for the bad acting and seemingly empty script. Additionally, although the film was technically shot over twelve years, it was actually only three or four days of filming each year. It wasn't really enough time for the actors to gel, and it came across in their performances. For the most part, it didn't feel like a family, broken or otherwise. It felt like a few strangers reading lines of pseudo-intellectual dialogue at each other.

The impression I got from watching Boyhood was that the director gathered everyone up once a year and said, "How about we do a scene where you talk to your teacher for some inspirational words or something? That'll probably be enough content for this year," or, "What about filming you bowling again? Yes, I know we've already done that, but I'm really struggling to come up with new ideas here. Plus, the owner of the bowling alley said he'd give me free hot dogs for life if I film there again."

The whole "broken family" thing is something that's been done hundreds of times before, in films where things actually happen. Not only that, but it just seemed so amateurishly done in this film. The over-acted/under-acted delivery of the cheesy writing throughout the film just left me cringing.

The example that immediately springs to mind is the scene where the drunk stepdad stomps his way to the dinner table for a little tantrum. "ANYBODY ELSE HAVE A PROBLEM WITH ME DRINKING AT MY TABLE?!" he yelled "intimidatingly", shortly before angrily throwing his glass across the room. In my case, this is one of the few scenes that has managed to remain in my memory, just because of how awful the acting was, and how forced drama felt. It was like I was watching a terrible, low-budget soap-opera.

It was an interesting experiment in terms of filmmaking, and it had so much potential, but it's completely wasted here, simply because this movie is painfully uneventful. There's no overall story arc whatsoever. The entire film is nothing but a sequence of scenes in which nothing of value occurs. If it wasn't for the visible ageing of the characters, most of the scenes could be interchanged without make the slightest bit of difference to the "plot". 

Overall, I rate Boyhood 3/10.

I was going to give it a generous 4/10, simply for the long-term persistence of the filmmakers, but I subtracted an extra point for the kid's annoying teen facial hair. Here's a tip to any young guys reading this: if you can't grow a beard, don't grow a beard. Patchy wisps of adolescent whiskers look lame. Always have. Always will.

I'm genuinely astounded by the number of awards and nominations that this film received. I get that it's an interesting idea to see all the actors grow for twelve years before your eyes, but in my opinion, it's still just a gimmick, and not a good enough one to save this event-less film. I firmly believe that if they'd gone down the conventional route of using different actors to portray the characters at different ages, nobody would care about this film. Subtracting the gimmick, this film has very little else going for it.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

I finally got around to watching the last Hobbit film this week. I went in with pretty low expectations, praying it would at least be better than the cinematic piece of excrement that was presented to us one year earlier. Nope. It was a disastrous finale to a declining franchise. I love The Lord of the Rings, so to me, watching the Hobbit films felt like being bitch slapped by a cave troll. 

I've been sitting, seething, ever since I skulked out of the cinema. There were so much wrong with these prequels that the easiest way for me to deal with them is by listing every single thing I hated about Peter Jackson's latest bowel movement. I need to therapeutically spill them out of my head and onto this page as a purging of my mind. So, in no particular order, here we go:

• WHY IS EVERYTHING CGI?! It's impossible to feel any sense of danger in this trilogy when all you're seeing is computer images smashing each other for nine hours. It's extremely noticeable for the entirety of the three films and ruins any immersion. A good example is in this last film, when we see the elf army standing at the foot of the Lonely Mountain. Even the elves standing right in the foreground were CGI. You couldn't hire a couple of extras for that scene, just to stand there?  CGI should be used to enhance practical effects, not to replace them entirely. I mean, the CGI was noticeable now, but in ten years' time, when CGI has moved on significantly, this film will have nothing going for it. It's a shallow, empty, computer generated snooze-fest. 

(L) Lurtz from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. (R) Azog the Defiler from The Hobbit trilogy.
Which is more intimidating? Correct answer: Lurtz, because he's an actual massive dude who could crack some skulls. Just looking at him is scary because I know he would genuinely tear me apart. There's a real sense of danger with Lurtz. Azog the Cartoon doesn't really pose a threat to me, because I can just delete him off the animator's hard drive and then he's gone. It's hard to feel intimidated by a drawing. There will come a day where a completely computer-generated character will be as photo-realistic as the real actor it is battling, but it is not this day.

• 99% of the orcs can be killed by chucking a rock at them, or giving them a little headbutt, apart from Bolg and Azog who are apparently terminators in orc form, and require half a movie to kill. I mean, we all know they're going to die in the end anyway, so why drag it out so much? It got incredibly boring and tiresome.
• I hate how the goblins all look like Dobby from Harry Potter has let himself go. They look ridiculous.
• The cave trolls in The Lord of the Rings had a very specific look. Why do all the trolls in this film look like 60 year old alcoholic Russian men?

(L) Troll from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. (R) Troll from The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.
See what I mean?!

• Whilst we're on the topic of trolls, why are there suddenly GIANT trolls which are 5 times the size of regular trolls? Are these the grown up trolls? Are the trolls from The Lord of the Rings all infants? Did Legolas slaughter a baby in the mines of Moria? Should we start calling him "Legolas the baby-slayer"? These are the questions that need answering.
• Why the hell was the death of Smaug saved for the beginning of this film, rather than being at the end of the previous film where it rightfully belonged? It took less than ten minutes. Because of this insane decision, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is the only Tolkien film, out of all six, which has no resolution. Seriously, cut out the boring, over the top, Scooby-Doo chase sequence around the halls of Erebor. It added nothing except bad CGI and only made Smaug the Terrifying seem totally incompetent and non-threatening. The death of Smaug added nothing to this movie and its removal only detracted from the previous one. Also, Smaug's monologue in Lake Town was a total cliché. "I'M EVIL AND I'M GOING TO KILL YOUR CHILD BECAUSE I'M SO SUPER EVIL!" Get lost.
• Most of the dwarves have zero personality and are essentially extras throughout the entire Hobbit trilogy. You know that emotional scene at the end where Bilbo is saying goodbye to all the dwarves? I swear there were a few who I don't think had any lines in any of the three films. In fact, there were a couple who I don't even remember seeing before.  After the first movie, where they'd only properly introduced about five of the twelve dwarves, I wasn't too worried because I assumed that since there are two more movies to go, there would be plenty of time for us to get to know the other dwarves. Nope. I don't have a clue who most of those little bearded enigmas are.

This is as far as my understanding of the dwarves' characters goes.

• Kate from Lost kept slipping back into her American accent. Ain't no American elves! I half expected her to whip out a Big Mac with lembas bread buns.
• Where did those battle goats come from? Seriously. We saw the dwarf army marching in. We saw the elf army marching in. Neither brought any armoured goats with them. Thorin and co. charge out of the mountain and leap straight onto these ridiculous war goats which were conveniently standing there, waiting for them. WHY WERE THEY THERE?
• Now that I think about it, why doesn't anyone ride actual horses in this film? Thranduil rides an elk, Thorin rides a goat, Dain rides a pig, and Radagast gets around on a sleigh pulled by rabbits. RABBITS!
• Beorn doesn't look anything like how I imagined him. He's supposed to look like a huge, muscular, black-bearded lumberjack. What we got was a lanky Scandinavian dude who looks like a werewolf in mid-transformation. Not only that, but:



Sort your eyebrows out, Beorn. You have guests.

• BEORN WAS ONLY IN THIS MOVIE FOR FIVE SECONDS! That's not even an exaggeration. He was introduced in the last film and established as a total badass who even Azog was wary of. I remember being so excited to see him do some serious damage in the finale. It could have even been a slight redeeming factor of this horrendous movie. But no, Peter Jackson elected to cut one of the most interesting characters from the Hobbit in order to leave more screen time for his own awful character: Alfrid.

• Alfrid. I've seen him described as the Jar Jar Binks of the Hobbit movies. I think that's a compliment. At least Jar Jar moved the plot along. Alfrid added absolutely nothing. He was just annoying and cringey. I get that he was supposed to show that Bard was such a good guy in comparison, but it was completely unnecessary. He definitely didn't need as much screen time as he got. I was expecting him to either get killed off at some point, or to change his ways and fight with the men of Lake Town. You know, like a character arc? Characters are supposed to develop and grow so we can connect to them and feel something for them. Not Alfrid. He just goes around, irritating everyone, then wanders off at the end with a load of gold. So unsatisfying. It pisses me off to no end when I think that Beorn was cut so that we could see Alfrid stuffing gold into his bra.
• What's up with those giant worms? What were they all about? I'm not complaining so much about stuff being added for the films, but this just raises the question, "if the orcs had access to GIANT, MOUNTAIN MUNCHING, DEATH WORMS, then why wouldn't they use them in the Lord of the Rings? Don't add random stuff just for the sake of it. 
• The eagles coming to save the day. Again. I know it happens in the book, but in this film it was so anti-climactic when they arrived. It didn't give me that feeling of relief that I got in the Return of the King. I didn't feel anything. In fact I felt nothing but boredom for this entire film.
• Legolas looks like an old man when he's supposed to be 60 years younger. It's noticeable. Maybe the one place that could have actually used more CGI is Orlando Bloom's face.
• It's impossible to take Bard's family seriously when they keep calling him "Dah". Impossible.
• Way too many ridiculous, over the top stunts. I know the Lord of the Rings had a few (Legolas taking down a Mumak), but none of them were as bad as Bard riding a wagon down a gentle decline, as it exponentially increased in momentum until it jumped over his kids and smashed into an alcoholic Russian man/troll.
• The love triangle was so boring. I don't think anybody watching this film cared in the slightest about the weird, interspecies relationship going on between Tauriel and Kili. It got more and more cringe-worthy as time went on. It resulted in possibly the most groan-inducing piece of dialogue I've ever heard. Tauriel is grieving over Kili's dead body, when she turns to Thranduil and says something like, "If this is true love, I do not want it. :'( Why does it hurt so much????", to which Thranduil replies, "Because it is real". I instantly vomited in my lap.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOORIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!

• To be honest, there was absolutely no need for the female elf character. I can understand the introduction of a female character to stop the film from being too much of a sausage-fest. However, if you bring in a female character JUST to be the love interest of one of the male characters, you've missed the point a bit. I mean, yeah, she killed a load of orcs, but ultimately her presence in the film made no difference to the plot whatsoever.
• When Kili dies, the longing look between him and Tauriel went on for far too long. Lengthening a shot doesn't give it any more emotion when I don't give a damn about the characters. You need to sort your editing out, Jackson.
• Too many forced references to the Lord of the Rings. The worst offender is right at the end, when Legolas is like, "the boyfriend of the girl I love is dead so imma bounce on outta here," and Thranduil says something like, "you should go and seek out this ranger from the north. His father was a great man and he'll be even greater one day. People call him Strider, but his real name you will have to discover for yourself". He may as well have turned to the camera and winked at the audience at this point. Why couldn't you just say his goddamn name? IT'S ARAGORN! There's also literally no reason that Thranduil would tell Legolas that he needs to go and find Aragorn, other than to shoehorn a Lord of the Rings reference in there.
• Why do the orcs only speak orcish in this trilogy? It's really distracting having to constantly read subtitles for them. They never spoke orcish in the Lord of the Rings. It's yet another small difference that greatly distances the Hobbit trilogy from the Lord of the Rings.
• For that scene where Galadriel, Saruman and Elrond come and save Gandalf from Sauron and the Ringwraiths, I could just see Peter Jackson saying, "wouldn't it be super cool if Gandalf got captured at some point so that all the most powerful good guys had to have a fight against all the most powerful bad guys for no reason whatsoever?" Nah. It was bad CGI and blatant stunt doubles jumping around. Yet another pointless reference to the Lord of the Rings.
• Apart from Bilbo, none of the other characters had any closure. For the whole trilogy, they're talking about restoring Erebor and Dale to their former glory and when they finally reclaim the mountain, the film's over. Oh. Okay then. Similarly, the whole subplot with the Arkenstone goes nowhere. We should at least have seen Thorin being buried with it. Nah. We get nothing. Well, that's what I get for investing in a storyline, right?
• Dragging Pippin back to sing the final song over the end credits. Yet again, I hear Peter Jackson saying, "Y'all remember that super emotional bit in Return of the King where Pippin sang a song? Well Imma put another one here to try and force some emotion out of this dead, empty film." So forced. So uncomfortable.
• Last but not least, barely anybody in this film seemed to care about it. They all seemed bored. It came across in their performances. It's fair enough though. I'm sure that shooting in front of a green screen for weeks on end isn't the most fun way to make a film. I empathise. I was bored too. I found myself looking forward to the end of this monstrosity of a movie. 

Overall, I rate The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 1/10.

I bumped it up from 0/10 simply because I really like Martin Freeman and Sir Ian McKellen. They did the best they could with the God-awful movie they were dumped into. Apart from that, this film doesn't really have any redeeming qualities. I didn't even find the action good enough to compensate for the lack of... anything interesting in this movie.

I feel completely let down by the entire Hobbit trilogy, and by Peter Jackson and his bloated, money-grabbing ego for "pulling a George Lucas", and ruining his own magnificent original trilogy with an abominable prequel trilogy. 

I'm going to go and watch the Lord of the Rings again to cleanse myself.