yads

LOL! What a crock of shit. How the hell was the Mandarin storyline predictable??

1. Before Midnight 2. Iron Man 3 3. Pacific Rim 4. Gravity 5 The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug 6. Star Trek Into Darkness 7. Man of Steel 8. Thor 2 9. Anchorman 2 10. Monsters University

Fucking awesome movie. I nearly choked on my sandwich from laughing. How did this not get more attention at the time???? Surely, it has to find an audience on DVD. Has to. There's no way this doesn't become a big cult hit over the next few years. Basically, in a nutshell, this is like a Kevin Smith movie, but good. It's laugh out loud funny. When it wants moments of pathos it nails it. When it needs a good character beat it nails it. It's just a superb fucking movie. Grade: A

Cool! I know The Wire is his favourite TV show. The man has taste.

Yeah, it's the best film I saw in 2012.

Really pleased to see the kid from Beasts get a best actress nom. Genuinely deserved.

There's a scene near the end of this film - the two main characters are in the back of a taxi, talking... that's all it is. Just two people talking while being driven through the streets of Paris. And that scene has more drama and emotion than pretty much any other scene in any other film you'll ever see. One of the best films of the 00's, and even better than the (genuinely great) first film. Blatantly an A.

If you want a couple of films that it reminded me of: Badlands and (particularly) Days of Heaven. Both are masterpieces... as Beasts is, IMO.

That's a bingo.

I'm not a Nolanite. I'm a Coenite and a Tarantinoite.

One of the 5 funniest movies ever. A

Good movie. My only two complaints (one major, one minor): The protagonist was woefully under-written. Ten more minutes in act one of getting to know Dredd would have helped a lot. Avon Barksdale was totally wasted. Otherwise it's well shot, well acted and well scripted. Score: B

Nolan is more consistent but FOTR is better than anything he's ever done.

Best: CasablancaWorst: Big Fish

1) Beasts of the Southern Wild2) Cloud Atlas3) Argo4) Moonrise Kingdom5) The Grey6) Bernie7) The Avengers8) 21 Jump Street9) Cabin in the Woods10) Looper

I would have thought a 3 hour theatrical and 4 hour extended Hobbit movie would have been about right. IMO the plot of AUJ is stretched way too thin. Like butter spread over too much bread. Or something.

If you wanted to you could pick a lot of holes in this movie. Some of the storylines are stronger than others. One in particular I think should have been cut (Jim Broadbent held captive in an old people's home). The quality of make-up and accents vary wildly. But none of the flaws matter. This is incredible, audacious, balls to the wall film-making. Coming at it from a Buddhist perspective, the philosophy makes perfect sense to me, and really works for me - everyone and everything is interconnected, karma is passed from life to life, yada yada. But beyond the philosophy - the editing of this movie. Man. This has some of the best editing and intercutting I've ever seen. It's glorious. It's got to be up there with JFK (which I always argue is the best edited movie ever). Yeah, so... I loved it. One of the films of the year, easily. A

Great choice. OHMSS is Barry at his best - definitely the best Bond score. It's also got the best cinematography in the series IMO... although Skyfall looks pretty awesome.

Yeah I'll second Almost Famous. Also Before Sunset.

I still care about the sequels... and still have hope for them. And I also think there's a good chance that I'll like AUJ more when I've seen the other two and get to see the whole story.

I wouldn't say none of it worked. There were some lovely shots in that sequence, and the beats of the story were laid out well enough. I suppose the problem was twofold: 1) saving a dwarf city, IMO, is a pretty anticlimactic, weak central conflict, 2) after the prologue the next hour is insanely slow and kills any lingering interest I might have had.

What did I know was coming? If I'd known a disappointing movie was coming I wouldn't have paid to see it.Presumably you're referring to the plot. I've never read The Hobbit, and I steered away from spoilers before seeing the movie. I knew the broad strokes of the movie, but that's all. And yeah, obviously the stakes were gonna be lower that LOTR. What disappointed me was that Jackson didn't make me care about the central conflict driving the movie - the attempt to reclaim the dwarf city.Re: comparing it to LOTR. Seriously? You don't think it's valid to compare a Peter Jackson Hobbit movie to a Peter Jackson LOTR movie? Especially when the earlier movies worked so well, and IMO this new one doesn't work remotely as well? Under those circumstances it's pretty inevitable to make the comparison, and try to figure out what went wrong.

"Surprise" is your interpretation of my post. In reality I was neither surprised nor unsurprised - just disappointed.

Very disappointing. It looks like LOTR, it sounds like LOTR, but there's none of the magic that made the original trilogy timeless. There are several problems, but the biggest one is pretty fundamental: the stakes are too low. In LOTR the stakes couldn't have been higher - it was a fight for Middle Earth against a primal evil. This time it's about reclaiming some dwarf city from a dragon. Since I couldn't give a toss about the dwarf city or the dragon the whole movie becomes a complete bore. Beyond the lack of stakes, there are other core issues. There are four antagonists, who come in and out of the narrative (did I mention the script is crap?). Two of them are barely in it at all (Smaug and the necromancer)... this in itself isn't a bad thing - look at FOTR, where Sauron's shadow hangs heavily over the whole movie, despite barely being glimpsed in three hours. But the dragon and necromancer are no Sauron. Their shadows don't hang over anything. The other two villains, the leader of the orcs and the goblin king, are just dull and by-the-numbers. After LOTR they're both too been-there-done-that. Going from Sauron and Saruman to some orc dude... it's a major step down in villainy. Also, I could have done withot the goblin king's giant ballsack chin. The whole thing just feels so flat, as if Jackson knew the material didn't cut it this time. I'm rewatching FOTR extended edition now as I type this. From the first moment it has a wit and energy to it. Yeah it's long, but it doesn't feel long. An Unexpected Journey feels every minute. The script is fatally flawed. Not only are the stakes too low, but there isn't a strong throughline. Nothing to really keep an audience engaged. Frankly, the filmmakers should have asked themselves: will an audience be happy to sit through 170 minutes - with the promise of another 340 minutes - about these dwarves trying to reclaim their city? And when they got their answer they should have rethought the whole project. It's nice to be back in that world, but this story is downright weak. And by being so episodic, and without that compelling throughline, it really, really tests your patience. All this is compounded by the asthmatically slow pacing. If it had raced by in 2 hours it still wouldn't be a great film, but it wouldn't give us so much time to consider how misguided this movie is. It's as if Jackson had forgotten why we loved the original films. It wasn't because they were slow, ambling guided walks through Middle Earth. It was because they were well scripted stories that were worth telling. Upsides? Freeman is good. He's not given enough to do, but he copes well. Obviously the other returning cast all shine, but Elrond, Saruman and Galadriel don't add anything to the narrative. It's more about the thrill of seeing familiar faces from the other, much better movies. I'll give it a C. Just because I liked Freeman and McKellan.

1) On Her Majesty's Secret Service2) Goldfinger3) Casino Royale4) From Russia With Love5) The Living Daylights