Slow West (2015)

Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a young Scot who has travelled to America to reunite with his true love Rose (Caren Pistorius). On his journey across to the west he encounters a gunslinger named Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender). They travel together, having a series of unusual encounters, and with secrets slowly revealed about their respective pasts.

Slow West is a wonderful oddity. It is a New Zealand-British co-production, but it is also a western set in 19th century America. It is also an unexpectedly idiosyncratic and bleak comedy, albeit one that can unexpectedly burst forth with frank and bloody moments of violence. At the same time it is soaked in a sort of mournful, melancholic fog. The film marks the feature film directorial debut of Scottish director John McLean. Quite how a Scottish fine arts graduate came to shoot a western in New Zealand is beyond me. However he managed it, I am glad that he did.

The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies (2014)

Now that Peter Jackson's bloated, self-indulgent and thoroughly messy Hobbit trilogy has been and gone, it is genuinely difficult to look back and ascertain precisely how things managed to get this far out of control. It beggars belief. How can the writer/director who successfully adapted The Lord of the Rings, a lengthy and complex novel widely considered unfilmable, do such a terrible job adapting The Hobbit, a significantly shorter and rather simple adventure story? How did this project get warped so wildly out of all proportion? The Battle of Five Armies, the final instalment of this Hobbit trilogy of films, is the worst of the three. It's also the worst sort of bad movie - the one where you look at the talent involved, remember their earlier successes in filmmaking, and simply fail to work out how it all went so terribly, embarrassingly wrong.

I'm not throwing these words around lightly, and honestly do wish this was a great film. I adore The Hobbit. It is a childhood favourite. It has the potential to form a delightful three-hour fantasy film, and Peter Jackson is demonstrably capable of making it. He didn't. Since the final release of The Battle of Five Armies: Extended Edition (a mind-boggling concept, given this film's theatrical release takes 144 minutes to adapt about 45 pages) Jackson has gone on the record admitting that he simply made much of this third and final film up. He improvised on set, threw together the lengthy battle sequences and ultimately had to delay it's release by about six months just to get the thing completed.

Do I have sympathy for Jackson, who only signed up to make The Hobbit when Guillermo Del Toro jumped out of the director's chair? Of course I do. Nobody wants to make a bad movie. At the same time I'm unable to sugar-coat it: Jackson didn't just make a bad movie, he made three.

Pulp: A Film about Life, Death and Supermarkets (2014)

In 2011 the brilliantly entertaining British pop group Pulp reunited for one final tour, climaxing in a sold-out concert in the band's home town of Sheffield in December the following year. This final concert forms the centre of a documentary, Pulp: A Film about Life, Death and Supermarkets. Directed by New Zealand filmmaker Florian Habicht, it is a blend of concert film and two intertwined documentaries - one about the band itself, and another about the northern city from which they came.

I'm quite a fan of Pulp, and indeed saw them perform during the Australian leg of the film's tour. To me they were the best of the various Britpop bands of the 1990s - although of course Pulp predated that particular craze and continued for quite a few years after it. That said, I'm still not altogether sure what I think of this film. I went in expecting a concert film with some interviews peppered through it, and instead got something that felt a lot less balanced. There's some concert footage, but arguably nowhere near enough, and while the members of the band do get a look in it's Sheffield itself that gets the lion's share of the movie.

Daily Links: 16 May 2014

By "Daily Links", I don't mean this will be a daily post. Some days I simply won't have the time. These are, however, interesting links that I found today.

• Mortensen laments Jackson's career. Viggo Mortensen says some pretty smart things about Peter Jackson's career post-Fellowship of the Ring, including the director's over-reliance on CGI. (link)
• Rachel Talalay joins Doctor Who. I am very excited to see that Rachel Talalay, producer of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and director of Tank Girl, will be directing an episode of Doctor Who this year. She's the first female director since 2010. (link)
• Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella gets teaser. Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella forms part of Disney's growing range of live-action remakes of their animated back catalogue. The teaser (and it really is just a teaser, no actual footage) has been released. The film is out in 2015; I'm looking forward to Cate Blanchett's wicked stepmother. (link)

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is the second part of Peter Jackson's three-film epic adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien novel. I generally hated the first instalment, with a few exceptions, but I had just enough affection left for Jackson's earlier Lord of the Rings trilogy to persevere with the second - albeit four months late on home video instead of in a cinema. It has many of the same problems, but for various reasons it seems to overcome them a little better. The result is a film that's watchable, indeed regularly very enjoyable, but still has enough niggling annoyances to prevent it from holding a candle to Jackson's earlier, vastly superior films.

We pick up where An Unexpected Journey left off, with Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) and the company of dwarves midway through their quest to the Lonely Mountain and the dragon Smaug who lives there. It's a relief that in this part they do actually reach the mountain, and we do actually get some scenes with Smaug. One of my largest criticisms of the previous film was that so little happened. It doesn't matter which way you slice it, there isn't enough material in Tolkien's novel to justify three full-length feature films. This was always going to hamper the Hobbit movies, and while it absolutely crippled An Unexpected Journey it merely forces The Desolation of Smaug to struggle a little.

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: "Hercules in the Underworld"

In his fourth TV movie adventure, Hercules (Kevin Sorbo) investigates a crack in the earth that seems to lead directly to the Underworld. When his wife Deianeira is threatened, Hercules must bargain with the God Hades to save her life.

I've been rather tardy in reviewing this TV movie, because it's the worst kind of thing a reviewer can write about: something average. It's not as good as "Hercules and the Circle of Fire", and is certainly much better than "Hercules and the Amazon Women", but on its own merits it just kind of hangs there in an awkward fashion - too poor to recommend but too good to condemn. It's just... it is what it is.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

The Hobbit is, as you probably know, a 1937 childrens fantasy by author and academic J.R.R. Tolkien. It is a marvellous novel, and a childhood favourite of mine, and while it's long been overshadowed by Tolkien's subsequent epic The Lord of the Rings it remains in my opinion the best book among his works. It's breezy where Lord of the Rings is ponderous. It whips along where its sequel meanders about.

I spent many years eagerly anticipating the day when someone in Hollywood made a feature film out of The Hobbit. I was surprised some years ago when New Line Pictures allowed Peter Jackson to write and direct a three-film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, rather than get him to direct The Hobbit first: it could be easily adapted into a single film, was self-contained and could have made for a brilliant hit. Instead, Jackson has come to The Hobbit a full decade later, adapting it into an all-new trilogy of films to be released annually from 2012 to 2014.

The first part, An Unexpected Journey, was released into cinemas in December 2012, and onto DVD a few weeks ago. It has many great elements in it. Overall, however, it's a disastrous failure.