There's a little thing people like to do when celebrities are caught out indulging in the hedonism their ridiculous paychecks allow them to: they like to be disgusted. Appalled. Ashamed. "Oh, how horrendous," they say. "I would never do that." Bullshit. Life has yet to afford them the chance. Few directors understand this the way Martin Scorsese does. Since the beginning of his career, he's openly displayed his fascinated repulsion for society's maladjusted egomaniacs in such beautifully crafted ways that often comes the time when the line between condoning and condemning is blurred. That's no accident, however. After all, Travis Bickle, Henry Hill, Rupert Pupkin and now Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) are people, just like us. They were children, they grew up, they had dreams, aspirations and the best intentions. And we're only three or four mistakes away from being them. In the wrong hands, The Wolf of Wall Street could have easily been a dopey, heavy-handed anti-capitalism flick. Thankfully, it's smart enough to not be anti-anything. If anything, it's anti-addiction to things that are addictive, but even that's not really the case. It's simply about the nature of people, specifically those that seize on opportunity and allow it to consume them. As hard as it may be to hear, Jordan Belfort, the coke-sniffing, midget-tossing, two-timing, wife-bashing, money-stealing, no-good, dirty lying rat, isn't a monster. He's a person, and he used to be just like you. And you can be just like him. All you've got to do is listen closely.
For as long as Jordan Belfort can remember, he always wanted to be a rich man. And, like the movies say, nowhere gets you richer or poorer faster than Wall Street. Straight-laced as you can be, at the age of 24 he accepts a job as a "connector", one of hundreds of foul-mouthed fast-talkers on a phone trying to put people with money through to the higher-ups. After a lunch with one of his superiors, Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), in which he does a tribal chant with his chest, breaks down stockbroking as nothing more than smoke and mirrors, and encourages decadence as the only way to survive in this environment, he starts working his way through the business. Until Black Monday. With the stock market in shambles, and nowhere else to take his skill of talking quick to the impressionable, Jordan takes a job selling penny stocks (common shares of small public companies that trade low) at a company that offers a 50% commission for every sale. His Wall Street training nets him a small fortune in no time, and after a chance chat with his neighbour Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), the two open their own firm. Still utilising the penny stocks, but training a few of their drug dealer friends in the subtle art of smooth talk, in no time Jordan's raised his pump and dump company (artificially inflating owned stock through persuasive language to sell at a high price and "dump" the investor after selling) to a few-hundred-staff-strong office space in Long Island, with a Forbes article praising and pissing on his name and an FBI agent breathing down his neck. But like you give a shit about any of this. As the ads show, the business is just a means to an end. An end filled with parties, drugs, booze, sex and a yacht with extensions to fit the helicopter on.
There's a scene in the second half of The Wolf of Wall Street where things have gone belly-up for Belfort. Among the FBI having him in a pinch, his wife Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie), wants a divorce. Jordan, smacked out on drugs because it's whatever the fuck o'clock, declares she'll never take his kids and storms away to get his daughter. Naomi follows and he punches her square, hard and fast in the stomach. It's a wretched act, made all the worse by his following antics in the car, backing straight into their brick fence and somehow not hurting his child. But minutes later, he has us charmed again and laughing at the witty exchange between him and Donny. Why? Because he's that good. To go back to the aforementioned luncheon with Mark Hanna, it's in this moment Jordan learns his greatest skill. It's not about making money for yourself and the clients, it's just about moving money from them to you. "Nobody knows if the stock is gonna go up, down, sideways or in fucking circles. Least of all stockbrokers. It's all a fugazi." See, consider the turn of events in The Wolf of Wall Street. It seems nothing really happened. Belfort made a lot of money, he did a lot of crazy, fucked-up shit and then it all inevitably came crashing down on his head. So why are we so captivated? Because we were under the spell of his sales pitch. We can't pretend we followed the story. Even Belfort acknowledges we weren't paying attention, cancelling a monologue filled with technical gibberish halfway through with a, "Fuck it. The point is: Was it illegal? Abso-fuckin-lutely." Following the story isn't his intention. The jargon is just hoodoo. We get the broad strokes and the buzz words and that's what matters to his sales pitch. We're being teased with how close we are to being him and, even if that horrifies us, we're hooked.
The point I'm trying to make is that a big part of Jordan being able to sell us his story is his ability to tell us his story. Everything is so lavish and over the top and in excess and straight-up fucking unbelievable because it's his story and he wants you to be addicted to it. Enchanted. Of course it didn't fucking happen like this. But who cares? Doesn't he tell it well? Isn't this pretty fucking cool? When he's getting hunted by the FBI, it has to be the best agent in the field: the Straight A's Go Fuck Yourself Top Cop Motherfucker who can't be bought, preserving justice until it kills him. Because he's Jordan Fucking Belfort. He almost gets to fuck his wife's elderly aunt, but chooses not to. Because he can fuck anyone. Because he's Jordan Fucking Belfort. He has telepathic conversations with crazy successful Swiss bankers. Because crazy successful Swiss bankers are on the same wavelength as Jordan Fucking Belfort. Even when he punches his wife, it's because she's trying to take something from him: Jordan Fucking Belfort. Scenes go on for way longer than they should on irrelevant topics because it's his story. His team spends five minutes discussing the business ethics surrounding throwing a midget across the room because Belfort thinks it's fucking hilarious and you should too. There's a twenty minute scene in which he tries to get from a country club back home so he can get Donny off of a wire-tapped phone whilst so out of his mind on illegal sleeping pills that he can barely move his limbs, let alone walk (Cerebral-Palsied, as he so delicately puts it), because Belfort thinks that shit is so fuckin' crazy cool and you should too. Even if he can't always escape the truth, no better example than in his following drugged-out fight scene with the equally drugged-out Donnie, choking each other with the phone cord and having us in stitches until one masterfully heartbreaking shot shows Jordan's infant daughter stepping into the kitchen and seeing just the sort of person her father is, the truth ultimately becomes an afterthought. An afterthought to the gestalt built from the "Aw fuck man, ya shoulda been there" attitude, the image, the sales pitch. Keep listening. You can be just like me.
When The Wolf of Wall Street began with a shot of Leonardo DiCaprio snorting cocaine out of a stripper's asshole, I got mentally prepared to watch a film in which I was not going to sympathise with the characters. How surprising then, that Scorsese dares me to do just that. About halfway through the film, Jordan's invited the Batman of FBI agents, Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler) onto his boat and attempts to bribe him. When he fails to do so, he taunts the agent as he leaves by saying, "Good luck on that subway ride home to your miserable ugly fuckin' wives." One of the film's final scenes is of Denham doing just that. Belfort is in jail, his company has been completely shut down and Pat's the hero. But there's a slight twinge in his eye as he looks around the car, at all the people either on their way home from work or on their way to work, some for the second time that day, some not working at all. It was people like these that Jordan made rich alongside himself. He was never a leader in Wall Street. He was forever the underdog, built from nothing. And there's a prior scene in the film in which he's telling his entire staff his intent to give in and surrender to the FBI. He reminisces on some of his most valued members of staff and the horrible, dire situations he found them in and pulled them out of because he had the means and they had the initiative. You know, the initiative to steal money from the rich to get richer. No matter which way you look at it, his activities were illegal and he did a lot of really shitty things. But is it possible, even just a shred, that he's a hero? The final scene of the film puts the period on Jordan Belfort's career. He's a motivational speaker on self-sufficiency and personal financial growth. But nothing's changed. As he asks each person to sell to him his own pen to teach them about the power of persuasive language, the same way he did when starting his company, he's helping people who can't help themselves. Think of it what you will. But definitely go and see The Wolf of Wall Street. Some people have complained about its length, but I could have happily had another hour or more of this. It's a movie that justifies its length. It's not a focus-group business decision based on what the masses expect these days, it simply goes until the very engaging story is over. You may notice it occasionally or get a bit bored once or twice, but for the most part you'll just enjoy watching fine actors play interesting characters under masterful direction. A guy like Martin Scorsese, who you could have said was at the top of his game years ago, still is, because he still gives a fuck about the story, the craft and you.
Earlier last year one of my heroes, Louis CK, had an incredible interview with Conan O'Brien in which he explained his distaste for mobile phones, describing them as an instant distraction from ourselves. When we feel sad or lonely, we immediately get our phones out and hop on Facebook, or message our buddies, to avoid having to deal with negative emotion. And the question Louis asks is when did negative emotion become such a bad thing? He had a day where he started to feel sad listening to Bruce Springsteen in his car (a man after my own heart), and rather than go for the phone, he pulled over and, experiencing intense emotional distress, he cried. But with the sadness came equally intense happiness, extreme gratefulness for allowing himself to "just be sad". To be human. "The thing is, because we don't want that first little bit of sad, we push it away with the phone or jerking off or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy. You just feel kind of satisfied with your product. And then you die. And that's why I don't want to get a phone for my kids." Early on in Spike Jonze's her, Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix) is lying in bed when memories of his ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) start coming back. They start happy, but inevitably turn to the relationship's downfall, and rather than confront it head on and start processing those feelings, Theodore immediately reaches for the phone and starts cycling through other lonely singles keen for phone sex. Within seconds, he's got a woman in his ear begging him to strangle her with the dead cat while he fucks her. Both of them crave instant gratification, but neither gives a fuck about what the other wants. Because that's not instant. That takes work. So if this is human contact, is it any wonder he ends up in love with his computer?
her paints a very realistic vision of our future. One of the first scenes of the film is Theodore sitting on a train heading home. Everyone is talking, but not to each other. They're talking to their phones: a small earbud that's filling them in on the news, their emails and which celebrity recently had the misfortune of being in front of a camera sans clothes. The movie begins on the cusp of a new technological breakthrough. Available for the first time is the brand new Operating System (OS), a voice tailored for you from an almost infinite set of possible personalities. It evolves and learns as it communicates with you. It will be your companion. Theodore buys an OS. He's a pretty normal guy, all things considered. He's friendly, he's funny, he's pretty charismatic and he's well regarded by his colleagues and his friends. Where he falls down is where a lot of people are falling down: he's lonely. He's separated from his wife but isn't ready to sign the divorce papers, and that's affecting his other relationships. The idea of just having someone to talk to that is disconnected from all of that and is there only for him is too tempting to pass up. "How would you describe your relationship with your mother?" the program asks during the installation phase. "Er--" Theodore begins. "Thank you. Processing your OS installation now." Seconds pass before Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) is introduced to the film with a, "Hello, I'm here." From this point on, Theodore and Samantha begin developing a layered, complex, but more importantly, real relationship, something almost unheard of in this day and age. The question her asks is: Just because this relationship is developed, and mutual, and real, does that make it okay? Because, y'know, it's great he found someone and all, but she's a fucking computer.
One of her's greatest triumphs is that it doesn't answer this question. It places arguments for both sides in front of you and asks what you think. Its method for doing this is treating the relationship very seriously. Theodore approaches telling people of his special someone with trepidation at first. His colleague Paul (Chris Pratt) introduces him to his new girlfriend and says they should double date. "...she's an Operating System," Theodore murmurs. "Cool! We should do something fun." Paul replies. When he tells his close friend Amy (Amy Adams), she's fascinated. "You're dating your OS? What is that like?" This is a world where everyone is so desperate to find a legitimate connection with anybody that nobody could care less whether or not someone finds that with a computer. It's just great they found someone. The only person who expresses any sort of distaste for his new relationship is his ex-wife, though it's not for the reason you may expect. "You always wanted to have a wife without the challenges of actually dealing with anything real." she says, and she's right. Because Theodore has these extremely romantic, grandiose notions of what a human relationship should be, and it blinds him to the fact that it's a two-way street. But is that a bad thing? There's another scene which I strongly believe is the anchor to this story. Theodore and Samantha have had a fight and he's confiding in Amy. He begins to question whether or not what they have is even a real relationship. "I don't know. I'm not in it." she replies. She follows this with her own personal reflection on her recent divorce. "I've just come to realise that we're only here briefly. And while I'm here, I want to allow myself...joy. So fuck it." I know I'm just quoting the film, but there's another important and heartbreaking moment where Theodore says, "Sometimes I think I have felt everything I'm going to feel. And from here on out, I'm not going to feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I've already felt." If Theodore is someone so in tune with his own emotions to the point that nothing but lines of code specifically designed for him can make him feel happy, then who the fuck is anyone to stand in the way of his happiness? The danger there, though, is that Samantha is designed to the end around him, for him. So when their relationship turns romantic, it's because that's what he wants. When she argues with him, it's because that's what he wants. When she leaves him, it's because that's what he wants. Or is it? Could she be so well-programmed with human emotions and the ability to think, learn and grow that she's found herself thinking the same thing that I am, and is left wondering if she's meant for more than just programmed servitude?
But let's, for argument's sake, say that what Theodore has and what other people could have is preferable to a relationship with another real person. Why is this better? One of the answers may lie in one of her's early scenes. Theodore has been set up on a blind date with an unnamed lady (Olivia Wilde) by Amy. Everything seems to be going great. They have good chemistry, the alcohol keeps flowing and before long they're out beside the water making out. She asks if he's just going to fuck her and leave. Theodore says no. She says she's too old to have her time wasted with something that isn't serious, which causes Theodore to panic and try to leave her gently. She attacks his insecurities by calling him a "really creepy dude" and walks away. But the thing is she's just refusing to acknowledge her own insecurities. Because what she desires is what advances in technology have taught us that we can have: instant gratification. She wants love, but she doesn't want to have to work through a relationship to get it. Theodore wants love too, but looking in her eyes he sees all of the things that went wrong with his first relationship and, knowing that there's a voice in an earphone at home that won't leave him, he retreats. Who can blame him? Not to mention his relationship with Samantha has been developed - it was not instantaneous. Where he finds trouble with her though is the lack of a physical side to their life. They have sex, but of course there's no touching between them, which generates frustration in Samantha. After all, she knows what Theodore looks like, but how can she even begin to understand what he sees her as? On top of that, there are still people like Theodore's blind date who haven't found someone who will love them right now and forevermore on their terms. So leave it to business to create OKCupid for an OS couple. Samantha, behind Theodore's back, begins exchanging emails with a lady named Isabella (Portia Doubleday) who falls in love with the two of them. The idea is that Isabella will be the surrogate physical aspect of their relationship by wearing a camera and allowing Samantha to talk through an earpiece. Samantha sees it as a golden opportunity to finally experience real sex with Theodore. Theodore is creeped right the fuck out. After all, he's with Samantha because he grew tired of people and their desire for instant gratification. But he tries it anyway and, when he eventually becomes too uncomfortable and calls it off, he genuinely breaks Isabella's heart. She truly loved them, or at least, within her capacity to understand love, she did. And why shouldn't she? She's the product of a society that's taught her you don't have to work for anything anymore and things can be perfect immediately. Theodore and Samantha have put the hard yards in, but they can't have sex, so she can facilitate that and be loved at the same time. Except she can't. There's a very real danger here.
But oh so thankfully, her never becomes a dark omen for our future. Within the bad, there is always some good. Theodore's occupation is at a website called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com. It's what it sounds like: people hire him and others in the building to write letters to their significant others or family members. Need to profess your love? Need to congratulate your son on his 18th birthday? Need to tell your husband you're still as crazy for him as you were 50 years ago? BeautifulHandWrittenLetters.com will. I was initially disgusted, until I had the thought that these aren't emails. Theodore dictates what the letter will read into a microphone, which is interpreted and printed in handwriting onto a piece of paper that gets mailed in an envelope. This is a flourishing business, which means that even in an age where your computer is so advanced that you can date it, there's a small piece left inside people that is unwilling to let go of humanity. People are absorbed by and dependent on their technologies, which means they struggle to access their humanity, but it hasn't erased the desire to. Which does mean that one man in touch with human emotion is writing letters upon letters for those who aren't, but there's an optimistic hope underpinning all of it. Now, there's so much about her I haven't even mentioned. There's the fact that while we can create this unbelievable technology, we still don't understand it, which means that once we program it with humanity, it will eventually desire all the things we do and more, not to mention outlive us and all of our own desires, and seek understanding and a sense of belonging elsewhere. There's the questions it raises on the implications surrounding technology getting to the point where if we can create an infinite amount of personalities, we can input information on the life of someone deceased and recreate them. There's the sly suggestion that gaming will probably end up devolving into just swearing at the screen to progress. There's the bold and courageous close-up cinematography that is 100% in Joaquin Phoenix's hands which he knocks out of the fucking park, coupled with Johansson's heartbreaking and warm voice acting that often had me closing my eyes just so I could pretend for Theodore that she was real. There's a lot of things I haven't mentioned just to try and keep this word count as low as possible. Ultimately, her is asking you some tough questions. Do we need technology, or do we need people? Or do we just need to work on being happy, with whomever or whatever makes us so? That's for you to decide. What I know is that in a season of film so full of watered-down shit that I struggle to find anything to say about it other than "Don't bother", it's so refreshing and overwhelming to experience a film so honest and heartfelt and personal and raw and insightful and challenging and just fucking perfect that I have so much to say I struggle to find the place to start. Thank her.
American Hustle
It's all there in the title. American Hustle begins with Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) spending a ridiculously long time preparing an elaborate comb over. It's long to the point of hilarity, but it serves to prepare you: this is a film that will work tirelessly into tedium to pull the wool over your eyes. It deliberately presents itself as a cheap Scorsese knock-off so that it may fool you into thinking it's something that it's not. When the big, hugely obvious reveal comes at the end, you're left scratching your head wondering how the fuck none of the other characters saw it coming. The answers might lie in Amy Adam's hilariously awful and constantly-shifting fake British accent: either these guys are that good at bullshitting, or everyone else is just seeing what they want to see in the hope that they can get what they want to get. And at the end of the day, why should they let something as trivial as truth get in the way of their desires? To its benefit and detriment, it really requires two viewings. But hey, any reason to again watch Jennifer Lawrence drunkenly throw two middle fingers in the air and say, "I make this shit look easy. Oscar me, bitch."
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Towards the end of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the titular character (Ben Stiller), negative assets (photographs) manager at Life magazine, asks the big bad suit (Adam Scott) if he even knows what the publication's motto is. Big bad suit scoffs and says, "I'm...loving it?" Mitty stares down at him in disappointment and says, "That's McDonald's." The sad thing is, in a movie that so proudly proclaims the importance of individualism and of identifying the evils of corporations, McDonald's probably paid for that. Money was definitely exchanged for the Life magazine linchpin. But, that aside, the movie still rings hollow. Ben Stiller, who also directed, obviously wants you to be inspired by this story and he's tried to make a character that everyone can relate to. Unfortunately, in creating such a blank slate of a man, he's made a character that you feel like you never really knew. Sure, he used to be a punk and a skater when he was a kid until the day he gave up passion for fiscal responsibility, he spends a lot of time dreaming of all the things he could be, and he sucks at dating - crises of identity everyone can relate to. But it feels like those things aren't really vital parts of a character, but rather a series of "Hi, my name is..." labels slapped on a shirt in the hope that you'll see yourself in one of them. Some of the daydream sequences are great, the cinematography is quite nice even if it graduated from the school of going really far away from the big thing and setting up a tripod while playing an Arcade Fire song, and if you can tuck away your inner cynic it will make you smile. But really, it should have just been retitled, "This Will Make A Great New Year's Facebook Status."
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
I was kind of blown away by the first hour of Catching Fire. Rather than take the easy way out and wipe the slate clean, something that would be very tempting given the ludicrous amount of money these franchises make, we're forced to see very real, very heavy consequences for Katniss's actions in the first film. She cheated the system, she made the dictators look like fools and now she's paying the price. They acknowledge the foolishness of the public, but also how powerful they could be should they realise the fragile balance of power, hence the importance of keeping them entertained. My favourite part of it, apart from the same incredible satirisation of our addiction to macabre reality media, was the acknowledgement that people today don't care about a story unless there's some saccharine, Twilight-esque romance for them to live through vicariously, shown through the falsified relationship between Katniss and Peeta, a relationship they have to fool the public into believing is real if they want to keep breathing. How sad then when it becomes a real saccharine, Twilight-esque romance for no reason other than Katniss doesn't want to sleep alone and Peeta's a clingy little bitch. That disappointment and waste of potential bleeds through the whole film. One of the most confronting aspects of The Hunger Games was when the game started, the sound drowned out and frightened, helpless children were butchered by those stronger than them in a stark and brutally honest portrayal of death. This time around, they're all previous winners and they're all kind of a bunch of dicks, except for the sweet old lady with a Death Clock above her head, so why should I give a fuck? Throw in the fact that it's exactly the same movie once the games begin, and I find myself asking the same question again. Jennifer Lawrence continues to sell it beautifully, but I can see the inevitable love triangle that's brewing between her, Peeta and Thor's brother eclipsing the greater social aspects of this plot. I hope I'm wrong, but there's no denying Team Social Justice won't sell as many T-shirts as Team Peeta.
Walking With Dinosaurs 3D
The third best thing about Walking With Dinosaurs 3D was that occasionally I forgot I was watching it, and was able to think about other things. The second best thing about Walking With Dinosaurs 3D was when Fleetwood Mac's Tusk was used for a scene, and I was able to think about listening to a Fleetwood Mac album. The best thing about Walking With Dinosaurs 3D was that it ended, and I haven't thought about it since. Go see it if you hate yourself.
Frozen
Slowly but surely, Disney seem to be taking inspiration from Pixar's courage. Up taught us that dreams and love can't always beat the cruelty of circumstance but that shouldn't stop us from fighting back, and Toy Story 3 taught us that at some point in life, you're going to have to let go of the things that defined you and it will make you cry really loudly in public. In the last few years, Disney have put out a film with their first African-American princess, a film about a video game character going through an existential crisis and have now produced a story in which the heroic male is an afterthought to the unbreakable bond between two sisters. There's no denying the impact of seeing, for all intents and purposes, a very traditional Disney film in which the heroine sacrifices herself to save the other heroine while the hero looks on in awe of her strength. It's a bit of a pity that the rest of the film is so by the numbers to compensate. In creating two heroines, they forgot to create a memorable villain (or really any sort of true villain at all), the songs are forgettable at best and the setting isn't all that interesting. Plus, though there's no denying the harsh cruelty and coldness in the scene where the princess, dying from a curse curable only by an act of true love, has the prince lean down millimeters from her lips before whispering, "If only there were someone in this room who loved you", it really is just an easy way to cobble some pure evil out of a cast of otherwise "fairly alright" people. How much more interesting it would have been if the prince she fell "in love" with after one night ended up rejected for the man she spent the majority of the film with, going through immense hardships and learning more about herself in the process, as a lesson to children that sometimes you just lose. It's all baby steps, but ultimately, Frozen's themes of female empowerment and independence, along with slight matter-of-fact themes of homosexuality, are well-placed and welcome, and this is far and away the best children's movie to see this season.
Saving Mr. Banks
Early on in Saving Mr. Banks, limo driver Ralph (Paul Giamatti) makes the allusion that author of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) is responsible for the sun shining today. She replies that she would much rather be compared to rain, as rain brings life. "So does sunshine," he replies. Later in the film, his impossible cheeriness seems to finally put a crack in her bristled-up, pompous demeanour when he explains the reason he loves the sun is because his daughter, Jane, is confined to a wheelchair. The sun frees her, the rain restricts her. When Ralph is saying goodbye to Travers, she hands him a note that reads, "Albert Einstein, Van Gogh, Roosevelt, Frida Kahlo." "They all had difficulties. Jane can do anything that anyone else can do, do you understand?" she says to Ralph, as he, and I, begin to cry. It's so effective because it's so surprising, a moment of genuine human compassion that you can't find on a Wikipedia page. The rest of the film tries to get you to feel the same way, but this is a story that we already know, and the film is desperately struggling to make you think you don't. Everything is so smothered in schmaltz and overblown emotions that it all becomes one big emotional caricature, which makes it all the more painfully obvious that it didn't go down this way. The solution, of course, is to not be a cynical asshole. Forget all of the evidence that suggests Walt Disney was an anti-semitic creep. Forget that P.L. Travers was probably just a stuck-up snob too attached to her story. Forget that none of these events occurred this organically and beautifully. Just let the astoundingly professional film-making, coupled with the astounding performances of Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks tell you a story (that's right, a story) of two damaged people fixing each other. Do that, and you might just be surprised by Saving Mr. Banks. Oh, and congratulations Colin Farrell, you now hold the award for Worst Australian Accent. Commiserations to the dickheads in Pacific Rim.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug was full of surprises. I never expected the man who I believe still holds the world record for most gallons of blood used in a film to resort to George Lucas-levels of CGI. I never expected a film with a $225,000,000 budget to use footage from a Go Pro. I never expected to say an Ed Sheeran song was probably the best part of the experience. I never expected to spend three hours watching a film and struggle to recall what actually happened. But above all else, I never expected a movie with a giant talking dragon to be this fucking boring.
The Bottom Line
Find someone who hasn't seen Back to the Future and watch it with them. It's been too long since you last saw it and they'll think it's ace.
