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

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Ian McKellan, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Luke Evans

Have I Seen it Before: No. This one Lora and I are sure of. After shrugging our way through The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), there may have been some desire to catch the final Middle-Earth feature film (especially from Lora, the actual Tolkien fan in the house), but somehow not a lot of followthrough.

Did I Like It: Almost. The run-time is the shortest of any movie Jackson has done since The Frighteners (1996)*. That helps a lot.

However.

Smaug is dispatched in the first reel of this movie. Doesn’t that mean that the story of The Hobbit is done. Sure, Jackson could fill the return to the Shire and the consternation over the fate of the gold under the mountain for forty-five minutes, but shouldn’t we be heading out of the theater before sundown at this point?

I truly have underestimated the man’s ability—nay, pathological need—to pad things out. 

And by the end, things are dispatched with such ruthless speed, I can’t help but wonder if the slightly diminishing returns mandated some changes in the Jackson working style. Evangeline Lilly (little known fact: not played by Liv Tyler) and her love affair with a dwarf is ended with none of the pathos from the LOTR trilogy it was so thoroughly trying to ape.

It’s difficult for me to forgive a fueling sense of nostalgia for a film series I didn’t love to begins with.

Also, which five armies are we talking about here. One, dwarves. Two, men. Three, orcs. Four, elves.

Five… Five? Anyone? Gandalf (McKellan) and a handful of other LOTR characters, who spend the majority of the movie inevitably failing in their goals to forestall something we already know will happen? Bilbo alone (Freeman)? Legolas (Orlando Bloom), who still somehow appears in the film? Are we the viewers—and perhaps, more appropriately, the fans—the fifth army? I can’t readily come up with a more befuddling title for a film, mainly because I’m distracting myself with still shaking my head over this one.

*I’ve now gone two-for-three on referring to The Frighteners in my review of Hobbit films. Maybe it’s time to re-watch The Frighteners…

Ma (2019)

Director: Tate Taylor

Cast: Octavia Spencer, Diana Silvers, Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans

Have I Seen it Before: Maybe I have, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t squirming in my seat the whole time.

Did I Like It: I like it the moments after I saw it. I might have really liked it had I possessed absolutely no concept of what the film would be about going in. It may split from my mind the more time passes.

That is to say that there is no problem with the suspense quotient of Ma. It’s forty miles of bad road, and the only qualm that I would have with the film is that it ends up in a fairly predictable place. It forges together elements from Psycho (1960), Carrie (1976), and Misery (1990), just to name a few, it all ends somewhere in the vicinity of the territory in which those movies did.

There was potential for this to go into some truly dark places, and some of those places might have made Sue Ann (Spencer) a more thoroughly sympathetic villain. The borderline-incestuous connections between the people in that small town could have taken some terrible turns, and everyone could have been a little bit damned at the end of the proceedings. Instead, the worst character are punished in appropriate, if morbid, ways.

That’s a minor complaint, though. A horror movie need not have sympathy for its villain to be successful within the context of its genre, and Ma succeeds in so many places where other genre pictures fail. The teenagers all believably behave and interact with one another. If I had a dime for every horror movie that missed the mark in that regard, I’d be richer than Jason Blum at this point. And, despite how the sum of the film’s parts might underwhelm, God help me if I didn’t squirm through every moment of the road to get there. That’s a testament to Octavia Spencer’s commitment to a role that other Oscar winners might have blanched at. One imagines that this film might not make the waves to typecast her, and if she keeps swinging for the fences like this, there may be some other little gold men in her future.