Over to the Shire

In 2001 began a journey for me, sitting in IIMB campus, with Frodo Baggins, aided by Aragorn, Legolas, the dwarves, and the one and only Gandalf. The journey ended with The Hobbit – The Battle of the Five Armies. It is thus with a twinge of more than a little nostalgia, then, that I pen this review. Executed with the same standards of excellence that we have come to expect of the franchise, the latest movie is particularly notable for the emotional turns of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) – the lure of gold, and the eventual return to nobility. In this edition, the five armies – dwarves, elves and men, face off against the orcs, and a fifth army joins and eventually tips the balance. Brilliant action scenes and depiction of the sheer ambiguity of alliances and their fall-outs make The Hobbit – The Battle of the Five Armies – quite exceptional. A must watch – but then if you have been with the series, that hardly needs any iteration

16/20

Far Above the Misty Mountains Cold

 

Today, after a decade and then some some, a troop of all-too-familiar dwarves entered my house. Led by a wizard, of course. With them, I left the comforts of the Shire, and embarked on an adventure. Where, every turn of the page, in years bygone, had brought new experiences to cherish. We headed out, saw off trolls that had strayed afar, got much-needed albeit much despised help in Rivendell. We headed out from there, to repossess our Kingdom from Smaug. Again we saw off goblins and orcs, with a little help this time from the Eagles. And thus, with The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey – we are on our way. To a trilogy that is – however strangely – lagging LOTR – but so far, and as one has grown to expect, equally fascinating, overwhelming, and quite peerless in the world of movies. The unlikely combination of JRR Tolkein and Peter Jackson have created an alternate reality for me, something that I cannot quite put in the words of a bland little movie review

17.5/20

One for the Soul

If Crash and Babel tried to - and, to much commercial and critical acclaim, did succeed in doing - work the theme of interconnected lives, Cloud Atlas takes it more than a step further, in interconnecting lives through different times in history. So it is that we find that an act of kindness in the South Pacific circa 1850, a musical piece (Cloud Atlas) conceived and composed by a penurious musical genius, an incident involving nuclear safety in the 1970s, the strange events in the life of a spurned publisher in England circa 2012, a clone's coming of age in Neo Seoul in 2144, and eventually the search and discovery of a better life beyond a bleak post-apocalyptic future - are not just intertwined - in a way, they are sequential. Directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer must be commended for holding it all together in an intelligible and emotionally charged movie. Quite moving, if not quite deep, Cloud Atlas is definitely worth a watch

14.5/20