Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Hobbit:  The Battle of the Five Armies

Rating 8 out of 10

I was a big fan of the Lord of the Rings movies.  Loved all three.  The Hobbit of course is the prequel to those LOR movies by director Peter Jackson.  The Battle of the Five Armies is the climax of the Hobbit trilogy with the epic battle.  I didn't read the books and have to admit even after seeing all three movies I can't say I understand it all.  I thought the Hobbit series dragged a bit yet this finale is definitely worth seeing.  I gathered six other manly men like myself and after a manly meal at my favorite watering hole we were off to the NCG theater to watch this on IMAX.

In the first two movies we have learned the evil dragon Smaug has taken control of the castle in the mountain that has everyone's gold and riches.  When the dragon is killed as it destroys a nearby town in flames the Dwarves regain control of the castle and all it's gold.  As what often happens the money corrupts and the king of the dwarves goes a little nuts.  When the humans and the elves show up at his doorstep to claim their share of the riches the king says not over their dead bodies and a terrible war is likely.  As they are about to do battle they learn there is a huge army of nasty Orcs heading their way.  The humans, elves and dwarves can join together and fight or die.

This is a show you go to for the visuals and the Battle does not disappoint.  If you liked either of the first two Hobbit movies you will love this one.  It is by far the best of the three.  Even if you have not seen the first movies this one stands well alone.  I was entertained.  We had a good time.

The Homesman

The Homesman

Rating 2 out of 10


I am a fan on western and cowboy movies.  John Wayne was the best.  I would easily put Lonesome Dove in the top ten things I have ever watched.  Maybe top five.  Tommy Lee Jones is perfection as Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call. So maybe I set the bar a little high walking in the theater.  Sadly I was greatly disappointed.  I'm guessing this movie came from a great book and was the love child of one of the actors.  It did not transfer over well to film.

This movie is based in the frontier 1800s where people are trying to make it in the new country by farming and or cows or sheep.  Mary Bee Cuddy (Hillary Swank) is a tough woman.  Rough on the inside and out.  She successfully runs her farm and desperately wants a husband.

One of the many side effects of living on the frontier is the wives go insane at an alarming rate.  I'm guessing loneliness or the sound of the wind constantly blowing.  We see an example when one of the frustrated wives tosses her baby into the port-potty.  Someone needs to take three of the crazy women to the city where they can hopefully get help.  None of the men will go so Mary Bee volunteers for the 6-8 week one way trip through dangerous lands.  She is hoping in the city she can find a man to agree to be her husband.  Along the way she picks up a straggler old man George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones) who is being hung for squatting another mans land and eating his sheep.  Mary gives him the choice of being hanged or go with her.  He should have taken the noose.

The cast is nothing short of amazing.  Meryl Streep and her daughter Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, John Lithgow, James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, Barry Corbin, ect.  They stand no chance of helping this slow moving, boring film.  It has a run time of just over two hours and seems much longer.

In case you haven't figured it out by this point I didn't care for this film at all.  I wouldn't even rent this one folks.

The Hunger Games: MockingJay- Part 1

The Hunger Games: MockingJay- Part 1

Rating 6 out of 10

I read the first two Hunger Games books by Susanne Collins.   I enjoyed both books.  I started book III MockingJay and lost interest about half way.  Intended to finish it but never did.  I kinda had the same feeling with the movies.  I didn't think this was a bad movie.  Just very slow.  There may be alot of action in the rebels led by Katness Everdeen overtaking the evil empire.  It's not in this movie.  A movie pet peeve of mine is when previews for the film portray it in a manner that you find to be incorrect.  That is the case here.  When you watch the trailer it looks like an action packed movie.  It absolutely is not.  There is a five second scene in the trailer that shows Katness shooting down an airplane with her bow and arrow.  That is basically all the action you will see in this two hour movie.

Lions Gate Films did with MockingJay as they did with the Twilight films in splitting the finale into two movies to get more information in and more money out.  MockingJay Part I is the buildup to the big show down.  You get a good bit of information and the acting is good.  If you have invested your time into the first two Hunger Game movies you pretty much have to see this one.

I was mildly entertained with this movie even though I saw it when I was very tired and nearly fell asleep in the slowest part.  It's not the best movie of the series so far.  Just necessary to get to the end of the story.

The Way-rental

The Way

Rating 7.5 out of 10

Was talking with a friend of mine saying how there was a movie opening next week with Reese Witherspoon called Wild that looks interesting to me.  She plays a woman who has a good deal of bad things in her life (many caused by herself) and decides the way to heal hear soul is to take a 1000 mile walk in the mountains.  My friend said this reminded her of a movie she saw the trailer to but never got around to watching.  I decided to give it a try and was glad I did.

The Way stars Martin Sheen and his son Emilio Estevez whom also wrote and directed the film.  They play father and son.  The son decides to drop out of graduate school and begin living his life.  Dad is a wealthy doctor with a healthy work ethic who scoffs at his reckless son's plan to walk a famous trail in Spain called the Camino de Santiago or The Way of Saint James.  Thousands in Spain each year walk this trail to find spiritual enlightenment or to find their way.  Some just do it for the exercise to loose weight.

When a freak storm hits early in the sons trip and kills him Dad flies over to gather his remains and worldly goods.  After hearing the story behind the Walk and figuring it would honor his sons memory and help him cope with is grief he decides to make the walk himself and spread his sons ashes along the way.

As he makes his way along the trail he meets many different people.  Some of whom begin to tag along with him when all he really wants is to be left along and deal with his grief.  There are quaint cities along the way for them to stop, eat and sleep at allowing them to absorb some of the local cultures.

The movie drifts off into la-la land a few times but over all this movie is well worth the rental.  I found it on Amazon Prime but believe it's available on Netflix also.  The scenery is fantastic and Sheen's acting is first rate.  The movie almost made me want to give the trail a try.  Only I think I'd want to do it on my four wheeler which would most likely be frowned upon.

This is a good rainy day movie.  I liked it .

Last Man Standing- TV

Last Man Standing 

ABC Friday nights 8p

Last Man Standing is a tv show staring Tim Allen that is on ABC Friday nights.  If you are not watching it you really should be.  Very funny show.  One of my favorites.  I had a trip to LA planned and decided to take in the filming of a couple tv shows while here.  Many shows are filmed in front of a live audience.  Mostly half hour sitcoms and talk shows.  They need butts in the seats and the tickets are free.  There are a few different websites designed to give away those free tickets to people they want to laugh themselves stupid and clap when they want you to.  Luckily for me Last Man is very funny and we never needed prompting on when to laugh or clap.  I have used www.tvtickets.com a couple times to get free tickets to shows.  There are many shows on all the networks available.  

I received my emailed pdf tickets and info a couple weeks ago.  Last Man Standing starts filming at 6p.  The tickets say to check in atleast an hour before.  I found out the atleast should have been in all caps ATLEAST.  Like many Delta flights they oversell the tickets and it's first come first serve.  I got there at 445p with another couple from Orange County and all the tickets were already gone.  We were the first three on the waiting list.  Seems they had a large amount of VIP invited guests show up that were bumping some of us mere mortals.  Luckily some of the VIP's did not show and I was in.  First they put me in a bad seat in the far corner of the stadium seating of 220 seats.  Then they realized I was THE Royce Brown from Atlanta and they moved me to the front row center.  Or one of the VIPs didn't show and they had one empty seat they needed to fill.  Whatever.  

They make you leave your cell phone in the car or you can't get in.  So I have no pictures.  They are very strict on this.  The soundstage is very cool.  About a hundred yards long with five or six different sets that looked like different places you see.  One for the kitchen area, one for the living room, one for the outdoor store, ect.  No seat can see all the filming areas so there are tvs overhead so you can see the filming as it happens.  

They have a warm up comic that keeps the crowd loose and laughing before the show and during the lulls when they are setting up the next camera shot.  He introduced the cast one by one at the start.  Tim Allen took the mic and welcomed everyone.  What was surprising to me is they have what looked like forty writers for the show.  Tim made a joke that they were all depressed from the last elections were the Republicans won many.  He said the only people depressed were the liberals and since this was LA that meant almost everyone but him.  He was funny and came across as a likable nice guy.  

I was surprised the taping for a thirty minute show took just over three hours to film.  They do most every scene twice.  Sometimes tweaking the lines a bit from take to take to see which goes better.  Of course the funniest parts are when they mess up on their lines.  Tim would mess with the other actors to cause them to mess up.  What I found interesting was the behind the scenes.  The actors when they were not in the shot were often sitting on one of the other sets texting on their iPhones or talking quietly among themselves.  

After the show some of the actors came out the same exit we were.  We were able to say hello and give a high five.  I'm sure that was the highlight of their day. : >    This was a fun experience that I'd definitely do again.  

Going to see the Craig Ferguson show tomorrow!

Interstellar

Intersteller

Rating 6.5 out of 10

Paramount Pictures did a great job marketing this movie.  They showed a few clips that barely told what the movie was actually about yet I REALLY wanted to see it.  Still wanted to see it when I found out it was a three hour movie.  Is getting great reviews so I went on opening day.

The movie starts in the near future.  The Earth is dying.  The soil is so depleted due to overpopulation that it won't grow food.  Giant sandstorms are the norm blowing in out of nowhere and lasting for days.  Our star Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is an ex-military pilot turned farmer that is struggling to find something that will still grow to feed his family.  He meets up with his old military leader who shows Coop his plans of a rocket ship to a far off galaxy that will hopefully support human life.  It's many years away and to get there they have to use placed (by whom we don't know) worm holes that speed up the process.  The survival of everyone on earth depends on them.  Somehow three days before liftoff they don't have a main pilot and Cooper is recruited to run the show.

The acting in this movie is very good.  Anne Hathaway is good (even with her still super short haircut that I don't care for), Jessica Chastain (wow), Michael Caine, John Lithgow and Casey Affleck.  The visuals are even better.  It's nothing short of fantastic.

What keeps the movie from having a higher rating for me was it's WAY more complicated than it needs to be.  At times I felt like I was dropped into a class full of rocket scientists discussing at great lengths how worm holes and space travel really works.  Not to mention how in certain areas an hour on this planet equals seven years on earth.  They could have made it far easier to understand without completely dumbing it down.

If you have any desire to see this movie and I did enjoy it- I would say it needs to be seen on a big screen.  The bigger the better.  I saw it on the IMAX screen at NCG and am glad I did.

Chef- Rental

Chef

Rating 8 out of 10

When this movie came out earlier in the year I thought it looked interesting, but didn't have a big desire to go to the theater and see it.  It started getting great reviews which gave me a little more interest in seeing it . Yet it was only playing in a few theaters and I went to see something else.  A few of my friends saw it and highly recommended it.  The movie finally came to RedBox so I gave it a try.

Yes folks, it's a pretty good movie.  It is a fairly low budget movie with an amazing cast and a good script.  It stars Jon Faverau who has been balancing his acting with directing (he directed the first Iron Man movie and many others) which he bout acts and directs this movie.  Faverau plays master chef Carl Casper working in a big Los Angeles restaurant.  He is frustrated because the owner (Dustin Hoffman) won't let him spread his wings with the menu instead wanting to put the same thing on the table year after year.  When a big food reviewer calls him out on this he goes nuts.  It gets filmed and everyone sees it.

The movie is about Casper reinventing himself and getting back in touch with his son that lives with is ex-wife.  It's a likable movie with a good story.  Besides Dustin Hoffman it has Sofia Vergara, Scarlett Johansson, John Leguizamo, Robert Downey Jr and more.

With the cold weather coming in you could do worse than curling up on the couch with a blanket and popping this movie into the DVD player.   I enjoyed it.