Mike Schmidt - The Wall

I'll get back to the 30-day Baseball Card Challenge on Monday, but first this...

A few days ago I saw the movie "Pink Floyd The Wall" on TV. I wasn't buying a lot of records in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and although I'd been a fan of Pink Floyd in the early 1970s, I'd completely missed their 1978 album "The Wall". And somehow, I didn't know that there's been a movie made.

So anyway, a few minutes into the movie there's a riot at a concert and as the rioters are being rounded up by the police, this flashes across the screen.

What a surprise, to me, at least.

Movie Review: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

"I'm one with the Force, and the Force is with me." - Chirrut Imwe

 Do we really need another review of "Rogue One?"  Probably not. If you don't need one, then stop here.

I was not particularly interested in seeing this movie. I know there are a lot of people (some of whom I know personally) really love the Star Wars universe. And I get it why they do. I like Star Wars as well, but I pretty much like any good science fiction. As I've noted before, I'm more a Star Trek kind of guy.

We went to see "Rogue One" last night, and as we were leaving we both said, "That was a lot better than I expected". That's because we had low expectations for the film. But the film didn't just beat those low expectations, we both enjoyed it very much.

It gets off to a really slow start. The first 15-20 minutes are spent introducing the main characters in a variety of different, non-connected locations and situations. We also get a tour of various galactic hot spots: moons, planets, Imperial bases and the like. Sort of like a dramatis personae crossed with a travelog. Boring. I was literally falling asleep during this part.

But fortunately the story started and it got interesting and exciting.

Consider the problems of the story writer. Before this we knew nothing about how the Alliance got the plans for the Death Star beyond the bare fact that some rebels had obtained them.  The writers (it took 5 people to write it) had to come up with a story with virtually nothing to guide them. It helped, I'm sure that they had the details of the Star Wars universe to fill in the background.

Great literature it's not but, really, what did you expect? I don't think anyone had a conversation that lasted more than 2-3 sentences. Exposition was not what you came for anyway. You came for flying spaceships, blasting blasters, weird aliens and the occasional wise crack. You came to the right place.

Lots of daring do, great fight scenes, peril, explosions, bravery, evil intentions, and the story made sense. What more do you want? My biggest problem was trying to figure out everybody's name. I pretty much failed at that.

So, if you're not that really into Star Wars, go see the movie anyway.

One more thought. Does it seem to you that pretty much every Star Wars character, except for the crisp military people, wear rags and live on dusty planets?

Movie Review - Arrival

What is your purpose in coming here?

 

On a day, much like any other day, 12 huge (they're 1,500 feet tall) spaceships arrive at seemingly random points around the Earth. They hover just off the ground. Every 18 hours or so, a door opens in the bottom of each ship allowing humans to enter, if they wish.

Amy Adams plays world-famous translation expert, Dr. Louise Banks. Several days after arrival, the army comes knocking. Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) plays for her a 20 second tape of weird noises. Translate that, Weber says. Dr. Banks explains that it's impossible. A few days later she's taken to Montana, where the only ship to land in the US is hovering. By the way, she's great in this.

The aliens are very large octopus looking creatures but since they only have seven limbs we call them heptapods. We can only attempt to communicate with them through a transparent window. The creatures are embraced in fog. Although recordings have been made of the alien's noises at all 12 sites, no one has had a breakthrough. Dr. Banks, has a different idea, trying to use written language. She gets a written response instantly, which looks like this.

 Not very obvious but a start.

I love science fiction, written and filmed. Most movie science fiction is of the spaceship shoot 'em style which I'll watch ("Star Wars: Rogue One" is out in a few weeks) but this is different. No human-alien fight scenes. This is not "Independence Day".

"What is your purpose in coming here?" is the question everybody wants Dr. Banks to ask. She eventually does but it takes most of the movie. The movie is largely her trying to understand the aliens language with a lot of background tension going on. The Chinese and Russians are also 'talking' to the aliens but when they understand the aliens to say "we are out of time", they jump to conclusions which heighten tension and cause the various teams to cut communication with each other.

Jeremy Renner plays physicist Ian Donnelly. He's solid but doesn't have much to do other than support Amy Adams. Forrest Whitaker as Colonel Weber does a good job as the straight-forward Army man trying to follow orders while trying to understand Dr. Bank's work. He does a good job not sinking into a cliche. 

It is a pretty good movie. I might not take my young children to see it. Not because it's scary (although it is in parts, but more like international tension scary, which I'm guessing your average 8-year-old wouldn't understand) but because kids will find this boring. You might as well, there's not a lot of action. Amy Adams drawing alien symbols on graph paper may not be your definition of excitement. All though the movie Dr. Banks has flashes of memories of her dead daughter. The ending brings that story line and the aliens together through the use of great twist (which would be a major spoiler so you won't hear it here) making for a very satisfactory ending.

Movie Review - The Magnificent Seven

The trailers for this make the movie seem like a light-hearted romp with beautiful western scenery. We liked it, but it was appallingly violent. I probably saw the 1960 original, but it was many years ago and remember nothing about it. Certainly the original must have had plenty of violence, it being basically about a battle between two groups of gunfighters. In this remake, the Mexican bandits of the original have been replaced by a gold mine owner who can hire a seemingly limitless supply of men willing to die for pay. I guess the mine was pretty profitable.

Bartholomew Bogue, the evil mine owner (played by Peter Sarsgaard doing a passable John Malkovich impersonation), has been terrorizing the nearby town of Rose Creek. The town folk are represented as a bunch of simple farmers, although there is not a sign of crops anywhere. I'd think that in real life, Rose Creek would be a rough and tumble mining town filled with saloons, gambling establishments and prostitutes. For reasons that are not clear, Bogue wants to buy the town and offers the town folks a deal: pay me a pittance for the land and leave, or I'll kill you all. To impress the folks that he's serious, he burns down the church and gratuitously kills a few guys.

The first half or so of the movie was the best. Emma Cullen (Halley Bennett), whose husband was killed by Bogue, takes it upon herself to buy some protection. She meets up with lawman Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington) and he agrees to recruit a team to help her for whatever it was in the black bag she was carrying. Chisolm recruits a racially diverse group of seven gunman, gamblers, an Indian, and Civil War veterans (one of which seems to suffering from PTSD). As Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt) says during the process "Oh good, we got us a Mexican".

Chisolm and his recruits set about trying to train the townsfolk into something approximating a militia. They look pretty hopeless. Bogue and his men are out of town for 3 weeks giving the seven ample time to plan a defense of the town, making liberal use of the mine's dynamite and weapons.

What follows is a bloody slaughter. Between rifle and hand gun shootings, explosions, stabbings, arrows and a Gatling gun, I would estimate that 350 people get killed, mostly Bogue's hired men.

The magnificent seven guys are mostly presented as good guys, willing to die for a good cause, so you don't feel bad about cheering for them to win. It also turns out that Chisolm has reasons of his own for joining the fray.

One thing I learned from researching for this review is that the 1960 version (according to Wikipedia) is the 2nd most seen movie on TV, after "The Wizard of Oz".

Movie Review - "Sully"

How does a movie maker find drama in a story that everyone knows the ending to?

While the "Miracle on the Hudson" may not be one of those events that you'll always remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard about it, it only happened 7 years ago, in 2009. And it got a lot of TV coverage.

What director Clint Eastwood has done is make the movie more about the National Transportation Safety Board investigation then about the actual crash in the river. We get to see the crash several times from many angles, but the movie spends more time in conference rooms than in the chilly Hudson.

Tom Hanks does a wonderful job, as you might expect, playing the man-of-little-words, just doin' my job hero. Hanks was apparently born to play such parts.

I found the crash scenes to be pretty scary and emotional. There is one scene in particular when the plane is going down, where the flight attendants, in their jump seats in the front of the passenger compartment, scream "Brace brace brace! Keep your heads down!" in unison, over and over. I swear, if I ever survive a plane crash, I would hear the flight attendants yelling in my nightmares forever.

The movie is pretty short, only 96 minutes, but didn't feel rushed.

Aaron Eckhart, who plays the co-pilot, Jeff Skiles, with understatement and some humor, is also pretty good, and really, the only other actor other than Hanks who has much to do. To me, he's always that guy on screen that you recognize but can't remember where you saw him before. Oh, yeah, he played Harvey Dent in that Batman movie.  Maybe I'll remember him now.

The only drawback of the film for me was tone of the investigation. From some reviews I've read (notably the bad reviews), Eastwood rather played up the NTSB as trying to 'get' Sully and Skiles and blame them for the crash. There is a key reveal during the public hearing part of the investigation, which I won't spoil for you, that I, in particular, found ridiculous, although it didn't ruin the movie for me. If you don't know by now that movies about true events are often highly fictionalized, then I'm sorry to break your bubble.

The day before the film opened, Ton Hanks and Chesley Sullenberger  were on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. I hadn't had much interest in seeing the movie up until then but their appearance made me interested. Hanks talked about how the NTSB is required to investigate every plane crash. He spoke quite favorable about the NTSB and said in real life it was a 'friendly' interrogation that Sully went through. Which is not how it was in the movie.

Movie Review - The Martian

I'd read the book last year and really liked it.

When I heard that a movie version was coming out in 2015, I was pretty excited but expected to be disappointed. My wife and I went to see it last Sunday and I was not disappointed.

I consider the book to be 'hard' science fiction but in a different sense than I usually mean it. All the science and engineering in it is based on actual science, not speculative stuff like warp drives and alien species. There's some suspension of disbelief involved in that if you know anything about the current state of NASA's plans for a Mars visit, a lot of problems that don't seem to have solutions get solved.

Mark Watney gets stranded on Mars by a wind and sand storm much stronger than anything expected. Apparently this is the most unbelievable part of the book and the movie. There just isn't enough gravity on Mars to produce such a storm.

The book spent a lot of time with Mark as he figures out how the "science the shit out of" his predicament. Lots of calculations and Mark talking to himself. Much of this is cut down in the movie and it's just as well. It's one thing to read about Mark calculating how long is Mars grown potatoes are going to last but actually watching him doing the calculations would be a bit tedious.

The movie was very faithful to the book. Mark in the book is a wise-cracking astronaut and I thought Matt Damon did a good job of getting that across. Mark in the book is about the most determined man you could imagine multiplied by 10. This comes across in the movie a bit like cock-eyed optimism but Damon never goes over the top with it.

Back on earth,  NASA first tries to cover its ass, making Watney a dead hero. But after Watney makes contact and they realize he is still alive, the powers that be at NASA realize that they have to mount some sort of rescue mission. They try to do it as cheaply as possible in the beginning but as Watney faces setbacks, NASA takes on the challenge whole-heartedly.

Is Watney rescued? Well, the trailers I saw didn't say so you're going to have to see the movie or read the book. As with just about everything else, the movie follows the book pretty closely.

In case you've forgotten, this isn't the fist movie about an American astronaut stranded on Mars. There was this 1964 movie which has more action but doesn't seem as realistic.

Movie Review - "Mr. Holmes"

Are you getting a bit tired of summer spectacle movies? I know I am and we still have a least the new Mission Impossible movie to go.  Take a break and go see the wonderful "Mr. Holmes.

It's 1947 in post-war England. Sherlock Holmes, now 93 years old, has retired to the countryside with a housekeeper and her young son. He lives a quiet life, taking the occasional dip in the sea and taking care of his beloved bees. And he is writing, or trying to write, the story of his last case, "The Case of The Lady in Grey", which happened some 30 years before. Holmes has long been dissatisfied with Watson's version of the story and wants to put the record straight. The problem is, he can't remember what actually happened. He remembers that he badly bungled the case and this is why he retired.

The movie unfolds on two tracts. In 1947, Holmes, old and ill, makes friends with young Roger, his housekeeper's son. He instructs him on how to take care of the bees and allows the boy to read the manuscript of the story he is slowly writing. In turn, the boy gives him friendship and helps him with his memory.

The second track takes place 30 years before in a different post-war England. The story of the Lady in Grey is told in these flashbacks. A much younger and more sure-of-himself Holmes takes on a case from a young man who believes his wife, the Lady in Grey, is lying to him about her activities.

Ian McKellen is just wonderful as Sherlock Holmes in both tracks of the story. We meet him as a crabby old man, just returned from a difficult journey to Japan. He slowly thaws and becomes friendly with the boy. Young actor Milo Parker is very engaging as Roger. This is only his third movie. I couldn't tell from his IMDB page but I guess he is about 10 years old. Watch out for this kid.
The third major character in the story is Roger's mother, Mrs. Munro, played by Laura Linney. Her story is that she lost her husband to the war and is very protective of Roger. She distrusts Holmes' interest in Roger and see him as trying to take away her boy, the only thing she has left. 

This may not be in the theaters long so go and see it soon.

Movie Review - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)

You probably remember the TV show "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" which ran from 1964-1968. But before that there was a movie in 1961.

At book sale at our local library a couple of weeks ago I picked up Season 1 of the television show. Included was the 'never before seen pilot'. Certainly I had never seen it. If you hadn't seen the movie you would have to agree that the pilot pretty much set the tone for the entire series. But, in fact, the movie set the tone. Except for the lack of women in the TV show.

First of all, look who was in this movie!  Trivia - Michael Ansara (who later played a Klingon on Star Trek) was married to Barbara Eden while this movie was made.

Walter Pidgon is Admiral Nelson, the inventor of the fabulous nuclear submarine "Seaview". The two distinguishing features of the Seaview are the giant windows in the front and the 1959 Cadillac fins on the back. In the movie, the sub as part of the US Navy but in the TV show, it was part of some marine study institute. The Seaview is on her maiden cruise carrying a few dignitaries, Dr. Susan Hiller (Joan Fontaine) and Congressman Llewellyn Parker (Howard McNear, mostly known as Floyd the barber from Mayberry). Dr. Hiller is there as part of a psychological study of the crewmen and Parker is with a congressional budget committee who always opposed the building of the Seaview and wants to see if the government got it's moneys worth. He carries a notebook and a sharp pencil.

After a few practice dives at under the Arctic ice,  the Seaview gets bombarded underwater by sinking chunks of ice. Since ice usually floats this was a surprise. The Seaview surfaces and finds that the sky is on fire. Admiral Nelson learns from Naval command that a errant meteor has set the Van Allen Radiation Belt on fire! The Van Allen Belt had only just been discovered in 1958 so I guess it sounded plausible. The air temperature was already 130 degrees. Before they leave, they see a guy laying on a hunk of ice and rescue him and his dog. What he was doing there is never explained. This is Miguel Alvarez (Michael Ansara).

The crew hightails it to New York to meet with a UN expert panel of scientists. On the way, Nelson and Comm. Lucius Emery (Peter Lorre) concoct a scheme to launch a nuclear missile at the burning belt to blow out the fire. Emery's role on the Seaview is unclear. He seems to spend much of his time studying the sharks that Seaview have in a giant tank on board. The missile has to be launched at some precise location in the Pacific Ocean at a precise time in order to work. By the time Nelson arrives at the UN, some crazy scientist on the panel had already convinced them that the fire would burn it self out at 173 degrees. By then of course everybody would be dead and the planet a cinder (which nobody mentions). Nelson, insisting that only his plan would work, storms out of the UN and takes off in the Seaview.

The TV pilot had a similar plot, only it was a earthquake that was going to occur in the Arctic which would send devastating tidal waves into the Atlantic and Pacific. Nelson blew up a nuke to stop the earthquake.

After many adventures, the Seaview gets to the launch point and saves the day.

Some charactor notes:

Admiral Nelson is pretty much a megalomaniac who is convinced he is right and doesn't care what happens to anyone as long as he gets his way.  This character was toned way down for the TV show.

Captain Lee Crane (Robert Sterling) is played pretty straight as the boat's commanding officer who gets increasing worried about his superior officer's seeming increasing insanity. In the TV show, Crane is the solo real Naval officer on board.

In a surprising move for 1961, the Seaview has a woman officer, Lt Cathy Conners. Of course, she's played by Barbara Eden, and is engaged to Lee Crane. She spends a lot of time hanging all over the captain and screaming.

Already mentioned is Comm. Lucius Emery (Peter Lorre). He mostly seems like a absent-minded professor.

Joan Fontaine as Dr. Heller is interesting. It's not clear how long she was supposed to be aboard the Seaview but she is wearing a different outfit pretty much every time we see her. BTW, she and Barbara Eden wear high heels. On a submarine.  Her function seems to be to convince Crane that Nelson is crazy and will kill them all. Eventually, convinced of this herself, she goes into the reactor room and somehow sabotages it, getting a lethal does of radiation (shown by the badges everyone wears) in the process. But we don't have to watch her slowly die as she falls into Emery's shark tank and gets eaten alive. Really.

Miguel Alvarez (Michael Ansara), the mystery man from the Arctic, turns out to be some kind of religious zealot who spends his time trying to convince the crew that we are all helpless against God and if God wants to burn the world down, there's nothing we can do about it. The movie comes down to a religious discussion between Alvares (who has a bomb he found conveniently laying around) and Nelson. While this is going on, Crane, goes outside the sub and somehow launches the missile by hand.

After the missile launches, the Seaview surfaces and everybody goes out on the deck so they can watch the nuke explode right over their heads.

OK, here's a special treat, Frankie Avalon singing the love theme from "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea". I strongly recommend you don't listen to more than 15 seconds of this.

Movie Review - The Age of Adaline

Last weekend my wife, my daughter and I went to see "Marvel's The Age of Adaline". I was pretty disappointed. Where was Iron Man and Captain America? Where were the great special effects?  Oh, what a minute. This was not that Marvel movie.

I told my wife and daughter that I was going to open my review this way and they didn't think it was too funny. But it's my blog so I'm going with it.

I hadn't even heard of this movie until I saw Blake Lively, who plays Adaline, on a talk show. The concept sounded intriguing. The scene they showed had Harrison Ford in it. I'll got to any movie with Harrison Ford. When I heard my wife and daughter planning to see it, I joined them.

It's not a particularly original story. A person (Adaline) finds that she seems to be immortal, or at least long-lived. How does she face life when all about her grow old except her?

OK, so a familiar story but done pretty well. Adaline, born in 1908, seems like a normal girl. When she is 29 she's in a horrific car accident, which through an improbably series of events, stops her from aging. She spends most of her life running from shadowy government types who want to study her and entanglements with other people, especially men.

The first 30 minutes or so details all this background and the story gets going in 2014. Her best friend is a blind woman who thinks Adaline is older than she looks. She has no other friends, except a daughter born before the accident who now looks more like Adaline's grandmother than her daughter. She's well on planning her next disappearance when she meets a guy and lets him open a crack into her life.

I'm not very familiar with Blake Lively's work. The only thing I've seen her in was 2011's "Green Lantern". Than movie was so forgettable that I believe I've lost remembrance of 2-3 months of my life around when I saw it.

Lively is, of course, a beautiful woman and, if you're a guy, you might see how someone could fall in love with her at first glance. But what really got to me was her voice. She's a young woman, but she speaks with a feeling of experience well beyond her age. She is, after all, over 100 years old. Even as she starts to fall in love with this guy, you can hear in her voice that she's not at all sure it's a good idea.

She was entirely captivating in every scene she was in, both by how she looked and how she spoke.

If you're a little tired of summer blockbuster fare (even though it's only May), I'd strongly recommend this movie.

Movie Review - Mad Max Fury Road

We went to see this last night, the opening night. We got to the theater about an hour before show time because we thought it would be crowded. We were the fist into the theater. The theater eventually got to be about 1/3 full. I predict a bad opening weekend.

Of the 120 minutes of this movie, I'd easily say that 100 minutes of it were car chases and running battles. If this is what you like about the Mad Max movies (and really, what more is there), then you'll love this movie. Is Tom Hardy a good replacement for Mel Gibson? Sure, it's not like there is any actual acting in the movie.

The action scenes are very well done. The action is relentless, from the opening Warner Bros. logo to the end credits. The dialog in the movie would take up, maybe 10 double-spaced typewritten pages. And some of that is grunts. In fact, Tom Hardy hardly more than grunts through the first half of the movie.

There is a plot, sort of. Charlize Theron is Imperator Furiosa. I was never clear if this was her name or her title. She's actually the main character in the movie. Max is just along for the ride. Fury is trying to escape The Citadel, where one crazy guy controls the water and the good looking women and the guns. Max, who is haunted by dreams and visions of those he couldn't help in the past, ends up helping her. The eventual lesson of the movie, if you can call it that, is that there's no place like home.

Do  you have questions like, how could civilizations degenerate so far since Max was a young man? In what appears to be a vast featureless desert, where do people find enough food and water to survive? Are there sufficient oil reserves in Australia to support this level of automotive activity? Where do all the bullets come from?  Forget all these questions, the chase is on!

The last real Mad Max movie, with Mel Gibson, was"Beyond Thunderdome". It was released in 1985. Of the three people with me in the theater (2 of my kids and one of their friends) only one of them was alive then, and he was only 1 year old.

End-Of-The-Year Sci-Fi Movies (the last one) - "Apollo 18"

And the reason is moon spiders.

Thought the Apollo moon missions ended with Apollo 17?  This 2011 movie says differently.  After the remaining Apollo missions were canceled, NASA decided to launch one more, Apollo 18, in secrecy. It would be a military mission to place a system that would give the US early warning of a Russian missile strike against the United States.

For some reason, the director decided to go with the 'found footage' genre. I guess it added some suspense but since a lot of the footage shot on the moon was with hand-held movie cameras, it sure isn't clear where the footage was found. Also, the footage was supposedly released on an unofficial website.

I didn't know any of the actors in this. The entire cast of the movie is basically the three astronauts. Warren Christie (Commander Nathan Walker), Lloyd Owen (Captain Ben Anderson), and Ryan Roberts (Colonel John Grey) play the crew. Walker and Anderson descend to the moon on 'Liberty' while Grey stays behind in the obit on 'Freedom'.

Things start to go wrong almost immediately. The first day is spent placing the monitoring devices and collecting a few more moon rocks while glitches start interfering with Earth and Freedom bound communications.

The second day, they look over the rim of a nearby crater and see another space craft. They get into the rover and drive over to it. It's a Russian moon lander!  They manage to get into it. They find some blood but the lander appears to be operational with good supplies of air and fuel.

Then they find a pitch black cave nearby and Commander Walker decides to take a look. For illumination he has some sort of strobe light, which makes for some suspenseful footage but doesn't make much sense. He finds a dead cosmonaut.

Walker and Anderson get back in their lander and things really start to go bad. Communications with Freedom and NASA are completely down. Walker thinks something is in his spacesuit and although they don't find anything, he's got a laceration on his abdomen and something seems to be lodged under his skin. Anderson pulls it out and it looks like a moon rock. Walker smashes it with a hammer.

After another sleeping period (while we watch something small skittering around the lander), they attempt to launch but something goes wrong. Outside the lander they can see that the flag they put up has been knocked down and the rover is sitting on it's side. Still no communications. Walker is sick and clearly infected. And their air is running out.

Anderson decides they have to abandon their ship and make to the Russian ship. He manages to get Walker in a spacesuit, but Walker collapses on the trip and appears dead. Anderson decides to take one more look into the dead cosmonaut cave and sees things erupting from the moon dust. He rushes to the Russian ship and seals himself in. After he powers it up, he manages to establish communications with Grey in Freedom. Grey has been spending a lot of time saying "Freedom, do you read me?" Then they make contact with NASA and then a military guy who says, yea, we knew what you were going to find and you can't come home because you're infected too.

Anderson and Gray decide, against orders, to launch the Russian ship and meet with Freedom, where Anderson will have to make a space walk between the vessels. Just before the rocket goes off, Walker shows up at the window with an ax and attempts to break in. He's got what look like giant spiders running around inside his helmet. Anderson launches and indeed he is infected and passes out after he gets aimed at Freedom. The out-of-control Russian ship crashes into Freedom and the movie ends.

End-of-the-Year Sci-Fi Movie Reviews - "Age of Tomorrow"

I don't know if I can do another of these movies after watching this.  I have a hard time understanding how these kind of movies get made.

Here's the synopsis that Netflix gave for this movie "When the sun strikes an altar hidden within the ancient Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico, it creates a beacon that triggers an alien blitzkrieg". It didn't sound too promising, however, nothing in that synopsis, expect for the last two words actually happens in the movie. The only reason I can think of to name this movie "Age of Tomorrow" is the hope that people would confuse it with the Tom Cruise movie "Edge of Tomorrow". In fact if you image Goggle "Age of Tomorrow" most of the images are "Edge of Tomorrow". If you can fool Goggle, you can fool anybody.

The story started out looking like a high school reenactment of "Armageddon". That's right, another asteroid is heading for the earth and it's a 1/4 the size of the moon. And learning nothing from either "Armageddon" or "Asteroid vs. Earth", we're gonna try to blast it from the sky. The "best pilot" we have (Captain James Wheeler) who has "issues" is tapped to lead his band of "roughnecks" in a CG spaceship to the asteroid and plant explosives.  Coming along for the ride is the best expert we have on "interstellar geology" (Dr. Gordon - this film is so low budget, she doesn't get a first name), to direct the placing of the charges. The mission is put together by General Magowan who is played by Richard Picardo. You may recognize him as The Doctor from "Star Trek Voyager". It's the second movie in a row featuring a refugee from Star Fleet.

They crash land on the asteroid and with machine guns in hand, they go out to place the charges. The low budget doesn't extend as far as trying to reproduce a low gravity environment, nor does it explain why they needed machine guns (and it later turns out knives) on this mission. Well it's just as well they did. All of a sudden a swarm of spheres streams out of the rock toward earth. One takes a swipe at their ship leaving them stranded. Luckily (?) they find some sort of portal which takes them to the alien's home planet. It has lovely blue vegetation.

Back on earth, the alien machines, which look like miniature Death Stars, are causing havoc in Los Angeles. Fireman Chris Meher and is crew are trying to put out the resulting fires while dodging alien machines, when Chris gets a call from his 17-year-old daughter. Instead of being at home, she's gone into town and is trapped in an office building.  Meher and company run into an Army group which mostly gets wiped out by the aliens. Chris gets his men and Major Blake, the only surviving soldier, to help rescue his daughter. One of the fireman says to another "Rescue his daughter? That's a bad idea". The other says "Yeah, she isn't even that cute". They both get killed by an alien blast for those remarks.

Eventually we learn that the aliens, who by the way look like the aliens in "Preditor" but with shorter dreadlocks, are a dying race. They have only one queen left. For some reason they are not killing everyone on earth, some are being teleported to their planet. This is what happens to Chris' daughter just when he's found her.

The aliens are torturing the humans they send back or blowing them up in what look like futuristic telephone booths. They then may be feeding the remains to the queen. Captain James Wheeler's get killed in one gruesome manner or another. Wheeler manages to escape and finds the team's radio. He sends a rather disjointed message back to earth. Again no budget to account for the speed of light in this movie as the message is instantly received back on earth.  The good Captain gets one of the serrated blades the aliens have sprouting out of the backs of their hands through is chest for his trouble.

Back on earth, The Doctor, I mean General Macowan, completely understands Wheeler's message. They are planing the greatest assault ever launched by earth. First, a fleet of 6 CG space ships will be sent against the asteroid to blow it up and seal off the portal the aliens are using to get their ships to earth. At the same time, a crack team of heavily-armed soldiers will be sent through a portal created by an alien machine they captured to rescue the humans on the alien planet. This crack team consists of Major Blake armed with a hand gun and a flashlight, fireman Chris, armed with a giant axe, and 6 other soldiers with an odd assortment of automatic weapons and a bazooka. None of them is wearing a helmet. This assault doesn't exactly look like D-Day.

We've already seen that the aliens are pretty hard to kill. Bullets just bounce off. Captain Wheeler managed to kill one by sticking a knife in it's ear (or whatever it had on the side of its head).

It's a good thing that Chris had the axe because it was the only weapon effective against the aliens. While the rest of his team gets wiped out, usually without even firing their weapons, Chris mows those aliens down with his fireman's axe. He finally find his daughter but she gets a gut shot. He gets her outside, saying "Let's go home", even though there didn't seem to be any provisions to get back to earth.

Meanwhile, The Doctor gets the decisive shot against the asteroid and blows it to pieces, only to see that all the pieces are going to hit the earth.

Back on the alien plant, Chris puts his daughter down by a tree and sees he's surrounded by aliens. He starts to pick up his axe, but his daughter manages to croak out, "Dad, it's over". Chris grabs the axe and says something line "It ain't over yet" and leaps toward the nearest alien.

Roll credits. Seriously, that was the end of the movie. Perhaps they had some sort of sequel in mind.

End-of-the-Year Sci Fi Movie Reviews - "Asteroid vs. Earth"

Tell me if you've heard of this plot before. A giant asteroid is going to strike the earth and wipe out mankind unless we can stop it first. Think movies like 1998's "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon". "Asteroid vs. Earth" is nothing like those other movies. "Asteroid vs. Earth" is genuinely terrible. So terrible that I'm sure I lost 10s of IQ points while watching it. It's on Netflix if you don't believe me.

The movie opens with a kid (19-years-old, maybe?) in the control room of a large telescope somewhere. He's got some awful music playing at ear shattering volume while he rolls around in an office chair monitoring the various computer screens. I never really caught this guy's name and didn't see anybody in the credits likely to be him, so I'm just going to call him "The Kid". We later learn that he's an intern genius who once built a working nuclear reactor in his garage.

Through the music he hears a strange beeping. He frantically starts typing on one of the keyboards the runs over to the eye piece of the telescope and sees an asteroid heading straight for us. He instantly figures out that it's going to hit the earth in 10 days and calls some woman up even though it's 3 in the morning. He tells her what he found, she says, OK, let me think about this, and we never hear from her again. Just the first of the many weird continuity problems in this movie.

The next think he knows, a squad of soldiers with NSA written on their caps storms the place and holds him a gunpoint.

Next, the craggy faced guy in the poster, General Masterson (Robert Davi) is taken from his home, which had just survived a "super cell storm", by helicopter to the telescope. He's in charge of launching nukes at the asteroid. The Kid tells him it won't work, that the asteroid is 1/4 the size of the moon and we'll never stop it. This is another continuity problem. Later he says that the asteroid is about 200 miles across (about 1/10 of the moon) and still later he says it's 34 miles across. He says that since we can't stop the asteroid we have to move the earth out of the way. His suggestion is to explode a nuke in the Yap Trench. This will cause massive earth quakes around the Pacific Rim pushing the earth out of the way.  The General, without consulting with anybody, like the Chief of Staff, or the President, or even the Speaker of the House, sets in motion a plan to do just that.

Here's where Tia Carrere (as Melissa Knox) comes in. She has a remote controlled submarine that can be modified to carry a nuke and driven into the trench. She's picked up by the military, stashed aboard a submarine (the USS Polk) and dispatched to the Trench.

The nuke that the general sent to the asteroid hits dead center but only manages to blow some rocks out toward earth and somehow make the larger asteroid speed up, which, of course, makes perfectly no sense.

When the Polk left it's base it offloaded some of it's warheads and leaves it's gunnery officer (Ray) in charge of them. Every scene with Ray in it seemed to be wrong. He's got the nukes (there seem to be four of them, with 4 marines and maybe another 30 people, in a warehouse somewhere. Then a volcano behind the building erupts, apparently because of the gravitational pull of the asteroid. Ejecta starts raining down on the building and Ray says they've got to get the nukes out. A fork truck picks up two of them and heads out of the building. Ray, and the four marines make it out of the building before it collapses. Ray checks with the marine sergeant who says all his men got out. Everybody else seems to have gotten killed but Ray is unconcerned. Then they open the two warheads and remove a heavy bullet shaped thing from them which goes into a foam-lined case. They pull one of these from each of the two warheads and end up with 6 cases. The marines load the cases into a couple of Suburbans and the four marines split into two groups. 3 of them get into one Suburban with Ray and the other 3 get into the other Suburban. I can't even go on with this.

Back to the Polk. One of the pieces of the asteroid lands on Hong Kong and makes quite a mess. The Chinese Navy scrambled before the impact and now a Chinese sub is firing at the Polk. They've got the mini-sub in the water and are guiding it into the trench but get hit a few times. The sub starts taking on water in the aft portion. And the captain gets electrocuted. I almost forgot about the Captain, he's played by Tim Russ from "Star Trek Voyager". His promotion from First Officer to Captain didn't work out well. The Polk's first officer (Commander Chase Steward), in order to save the boat, blows off the aft end and the rest floats to the surface. WTF.

I'm going to wrap this up. The mini-sub blows up in the Trench but it's not enough. So Chase calls up Ray on the radio and tells him he has to throw his nukes into a volcano, apparently not the same volcano he ran from. And he has 49 minutes to do it. And he does. And the earth moves.

Stay tuned for the squeal "Earth vs. the Sun".

End-of-the-Year Sci-Fi Movie Reviews - "Parts Per Billion"

Last year around this time I found myself watching a bunch of relatively new but not very good science fiction movies on Netflix. I wrote reviews of them on the blog. Since there isn't much going on in baseball cards at this time of the year, I thought I'd do the same this year.

Our first feature is "Parts Per Billion", a direct to rental, released in May of 2014.

The movie follows the fate of three couples, Erik and Annie (top row), Len and Mia (middle row) and Andy and Esther (bottom row) as a biological agent is used in the Middle East.  It has a pretty well known, including Frank Langella, Gena Rowlands, Rosario Dawson and Josh Hartnett. The phrase "parts per billion" is used twice in the movie, which hardly seems like a reason to use it as the title.

The movie opens with Erik, a musician, noodling on his guitar while his girl friend Anna is watching faux CNN on her laptop.  Scenes of Erik and Anna arguing about dirty dishes, going to dinner, meeting an old girl friend of Erik's are inter-spaced with news flashes concerning first the rumors of biological warfare, the denial by everyone involved, and people dropping dead in the street. At first the US looks safe but, according to one newscaster, the "trade winds" are blowing the pathogen across Europe.

Here's the first, for me, real problem with the movie. In the northern hemisphere, the trade winds are called the "westerlies" because they blow from the west. This movie would have you believe the westerlies blow toward the west. A minor error perhaps but the entire movie relies on the pathogen reaching the US East Coast relatively quickly. If the movie had been more engaging, I'd care less about this.

The movie jumps from current time scenes, like the one described above, to flashbacks presented in confusing order and, at least in the beginning, no awareness for the viewer that a flashback is happening. Through these flashbacks we learn that these three couples are connected, although that connection ultimately does not matter.

Andy is the original inventor of the pathogen although he claims to believe he didn't know if it's potential use as a weapon. This brought much money to Andy. Erik is Andy's grandson, who was only born as a result of Andy's ill-gotten wealth keeping his daughter, who had some unnamed disease, alive long enough for Andy to be born. Mia is Andy's lawyer. He's being sued for disclosing trade secrets of the company that developed the pathogen from Andy's work. It's through this connection we learn that Andy was sorry he'd ever worked on the project. Mia has to practically slap him in the face to keep him focused.

The flashbacks for each couple intermingle with each other and with the present scenes. Erik and Anna, seem to take no precautions for the pending disaster, even though Anna was pretty worried about it in the beginning of the movie. Andy and Esther were in the hospital due to an apparent Esther heart-attack. As people in the hospital are dropping like flies, Andy has rustled up some small oxygen canisters to keep he and his wife alive. He tells Esther that the pathogen is only deadly above a concentration in the air of 30 parts per billion and that after 8 days the pathogen will expire (or something). Len and Mia, who apparently had miles of plastic sheeting in their house, have sealed up all the windows and doors and prepare to wait out the 8 days in the basement. They hear on the radio, apparently the last thing before the radio dies, that it's 45 parts per billion they have to worry about.

That this wasn't a very good movie wasn't for lack of trying. There are some good actors in this and I'd say that the acting was pretty credible. But ultimately these people weren't very interesting and all the effort that went into tying their stories together meant noting.

By the end of the movie, they may all be dead. Erik and Anna who spent the last few minutes of their life making love sure look dead. Andy and Esther, after having made a trek from the hospital they were in to another hospital looking for more oxygen, go out on the hospital lawn and take off their oxygen masks (which probably weren't protecting them anyway) and gaze expectantly into the sky. Len and Mia, who seem to have the best chance to survive, get into an argument over if they should do the 'Adam and Eve' thing. On the second or maybe third day of their hiding, Mia wants out. Len begs her to stay. The last we see of them is Mia on the basement stairs with Len on his knees begging.

Throughout the movie, Anna was having visions (or psychotic breaks) where she was seeing a young blond girl running barefoot through he woods wearing a white shift and a necklace of flowers.  Since Anna is blond, I thought it was some childhood memory. The last scene has the little girl running down to a river where a woman, also dressed in a white shift, is apparently about to clean some clothes in the river. The little girl shows what she found in the woods - Anna's engagement ring.

Make of this what you will.

Two interesting facts about the movie. One, it was filmed in Detroit. The State of Michigan granted the film company about $300,000 in state tax incentives. It was never made clear where the story was taking place and the director seemed to be taking pains to not reveal it was Detroit. A local may have known. The second fact is that the movie had 16 executive producers, including actor Dennis Hopper, who died 4 years ago.

Movie Review - Interstellar

I don't really like to post two movie reviews in a week but we went to see Interstellar Monday and I want to write something while it's still fresh in my mind.

Since the movie just opened last week, I'll try to keep the spoilers at a minimum. I will say that the movie when viewed is not the movie as presented in the trailers.

The story takes place in the near future. The Earth is dying for unspecified reasons. Or maybe it's just that the Earth is tired of us humans messing up the place like ungrateful house guests and is emptying the fridge and refusing to buy anymore beer.  Perhaps it's time to move on.

Cooper, usually called Coop (Mathew McConaughey), seems to be a poor dirt farmer somewhere where they grow corn and all the roads are dirt roads. It's damn dusty all the time. Could be the 1930's Dust Bowl, but he's got satellite guided tractors.  And he's a former NASA pilot.

By means that are too complicated to explain, Coop finds a secret NASA base within driving distance of his house. NASA is housed in a secret base because with all the other problems going on (like nobody's got enough to eat), flying space missions isn't a high priority anymore. But this base seems to have plenty of funding. In fact they are planning to fly a mission through a worm hole that's appeared near Saturn. They've already flown several missions through it and know that there are planets on the other side (in another galaxy) which may hold promise as the future home of humanity. The purpose of the mission is to confirm the earlier findings. And since Coop used to be the best pilot NASA had, would he please pilot the ship. This much you can figure out from the trailers.

The rest of the movie is a pretty good science fiction spectacle which doesn't rely on energy beam weapons and planets blowing up. Black holes, relativity, gravity, giant tidal waves and lengthy speculations on the meaning of it all are involved. And as McConaughey and Anne Hathaway have pointed out on numerous talk shows the movie is also about the love of a father for his daughter (although that is not at all apparent from the trailers).

My daughter and I enjoyed it immensely even though there are certainly problems with it. But most of the problems are of a science fictional universe type of problem. There are some characterization problems as well. For example, Coop's 10-year-old daughter, Murphy (who names their daughter Murphy?), who wouldn't say good-bye to Daddy when he left, seems to nurse a hatred for her father against all that she should have learned about his mission as she grows to adulthood.

One of the science fiction problems is a time-loop which would involve too many spoilers to explain. Read some of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes if you want more info. If you get too bent out of shape by such things you probably shouldn't be watching science fiction movies. Neil Degrasse Tyson didn't have too much trouble with it. When confronted with a problem like this I remember what Old Joe told Young Joe in the movie "Looper". "I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws."

As to the acting. I don't much like McConaughey as an actor, although I guess he's alright in this. Anne Hathaway, who plays a mission scientist named Brand, spends too much time acting like a woman in a Christopher Nolan movie that a scientist, does the best she can with some pretty dopey lines. Michael Caine, who plays her father, Professor Brand, pretty much plays a straight Michale Caine. John Lithgow is Coop's father-in-law, has only aphorism to add to the movie. But the movie isn't really (no matter what they said on the talk shows) about acting, it's about flying a giant spinning space ship through a worm hole, although the second half of the movie had my daughter in tears, so what do I know?

Movie Review - Guardians of the Galaxy

I don't normally do two movie reviews in the same week, but, then again, we don't usually go out and see two new movies in a week either.

Is there anything I can tell you about this movie that you haven't already heard?  Probably not.

This is the sort of movie that is so much fun, you don't notice, or really even care, that large parts of it make no sense. So I'm not even going to bring that stuff up.

The movie is pretty much completely divorced from the main run of Marvel movies. The only connections are a character known only as The Collector and Thanos. Both were mentioned in end-of-credit clips from other Marvel movies. The Collector (last seen in "Thor: The Dark World") doesn't have a major roll here, but Thanos ("The Avengers") does. My daughter, who is much more hip to the Marvel Universe than I can ever hope to be, is certain that the next Guardians movie will feature them and the Avengers teaming up against Thanos. I think I've also seen that on io9.com.

In addition to great effects and "an end of the universe" plot, the movie is also funny. There are a lot of through away lines and even the occasional slapstick to keep things lighter than the plot would suggest.

I'm still trying to figure out why they got Vin Diesel to voice the Groot character. He only has one line, "I am Groot" which he says over and over.

Be sure to stay until the end of the credits or you miss a cameo appearance of one of the greatest Marvel characters ever.

Movie Review - Lucy

If you've seen any of the trailers for this, you know it's not a remake of "I Love Lucy" with Scarlett Johansson.

If you've seen all the trailers, you've practically seen the whole movie. The running time is just 89 minutes.

The movie is kind of fun. Especially if you like to see an attractive white girl gun down a herd of Chinese gangsters. There are a lot of them and they all go down.

Early in the movie, Lucy is just a hard-partying American college girl going to school in Taipei. Who doesn't speak Chinese. It's just one of the many things in this movie that don't make a whole lot of sense. Why did this movie start in Taipei? Who knows, except to give many exterior shots of Taipei 101.

Morgan Freeman, attempting to be the intellectual ground of this movie, spends the first part of the movie giving a lecture on Evolution 101, to a bunch of scientists (they all look too old to be students), in Paris. The climax of this lecture is the blatantly untrue statement that humans use only 10% of their brainpower. All kinds of wonderful things would happen if we could only get up to 20% of 40%. A genius from the audience asks, "Professor, what if it were 100%?". Professor Morgan looks thoughtful and says, wistfully,  "We don't know".

So as you know, the Chinese gangsters stuff a plastic bag of some pretty blue crystals, into Lucy's abdomen and give her a passport and a plane ticket to Paris. There are 4-5 guys who get the same treatment and get sent to other places. Since Lucy is the only woman in the group she gets some special treatment and a couple kicks to the stomach for not appreciating it. With much GC pyrotechnics, the blue crystals leak from the bag and into her bloodstream.
From this point on, Scarlett Johansson manages to keep the same expression on her face as in the poster above. No matter what is going on. And a lot goes on. Lucy crawls around on the ceiling, she shoots a bunch of guys, she digs a bullet out of her shoulder with her fingers, she forces a surgeon at gunpoint to remove the bag, she shoots some more people, practically disintegrates on an airplane, and steals a police car (and the policeman) in Paris and drives through a lot of picturesque locales at top speed leaving a trial of destruction behind.

Why does the movie end in Paris? Just a guess, the director, Luc Besson, was born there. And we get some fine shots of the Eiffel Tower.

Anyway, she eventually meets up with Professor Morgan, gives up her secret and, in a scene that reminded me of the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey" reaches a higher plane of existence. We know this because she sends a text: "I am everywhere".

The only other Luc Besson movie I've ever seen is "The Fifth Element" which is a movie I absolutely love. "Lucy" is not nearly as much fun but it's a wild ride. Don't pay too much attention to the details, just hold on.

Movie Review - Snowpiercer

My daughter and I started hearing about this movie sometime last year. It was made by a Korean director, using American and British leads from a French graphic novel. Quite an international production. What we were hearing was that the film had finally found an American distributor, but they wanted some 20 minutes cut from the film. The director refused. Finally the distributor agreed to release the movie uncut and it opened to a very limited release, just 5 theaters, a couple of weeks ago. Last week the film got more wildly distributed but is still hard to find. It is only playing in 3 theaters in the Houston area, fortunately one near us. We went to see it Monday afternoon. It is excellent.

Here's the premise. In an attempt to reverse global warming, nations band together to release some chemical into the upper atmosphere. It is never explained how this was supposed to work but something went wrong. It plunged the earth into world-wide ice age. Now, 18 years later, all of remaining humanity is crowded into a enormous train which travels a tortuous path around the globe, taking a year for one complete circumnavigation. I will freely admit that the premise sounds pretty ridiculous and movie doesn't spend too much time on how all this came to pass.

What the movie is really about is social injustice, how an upper class can brutally maintain control over the lower classes by having complete control over the food and water supply, and a social experiment so outrageous you wonder how a human being could have thought of it.

Of course the upper class have control over the front of the train and the sacred engine that pulls it and supplies it's power. The lower classes live in terrible over crowded conditions in the back of the train. It's never clear how long the train is but it's pretty long. In the front of the train are the people who live there, a section that recycles water, sections were food is produced, fruits, vegetables, fish and meat. We only see a small part of this. The people in the front eat the food produced. The people in the back eat slimy black 'protein bars'.

John Hurt plays Gillium, the aged leader of the back of the train who only has one arm and one leg. His second is Curtis. Curtis, played by Chris Evans (that's Captain America to you), was 17 when the train began it's journey. Now he leads a very desperate people to reach Wilford (Ed Harris) at the front of the train. Wilford invented the train and is responsible for the social division on the train and has a lot to answer for.

The journey through the train is both brutal and wondrous. In some cars they fight pitched battles with pipes and the occasional ax as weapons against soldiers with guns. In others they encounter stuff they never imagined, like a car made out as an aquarium which they pass through in a tunnel down the center.

There are a number of plot twists throughout the movie that my daughter and I did not see coming. In the final showdown between Curtis and Wilford, Curtis (and we) learn that pretty much everything he (and we) thought he knew about his years on the train is wrong. Chris Evans is pretty good in this by the way. He had to do a lot more acting in this movie than as Captain America.

I highly recommend this movie, even if you have to go out of your way to find it. A lot of things aren't explained but ultimately, these things don't matter. What matters is the story of a downtrodden people trying to throw off oppression only to learn that the deck was stacked against them even more than they knew. I would not take the kiddies to see this. There are some very bloody scenes and foul language which give it it's R rating. On the other hand, there is no sex or nudity.

Movie Review - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

In my opinion, humble or otherwise, this is one of the best Marvel movies.

It's hard to say much about this movie without giving away major plot points. The movie is a direct sequel to the first Captain America movie and doesn't follow at all from, say, the recent Avengers movie. In fact, I'd strongly suggest that you re-watch the first Cap movie before seeing this.

For once, the trailers don't give away the story. The trailers consist of shots from several action set pieces from the movie but really tell you nothing about the story.

Samuel L. Jackson has a lot more to do in this movie then we've seen of him, as Nick Fury. You've probably seen the trailer where he's being shot at by what appear to be the DC police.

The story in a general sense is about how much of our actual freedom are we willing to give up to the people who are supposed to be protecting us. Actually, the movie is about how much of our freedom should the people who are supposed to be protecting us, take from us without our knowledge, to protect us. A very real issue in these days of NSA spying. And then, how can our enemies, who are trying to destroy our freedoms, exploit that tension between us willing (or unwittingly) to give up some freedom for protection and our desire to remain free.

The special effects are just amazing as you would expect. We saw the movie in 3D and I'll say that the 3D was so good that I mostly forgot that I was watching it in 3D.

You don't go to a movie like this expecting to Oscar winning performances and you won't see any here. The acting is adequate to the needs of the movie. Robert Redford is pretty good as Nick Fury's boss (Nick Fury has a boss?). The movie tries desperately to develop some rapport between Chris Evans' Captain American and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow but pretty much fails at that.  There is much forced banter between them where she suggests girls he can date. Anthony Mackie is pretty good as the Falcon, he does actually provide some comic relief that actually works. The special effects of him flying around however, are probably the weakest in the movie.

There are some pretty intense scenes in the movie, like the scene between Fury and the DC cops (which goes on forever) which I suspect would upset younger children. The movie isn't rated PG-13 for the sex (there isn't any) or the language (remarkably subdued) but the violence. The movie attempts ro interject some moral ambiguity (which I'm sure the ratings people don't care about) that might be confusing to kids. And I'd estimate that about 50,000 people get killed, fortunately most of them off camera.

Movie Review: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

I really love the Lord of the Rings books and the Peter Jackson movies. I've read the books and seen the movies multiple times. "The Hobbit" however, I don't have any great feelings for. I read it once over 40 years ago. I wasn't real enthused to see the first movie, but I did enjoy it. The second movie is not so good in my opinion.

Make no doubt, it's a gorgeous movie and parts are pretty exciting. But that's all it is. Lot's of stuff happens: dwarfs escape from Elftown in barrels with orcs and elves chasing them; dwarfs get trapped by giant spiders; Gandalf meets the guy with the big red eye; dwarfs get chased around underground by a fire breathing dragon (Smaug, of course). There's a little illicit dwarf-elf love story (red-haired elf played very enthusiastically by Evangeline Lilly) for some reason.

And then the movie ends. Very abruptly.

As I said, I don't have great feelings for the book, so I'm not particularly bothered that Jackson took a pretty slim book and turned it into three giant movies. As long as the movies have a good story to tell, and are not just filler. I'm sorry but "The Desolation of Smaug" is almost entirely made of filler.