Triple Bill Mini Musings: Hobbits, Sounds, and Cockneys...

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey:
What's it about?
Peter Jackson & Co return to Middle Earth with Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit (a new three-part movie extravaganza), where a young Bilbo Baggins is reluctantly pulled into a quest with a collection of Dwarves to take back their home from the dragon Smaug.
Who would I recognise in it?
Martin Freeman, Ian Holm, Ian McKellan, Cate Blanchett, James Nesbitt, Richard Armitage, Ken Stott, Graham McTavish, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Christopher Lee, Andy Serkis, Sylvester McCoy.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
If you didn't like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, you won't like this, but inversely, if you were into those films (or, indeed, the original texts) then you should be happy here. A lovingly crafted fantasy world, unending glory shots for the New Zealand tourist board, Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Goblins and so on - you know what to expect by this point if you're familiar with "the other trilogy" that took the cinematic world by storm in the early 2000s. It has to be said though, that the pace is a bit slow up front - there's only so much time you can spend at the dinner table in the company of Dwarves before you start thinking "shouldn't we be cracking on with this quest of yours?", and those who complained about the LOTR trilogy being nothing but 'three movies about people walking' (the Randall Graves' of this world) won't be in any danger of changing their tune.

Click "READ MORE" below for more Hobbits, weird noises, and undead rhyming slang...

It has been said that The Hobbit does feel more like an extended DVD edition rather than a theatrical exhibition, and it can certainly feel like that numerous times - however, when the tension begins to boil, or swords get drawn, the effort is paid off. Just the scene between Bilbo and Gollum/Smeagol is worth the price of admission - an excellent side-story, which not only links-in with the LOTR trilogy, but works perfectly in playing with the viewer's emotions. All-at-once it's tense, humorous, frightening, and fascinating. More of the same, then really - but take that statement as a confirmation of your existing views on this fantasy world. If you dug it the last time, you'll dig it this time, but if you weren't fussed beforehand, you'll find no reason to now. Place me in the former camp - it took me a while to get back into the swing of things (I've been meaning to have a retrospective LOTR DVD marathon for years now), but by the end I was eager to see the second part. Good with moments of Great.
N.B. I saw The Hobbit in 2D and in the traditional framerate.


Berberian Sound Studio:
What's it about?
Set in the 1970s, a reserved English sound engineer (used to working on dry nature documentaries), is hired by an exuberant Italian Director by the name of Santini to work on his new film "The Equestrian Vortex" (which is actually a horror film about witches and torture). Immediately out-of-his-depth, sound engineer Gilderoy soon finds his mind warping at the horrific sights cast before his eyes - sights for which he must create blood curdling sounds. A psychological chiller.
Who would I recognise in it?
Toby Jones, Cosimo Fusco.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Peter Strickland's film is partially inspired by the giallo films of the 1970s - although we never see a single frame of the film-within-a-film "The Equestrian Vortex" - rather, we only hear it, and see how the sound effects are created (butchered water melons, stabbed and drowned lettuce etc). It would be wrong to label Berberian Sound Studio a horror movie, but it shares similar territory, and offers a particularly disturbing aural landscape for viewers. Furthermore, writer/director Strickland and his editor Chris Dickens found numerous ways to disorientate the viewer, most impressive of which are a series of very clever, yet creepily subtle, moments where one scene in one location bleeds effortlessly into the next at another entirely different location. We come to feel as disorientated as Jones' softly spoken Gilderoy, who soon begins to descend into a form of contained madness. Cinephiles and audiophiles alike will find plenty to geek out over too - the sights and sounds of the 1970s are laid out like treats. The unseen projectionist wears giallo-referencing black leather gloves, while the sound recording technology of the period is fetishised in loving close ups that focus on detail and operation. This is a film where magnetic tape spooling through machinery is as alluring to the viewer as bared flesh, and a film that slithers beneath your skin with a gradual sense of impending psychosis. Great.

As an aside (as an extra features junkie), while the special features were informative, they were awfully dry. What was strangest though was 'The Making of Berberian Sound Studio' - the first 20 minutes is very roughly edited interview snippets (dry-but-informative) conducted without a tie-clip microphone, then there's a few minutes of roughly edited B-Roll behind-the-scenes footage, and then we get a properly edited 'Behind the Scenes of Berberian Sound Studio' documentary which repeats much of what came before, but in the form of a fully realised making-of ... why on earth was it put together like this? It feels like some random not-quite-final NLE save file was rendered out instead of the finished product ... very strange indeed. Oh, and the deleted scenes are strange too - some, but not all, feature snippets of Strickland's narration embedded within the scenes - so you're watching some deleted scenes without the ability to hear the original dialogue! Apart from that, Artificial Eye's Blu-Ray presentation looks the business with a lovely, crisp reproduction of the film.


Cockneys vs Zombies:
What's it about?
What it says on the tin, really. Shaun of the Dead meets Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, so boasts the cover art. A family of cockneys (and a nutjob with a metal plate in his head) rob a bank in order to try and stop their grandparents being shipped off to the North of England as a result of their old folk's home being closed. They just so happen to pick the same day to do the job as an outbreak of zombies in their home town of London.
Who would I recognise in it?
Harry Treadaway, Rasmus Hardicker, Michelle Ryan, Alan Ford, Honor Blackman, Richard Briers, Jack Doolan, Dudley Sutton.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
With a title and a tag line like those, is it ever going to really live up to the promise? Most likely not, and while this breezy little dose of British 'zomedy' never reaches the dizzying heights of Edgar Wright's iconic Shaun of the Dead, nor the enduring (and quotable) fun of Guy Ritchie's gangster flick debut, it's fun while it lasts. However, it's unlikely to become iconic, and yet there's a lot of good ideas in there - both dramatic and comedic - some builders accidentally start a zombie outbreak by unearthing a sealed plague pit, and one particular highlight involves a frantically-scored low-speed chase between an OAP behind a zimmer-frame and a shambling zombie. There's plenty of cracking gore moments, lots of fantasy-driven gun-toting, and a fair amount of cockney charm ... if Shaun of the Dead was a memorable steak dinner with all the trimmings, Cockneys vs Zombies is a bacon double cheeseburger that hits the spot and swiftly fills a void. Good.