I consider myself a casual Lord of the Rings fan. I watched all the movies and thought they were good, I tried to read the novels and was bored out of my mind. I took to the technical achievements of the films, all the new techniques and the immense work that Peter Jackson and his team did are very impressive. I like Peter Jackson as a director. It’s taken a very long time for the prequel to the LotR trilogy to be made, but The Hobbit is finally here.

I never read the book and knew the basics going into the film. I went to a full Peter Jackson Experience showing to see the movie as PJ intended. That means High Frame Rate 3D. First, the story. It’s a bit more kid friendly than the trilogy, showing us the tale of Bilbo Baggins on his first adventure. He is picked by Gandalf the wizard to go on a journey with 14 Dwarves who are on a quest to reclaim their ancicestral home. There’s some funny jokes, some great characters with visuals and an orchestrated score to match the epic journey. The cast is great and despite a long run time of two hours and 40 minutes, I enjoyed it a lot. I didn’t know any of what was added or changed from the book, so I have nothing to be annoyed about. The pacing felt good, it always felt like the story was progressing.

Now the technical. There’s a lot of cogs and gears that need to spin perfectly together to make everything work just right with the 3D and High Frame Rate. When it all works, the film looks amazing. The brightest 3D picture I’ve ever seen and never blurred or turned into mud when things got face paced. The 48fps makes things look really weird. The picture is so clear and so smooth, I can’t really compair it to anything else I’ve seen. No movie or TV show looks like this. It’s very disctracting at the beginning. Bilbo looks like he’s running around sped up and camera movement looks turbo charged. Like the rig is on a greased up track with no friction, it just flies around. The lighting, the colors and the depth can make scenes look like you are looking through a View Master. It’s almost like going on a motion simulator ride like Star Tours or The Amazing Spiderman, it’s like a different level of visual fidelity to take in. The computer effects are mostly spectacular. There are some weird integration/composotomg issues here and there where characters don’t look like they are actually interacting with the ground. Instead of running, it looks like a video game glide. Gandalf’s nose looks very fake in the beginning, some weird lighting on the prothstetic I think. Those are my only realy complaints. The facial animation is fantastic and the scene with Gollum and Bilbo is a remarkable moment for cinema.

Taken as just a standard 2D movie, I think there is a lot to like here. LotR fans have no reason not to see this. A return to Middle Earth is a much stronger selling point than I ever thought. The new filming techniques are a worthy experiement I think. It needs more work, but I there is potential there. There’s two more movies for PJ to improve on and it’ll be interesting to see if he sucseeds.

You gotta love a good documentary. They’re entertaining, intriguing and educational. With the economy being on everyone’s mind for the past 10 years or so, The Queen of Versailles is an interesting look from the other side of the fence, the uber wealthy.

The filmmakers started following David and Jaqueline Siegel before the 2008 economic collapse. They are extremely wealthy. Twenty bathrooms in your house wealthy. David started Westgate time shares many years ago building a empire of 28 resorts around the country and a massive casino/hotel in Vegas. They live extravagantly and even with a 25.000+ square foot mansion, they need more space. They employ 19 people just for the house, they have 7 children under the age of 12 (and one who is a bit older, who they adopt from Jackie’s sister). They start to build Versailles, they 90,000 square foot dream home in Orlando.

Then the housing market and economy collapses in 2008. The Siegel’s get cut off at the knees.

It’s a fascinating look at what the US is now built on. It’s really easy to think these two are terrible people, they’re wealth is the kind that most people can’t even dream of. The can get any thing and everything they could ever want. They have deep social and political connections. It’s easy to be envious of what they have. But this docu does a really good job of showing both sides of the story. They’re both people. David worked and works his ass off for what he has. He never stops working. Jackie is a sympathetic person and she has her flaws. Westgate employs thousands of people, what David does, in fact helps people. But on the other side you see how crazy they live and view the world.

The filmmakers re-balance the scales in every scene. They show the humanity and then show the dirt. You feel disgusted by them, then you feel empathy. Two really good examples. David works hard as hell, no doubt. He does earn his money. He figured out how to work the system. But then the guy talks about how he helped George W Bush get elected in 2001. When asked how he did it, he says “I don’t want to say….it might not exactly be legal.” Another one is when they talk to the kids. The adopted girl came from an abusive and very poor family. She compares her life of being dirt poor and her new life of luxury. She talks about trying to stay grounded, think about where she came from and how she dreamed of being rich. “I thought if I was ever rich, I’d wake up with a smile everyday. Now, I’m just used to it.” All the kids are, they’re used to it, they don’t know anything else. Jackie is far and away the worst, a gleeful compulsive shopper. Buying stuff is what she loves to do. She talks about alligator shoes and ostrich feather pants that cost 10 grand, laughs when she said she spent a million dollars a year on just…stuff.

But it could happen to you, which is the main point. When you become successful, your lifestyle and expectations change. It’s human nature. Sitting there saying it would never happen to you, that you would never change is a lie. You wouldn’t be aware it was happening to you. Even with all that money, they’re just people. The Siegel fortune was made solely on credit. No one paid for his business in cash. He got huge, cheap loans to build his resorts. When it all collapsed, the banks turned on David just like they did on everyone else. And he made them millions, if not billions. The banks hounding him to sell everything, refusing to give him extensions or the chance to make a deal. They just wanted to take the real estate from him. Their dream house lays half way finished (it is SO obnoxious, it’s hilarious) after putting $75 million into it. It goes into foreclosure (it’s a tough sell, the amount of people that can afford it is really minuscule, the location makes it an even harder sell).

Fascinating story watching this wealthy family have to adapt to lifestyle changes and stress they never saw coming. It’s enraging, it’s sad and funny. One of the best documentaries I’ve seen in awhile.

The Bourne Legacy is the fourth movie in the Jason Bourne espionage franchise. Big changes were made as Matt Damon bowed out of the series with director Paul Greengrass. It’s been 10 years since the first movie and 5 since the last. With the big cast change, Jeremy Renner plays Aaron Cross, another participant in the deep dark recesses of the Tredstone operation. “Jason wasn’t the only one” is the push here.

There was a lot of trepidation of how this movie would be, but I gotta say it fits and works really well. That is all thanks to writer Tony Gilroy who has been a part of every movie. He knows the characters and world better than anyone and he continues the action and intrigue without missing a beat. He also directs and does a good job of it.

I really like Jeremy Renner and he did well in this role. With Jason blowing cover for his bosses (the beginning of Legacy takes place when Ultimatum is happening), a slash and burn protocol is put into action to scrub all traces of the spy program. Investigations are inevitable and those in charge scramble to protect their asses. Aaron is a bit more special than Jason. While the previous movies were about a super spy remembering who he is, why and for who, Aaron knows he’s in the program. He takes medication that’s given to him, but he’s not entirely in the loop. Following the tag team nature of the previous movies, Rachel Weisz plays Dr. Marta Shearing who also works for the program and is also thrown out with the government bathwater. She knows all about the drugs Aaron was taking and helps him fight back.

Legacy in not only a solid action film, it’s a solid entry to the series. It looks and sounds like a Bourne movie, the action sections are really cool, the suspense and sneakiness is there and at the end of the two hours, I wanted more. That’s always a good sign for me.

Some quick hits!

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: This was directed by Timur Bekmambetov who also did Wanted, so crazy action scenes are a known quantity. Abe Lincoln: VA is a fun ‘what if’ idea where Abe Lincoln’s mother is killed by a vampire when he’s a boy and that inspires him to eliminate every single one he can find. Politics become his ‘backup plan’ and the plot weaves together history with vampire lore. It works pretty well, Benjamin Walker is pretty convincing as Abe and he’s really handy with an axe. Action is super over the top comic book style. Lots of style and slow mo. Fun movie, makes a good rental I think.

The Expendables 2: The Action Movie Star supergroup film is back and it’s better than the first. So that helps. The group is brought into a retrieval mission where one of their own is killed. That starts the mission for revenge and the halt of a nuclear threat. So that’s the set up for some good action scenes with action stars from he last 30 years. Problem one: the CG blood is terrible in the opening scene. It looks so bad it’s distracting. It’s toned down and gets better later on, but it’s worth mentioning. Second, there are a ton of stars here, the big get being Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s enough to have these huge hollywood action stars in one movie, but they had to shoe horn in every catchphrase they could. It doesn’t fit, it’s super obnoxious and just pointless. Everyone knows who these guys are and what they’ve done. Let them me these new characters in this universe. Any worse and Arnold and Bruce Willis would have high fived and looked right at the camera while slinging Terminator and Die Hard lines at the audience.

Men in Black 3: This turned out way better than I thought it would. The second movie was pretty terrible (I think everyone likes the first) and it’s been a long time since Agent J and K have been seen. Here we see one of the meanest aliens (Jemaine Clement!}that K puts into jail breaks out, manages to travel back in time and kill K so that his alien race can invade Earth. It works really well. There is a mix of fantastic special effects (both practical and CG) and terrible blue screen that needed some more time to be lit correctly. Solid cast, Will Smith does his thing, Tommy Lee Jones holds it down the way he does. Josh Brolin is the real star, he plays the young Agent K and he nails a Tommy Lee Jones impression. Check it out, it’s a great sequel.