60% on Rotten Tomatoes
The last in the stretched-thin trilogy following the adventures of Bilbo Baggins. Now we find ourselves in the midst of a conundrum: Smaug has left his Lonely Mountain to bring destruction on the people of Lake Town. As Thorin proceeds to claim his Kingship back and rule over the Lonely Mountain, news spreads of his return and thus a battle takes place, consisting of five armies: The Dwarves, The Men, The Elves, The Orcs and The Wolves/Eagles (the identity of the fifth army is debated).
This was definitely the best Hobbit movie of the trilogy, which comes to no surprise since it was not only a battle movie, but it also had some great links that foreshadowed the events in Lord of the Rings. Another great thing about this was that it wasn't three hours long, and even though it was still stretched out (in the book there is almost no information on the battle; Bilbo gets knocked out then he hears about what happened very briefly), it definitely wasn't as stretched out as other scenes in the first two movies.
Sure, a whole movie dedicated to one battle can get tedious (to say the least), but after watching the first two films, you have no choice but to accept that this is just the way it has to be. Fortunately, there's some moments of drama and humour that break up the intense battle, which itself contains some great battle sequences to make it a definitely worthy film.
While the romance between Tauriel and Kili was a bit bizarre, it was still nice to see what happened here. The ending seriously got all my feels going. I especially loved some of the quotes from this movie, but unfortunately I have to put spoiler tags on some of them.
~SPOILERS!~
I also made some banana bread these holidays!
I had three bananas that were super ripe and I definitely couldn't eat them all because I was the only one at home eating bananas, so I just spontaneously decided to make banana bread and it actually turned out quite alright.
It wasn't super dry or anything, but since banana bread is usually really really moist, it kinda felt like this was too dry (maybe because I didn't want to put too much butter in...)
These holidays I'm also volunteering as a Research Assistant for a Psychology student who's doing her PhD. It's 14 hours a week, meeting for 3 hours each week, but it's pretty flexible as I can just work from home most of the time. It's pretty much like doing an assessment, so I have to read lots of journal articles, do a summary of their findings, create a reference list and help write the introduction of her paper. Thankfully I don't get marked though, and everything I do goes through her eyes, since it's her PhD and she obviously wants it to be good. I was talking to a student who did this program last year and wanted to stay on even until now, and he said that it really helped with his assessments as it allowed him to read more efficiently, understand things better and write his assessments better. The supervisor is also super lovely and helpful so she's very happy to provide us volunteers with contacts that would help us learn more about Clinical Psychology. The topic she's working on is self-handicapping, which is super interesting for me, and I'm helping her with the self-esteem part of it, which I hope would really help my understanding of things when I head into Clinical Psych.
I haven't really started yet except reading some journal articles, but we only just met up last week. So I'm still going to be pretty busy these holidays, which is good since I'm no longer working (can't tutor because it's the holidays and Christmas season is over for my Christmas casual self at The Body Shop) and need to kill time.
I want to get back into cooking random stuff, painting/drawing random stuff and writing more of this story I'm working on, but I really haven't gotten the motivation back yet. So apart from that, my holidays haven't been really eventful.
And now, here are some movie reviews that I've been putting off for some time:
81% on Rotten Tomatoes
Based on the book of the same name by John Green, the story tells of a teenage Hazel Grace Lancaster, who has been diagnosed with cancer since young. It follows pretty much the plot and tone of the book (which I loved), but for some reason I didn't really enjoy this movie. I think it was because of the forced pretentiousness of the characters which made me super uncomfortable and annoyed. I mean, the characters were pretentious in the book, and I guess that's why I felt a bit weird reading some of Augustus' dialogue, but seeing it acted out by a real person makes you really want to cringe. There was also not much of a way to understand what Hazel was thinking, which was one of the things that was great about the novel.
I will give them props on how they managed the ending though; I had a lot of feels during it. Shailene Woodley was pretty great during this; she looked completely different to her character in Divergent, and it did show her versatility as an actor.
And yet... I wouldn't rewatch this any time soon.
41% on Rotten Tomatoes
Speaking of Divergent, I can't believe I never wrote a review on it. It's probably because I already wrote a review on the book and assumed I did one for the film.
As I said, this film also stars Shailene Woodley as the main character Tris. The story is set in a dystopian future with society divided into five factions based on a dominating personality trait: Abnegation (selflessness), Dauntless (bravery), Erudite (intellect), Candor (honesty), and Amity (friendliness). People who do not belong to just one faction are classed as Divergent. And as you guessed it, Tris is Divergent.
Sure enough the Divergents are in danger of being eliminated (executed), and so the story sets up the beginnings of a conspiracy against these Divergents that Tris must protect herself from.
Yet it's wrong to sell the story as that because in all honesty, most of the movie focuses on Tris' initiation after choosing to go to the Dauntless faction (at the age of 16, students take a test and then choose whether to stay in the faction their family is in, or leave their family permanently and choose another faction). The initiation comprises of mainly physical and mental training (the latter taking the form of fear simulations in which students must face their worst fears).
The novels themselves weren't at all fantastic (Hunger Games is so much better), so it was no surprise that this film wasn't that great. Sure it was good seeing how they actually created the world, painted the Dauntless faction and even the society's faction system, as well as seeing how they did the fear landscapes, but if the novel that it's based off doesn't have a strong plotline, then this won't either.
The second novel in the trilogy, Insurgent, was the best in my opinion, and even the trailer for it looks like they're changing a lot of things (just look at all the comments) to make it translate better on film, so it looks like it'll be an interesting one to watch out for. But for Divergent, I don't think I'd revisit it.
78% on Rotten Tomatoes
Based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, this film tells the story of three characters thrown into dark situations all in the corrupt Basin City (aka Sin City).
I wasn't too sure about this film, but when I saw Sin City 2 coming out, I figured I should check it out. Surprisingly, I thoroughly enjoyed it. While the main reason for being interested in it was the style of the film, since it's an adaptation of the graphic novel and therefore has stylistic black and white digitised imagery, I still really liked the plot of it. Sure, there was a lot of brutal violence and very sexual scenes (which my mum was very quick to complain about), but I think it was good because it added to the corruption, and even violent scenes weren't that violent because of its comic-book-like nature.
It was good seeing how all these characters intertwined, as well as seeing how corrupt humans can be. While fictional, it still emphasises real and human characteristics that exist today. The directing was great, and there was such a great cast as well, but I think the best features are the artistic nature of the film, as well as the cautions of human corruption. So in the end, this is a must see.
(Note: I actually wanted to watch Sin City 2 after I saw this to put them in the same blog post but I heard it was terrible so I haven't seen it yet.)
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