Film review: The Hobbit (12A)

FILM
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
(12A) 169mins
★★★★★

IN A NUTSHELL
Peter Jackson's return to Middle Earth is an astonishing feat, peppered with joyous performances and brimming with imagination.

REVIEW
As I left the preview screening in Holborn, a pigeon swooped low over my head. It was a grey London pigeon set against a grey London sky.

The pigeon wasn't particularly giant or notably tiny, it bore no dwarves upon its back and it failed to offer any words of illumination regarding my lineage or my impending sacrifice.

B-o-r-i-n-g. I, like Bilbo Baggins, am a fussy little Englishman with a tidy life and no hankering for adventure. Except when there's an adventure to be had and someone else might be having it in my stead...

I yearned to be back in Middle Earth, clashing swords with orcs and riding eagles and generally heading off in that direction to face an unknown peril, preferably learning a little bit about myself on the way.

I am new to this place - this lush cluster of kingdoms - having never sunk my hairy and bulbous Hobbit toes into the moss of Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Hence I have the zealousness of the convert. Whatever. This film is astounding, a riveting treat, full of breathless wonders.

Turn a deaf, possibly large lobed, ear to the doom-mongers who talk of creative bloat and how this first part of the trilogy merely arrives at chapter six of the slight book.

I went in prepared to heed their advice, figuring that toilet breaks along the 2 hour 49 minute length would be plentiful. But there wasn't a moment to spare.

Yes, it is long but this is a classic tale steeped in the mythology of story-telling itself. People go on a long journey to face a big challenge and along the way distract themselves with personal stories and parables and myths that entertain or inform.

To the detail. Bilbo Baggins casts his mind back to his younger days when he left the Shires to join Galdalf and 13 dwarves on a quest to reclaim the lost kingdom of Erebor, now inhabited by a grumpy dragon.

Led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), their journey - the first part at least - takes them through treacherous lands swarming with goblins, orcs, trolls and wargs. (In this world, everything sounds like you're trying to give directions to Stevenage with a mouthful of conkers.)

And, for those who cannot thrive without the parsimonious stimulation of linear story-telling, there is so much more to enjoy beyond the fireside chat. Open those peepers and scan the horizons for lush landscapes, a match for anything on Pandora and, in many cases, genuine bits of New Zealand. Or relish the sheer all-engulfing craftsmanship of the film-making.

Admire the performances too. Behind latex and CGI, the dwarves tend to become an amorphous mass (Ken Stott and James Nesbitt excepted) but, despite the dry "Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror" intoning, there are subtleties to enjoy.

Martin Freeman is perfect as Bilbo Baggins. He begins the film in a dressing gown which is an reminder of his other put-upon, bristling hero - Arthur Dent in The Hitch-Hikers' Guide To The Galaxy - and his beautifully modulated performance, switching between drama and wry comedy - survives the sensual overload of The Hobbit's epic sweep.

Sir Ian McKellen, as Gandalf, may spend the film spouting proverbs and twee schoolmasterly homilies but he does so with such panache and class. If Werther's Originals could speak, they would sound like our favourite East End pub owner.

And, in the most spell-binding sequence of the film, Andy Serkis reprises his role as Gollum, the bony, conflicted stoor hobbit who challenges Bilbo with life-or-death riddle games. Witnessing how Serkis can be so part of Gollum and so separate is a mesmeric experience.

You will no doubt hear of the higher rate 48 frames per second (compared to the usual 24) which gives a sense of televisual hyper-reality and, to some, proves a distraction. I found the sharpness an adequate counter-balance to the general frustrating dullness afforded by 3D specs.

But, all these things are forgotten to be replaced by the immersive vision of director Peter Jackson who commands this vast terrain with breath-taking sweeping shots. He can choreograph seething, warring masses and yet still pick out tiny dots of comedy and humanity.

In the face of the snarling anti-hype, the Unexpected Journey turns out to be an unexpected joy.

Film review: Seven Psychopaths (15)

FILM
Seven Psychopaths
(15) 110mins
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Martin McDonagh's pitch-black gore-fest is a sharp comedic treat although it veers wildly and ends up in competition with itself

REVIEW
Stuck in an office, kicking around for ideas, little wonder that so many writers turn to the act of writing for inspiration, even less wonder that they turn writers into action heroes.

To be frank, it is a vaguely dispiriting notion - but it can be done.

Charlie Kaufman had huge success creating a sweaty fictional Charlie Kaufman writing Adaptation and Stephen King is forever casting the blocked author as a mighty warrior.

Now acclaimed Limehouse-based Irish writer-director-producer Martin McDonagh follows up the inspired In Bruges with a slice of bleak comedy which features a central character called Marty going toe to toe with the fiendish cunning of a blank piece of paper.

Marty (Colin Farrell) dreams of finishing his screenplay Seven Pyschopaths but he lacks focus and drinks too heavily.

"I got the title - I just haven't been able to come up with all the psychopaths yet," he says.

He becomes embroiled in the petty dramas of actor-cum-dognapper Billy (Sam Rockwell) and his debonair partner Hans (Christopher Walken).

It is typical of this lopsided film that Marty becomes a subplot, rapidly overwhelmed with the end-of-the-pier loop-the-loop of his gun-totin' circus freak pals. (He doesn't actually announce he's become a subplot but every other story device gets a name check.)

Bonkers Billy takes the beloved shih tzu of psychopath Charlie Costello (Woody Harrelson) and before the slabs of this stop-start thriller settle, vast and skewiff like a toppled henge, there will appear the requisite number of psychos to fulfil the promise of the title.

Rockwell and Walken in particular have fun with McDonagh's rich (if bitter) confection. Highlight is Billy's fantasy final shoot-out gore-fest that if it wasn't played out as a dream sequence in this movie would be a shoo-in for Tarantino's next.

Without the central sparkle of McDonagh's characterisation and script, this project would have veered into the roadside ditch, upended and undone by its mannered quirkiness and love of self.

But the sharp dialogue, juicy riffs, plentiful gore, sly sense of humour and engaging performances just about keep this ramshackle drama on track.

Pity McDonagh was behind the camera.

A kinder, if crueller, director would have culled some of the excesses and let the best of the writer shine.

Film students would weep (because they love a bit of meta) but the rest of us wouldn't leave the cinema talking of diamonds in the dust.

Book review: Gravity's Engine, Caleb Scharf

SCIENCE
Gravity's Engine
Caleb Scharf (Allen Lane)
★★★★✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Caleb Scharf examines the latest thinking about the greatest enigmas in the universe - the black holes that destroy and create our galaxies.

REVIEW
Few books have attempted the epic opening of Caleb Scharf's wonderful description of a photon's journey from the beginning to time across 12 billion light years of void before it splats - like fly against windscreen - into a sensor that builds an image of a far-away cluster on the computer of Manhattan-based scientist.

British-born Scharf's 200-year odyssey into the mind-baffling world of black holes continues in the same vein - exciting, filled with awe and thickly laced with the sorts of figures the popular science market loves.

(Millions are nothing, there are black holes out there more than a billion times more massive than the sun.)

Scharf's lucid account picks apart these swirling, superlative-laden enigmas and takes us to the edge of current thinking about how they kill and create the cosmos with frantic ease.

They twist space-time to such an extent that both become irrelevant and yet far from being celestial rarities they are the heart of every galaxy, including our own.

The armchair enthusiast often parts company with some of these dense tracts because there's only so much boggling a mind can take on the DLR but Scharf has enough metaphors, juicy gobbets and narrative nous to keep the reader hooked and enchanted.

Film review: Great Expectations (12A)

FILM
Great Expectations
(12A) 128mins
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Mike Newell's adaptation shows grit and integrity but lacks magic and gets lost in the fog.

REVIEW
"I won't deny there have been too many secrets," declares solicitor and guardian Jaggers - and a wry snicker circles the auditorium. Too true, too true, we think.

Great Expectations may be Charles Dickens' most beloved book but it also ranks alongside his most preposterous

Boiled down into a series of confrontations, revelations, familial convolutions and cliffhangers, the resulting pulp would colour the most outrageous of American daytime soaps.

But Dickens turned this mush into magic by gumming words together like no man before or since - with a tragi-comic brilliance and - most crucially - with energy.

Yet this earnest and charm-deficient adaptation of the story of Pip - from blacksmith's boy to London gentleman by means of a mystery benefactor - is left to mope on a leash.

David Nicholls writes and Mike Newell directs a film that longs to be the definitive version of the age.

And the ingredients are there - the mud and blood of the marshes and the streets of London; the script sonorous and gratifying; the pacing busy and condensed; the cast neatly picked but where's the fun? The moment?

Fog rolls across the marshes and also across the eyes of the participants.

Take for example Miss Havisham in yellowing dress, doll-like and fragile in her remote rat-strewn stately home.

All the ingredients of a Tim Burton gothic comic epic are present (including Helena Bonham Carter).

But she is pallid, inconclusive, neither frightening nor comic nor weird.

A few of this excellent if lacklustre ensemble turn up the heat - David Walliams an inspired choice as Mr Pumplechook; Ewan Bremner bright-eyed as Wemmick, Ralph Fiennes throatily grim as Magwitch - but they are beaten down by their eerily subdued fellows - Robbie Coltrane as Jaggers, Sally Hawkins as Mrs Joe, Jason Flemyng as amiable Jo.

Maybe the trouble lies with this particular story. The best bits are at the beginning, in the graveyard, in Satis House with the spooky Estella and boisterous Pale Young Gentleman.

Beyond that, an unravelling. The middle section is ramshackle and the last act a welter of improbabilities.

Pip (Jeremy Irvine) is honourable but unresolved so the onslaught of revelations appear pedestrian or barmy and his love for Estella (Holliday Grainger) a fiddly distraction.

Nicholls (Starter For Ten, One Day) has professed his love for this work from the earliest age but the adoration has translated into stilted awe.

This film is a checklist of iconic scenes and, despite the twists and turns, comparison of adaptations provides the best route through.

Not bad, of course, but not as good as it should have been and so, sadly, qualifies as a disappointment.

Stage review: Constellations, Duke of York's

STAGE
Constellations
Duke Of York's Theatre
★★★★★

IN A NUTSHELL
Two lovers have enough problems getting it together without getting messed around by the multiverse.

REVIEW
If there were to be a stage play that combined the themes of honey bees and quantum mechanics, two boxes on my list of Perfect Plays would be ticked.

And so there was. Humble Boy in 2001 did just that. I have watched the ink of the ticks fade for a decade wondering if the winning bee/particle combo was played out and done. Until this week.

Constellations is a different product altogether from Charlotte Jones' grand work - for a start the bees are not the thing and the quantum world is but a smart structural device.

Instead, Constellations, directed by Michael Longhurst, concerns itself with examination of another of nature's great enigmas - the inept and magnificent human heart.

Writer Nick Payne has used the implications of quantum mechanics - that every decision taken or not taken is played out in another universe - to construct a winning and poignant two-hander. All that in 70 minutes straight through (and that's a third box ticked).

The stuttering romance of scientist Mirianne and beekeeper Roland suffers enough trials without the intervention of the multiverse repeating crucial moments as distorted echoes - adding layer upon layer of drama, pathos and confusion.

These brief encounters live on Tom Scutt's stage, empty except for a ceiling of balloons. But this is no celebration and they may not even be balloons.

As they light up, they became the very particles that mangle space-time and, as illness grips, they possess the fizzing agony of misfiring neurons.

Payne has eschewed the Sliding Doors conceit - two separate paths. Instead, he goes for the juddering phase shifts of nuance.

The same scene - of flirtation, of row, of crisis - is played again and again with the characters nimbly adopting a different attitude, sometimes juggling roles between them.

Two people, on a stage, conjuring worlds. It almost justifies the existence of theatre on its own.

But I've saved the best till last.

The performances of Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall are sublime; their comic touch impeccable, their grasp of the drama moving, their chemistry palpable.

Spall's trademark laconic hangdog is taken for a long walk as is Hawkins' cheerfully gauche naif. But the demands of the narrative mean they need to turn their performances on an atom and become someone else in a flash. Harder, angrier, wearier.

Their execution of these about-turns could prove an irritation but ends up a charming marvel.

The multiverse means I'm fated to see this play an infinite number of times. Not. A. Chore.

Until Jan 5. Go to atgtickets.com

Book review: On The Map, Simon Garfield

BOOK
On The Map
Simon Garfield (Profile)
★★★★✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Simon Garfield surveys the historic landscape of map-making and concludes that they say as much about our story as they do about topography.

REVIEW
Like just about everything else in what was formerly modern life, the internet has both destroyed and re-shaped the landscape of maps.

Now, as Simon Garfield writes in this comprehensive, often overwhelming, survey of the craft of the cartographers, we do not pore over a map and look for the arrow saying "You Are Here".

Instead the map comes to us - via our phones, our SatNav and our flapping print-outs from Google. The GPS in our pockets puts us at the centre of the universe.

We are creating a new map, with fluid borders, made up of the connections we make via Facebook, Twitter and the like.

No longer, he laments, the childlike wonder of the Ordnance Survey in plastic sheathing on a wet day in Kendal, or an X Marks The Spot treasure map, or the unexpected wrong turn into a sleepy village (unless, of course, the SatNav is having an off day).

The author wanders far and wide in his quest for stories (presumably he knows where he's going) and takes in such mouth-watering themes as thieves, forgers, scandals and controversies, from the sale of the Mappa Mundi to the paradigm-shifting Vinland map whose importance and authenticity has been disputed for decades.

In early years, he points out, cartographers hated the white space of terra incognita and went to work on cartouches and a flights of fancy about the lifestyle of the inhabitants.
Occasionally a fake mountain range would appear and would stay for decades because cartographers copied each other.

But as the brave or foolhardy pushed back the boundaries - culminating in the golden age of Antarctic exploration - the globe was completed.

Meanwhile, form and function became the next big thing with the Tube map at its pinnacle.

Simon Garfield has an eye for the curious and quirky facts - such as the crushing news that Here Be Dragons is a fiction and how the A-Z lost all its Ts out the window - and this a joyfully plotted journey from Ptolemy to Googleplex.

One complaint: the reproduction of the maps is dour and disappointing.

Exhibition: Ansel Adams, NMM

EXHIBITION
Ansel Adams: Photography From The Mountains To The Sea
National Maritime Museum
★★★★✩

IN A NUTSHELL
America's photographic pioneer receives a rare British outing focussing on his studies of water.

REVIEW
So that's one big US question sorted. (A. Barack Obama.) But there are plenty more that remain unresolved - about the changing character of America and whether global decline should be managed or rejected in the face of economic uncertainty and China's dominance.

The traditionalist Republicans are licking their wounds, wondering how the "white establishment" - products of the founders and the pioneers - will fare against the growing coalition of minorities who are increasing vocal in their demands and less attached to the nation's Euro-centric backstory.

Little wonder then, in a nation where the journey is still a significant metaphor, that the chronicling and conquering of the landscape has an extra resonance, suggesting permanence and progress at a time when there is little evidence of either.

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was a pioneer in the field of photography and, to a lesser extent, in conservation. He was just such a maker of icons.

His name stays in the pantheon because he comfortably reflects the best of America back to the Americans.

Adams captured the contrasts - the unyielding rock against the ephemeral spring - and, in doing so, impressed upon the unruly landscape a sense of conquest, pattern and purpose.

Adams is not so much known in Britain but that may change with a rare compilation of 100 original prints on display in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

He is best known for his rugged landscapes but the "maritime" theme is evoked with the movement of water, the capturing of moments beyond the reach of the painter.

Waterfalls, geysers, rapids, ponds, seascapes - he pointed his camera wherever water worked, perhaps inspired by the view of the San Francisco bay from his childhood home.

Something of a misfit, the precocious Adams found school impossible and he was sent with an open pass to the year-long 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco which was a hotbed of new cultural thinking. Cubism, Picasso and the possibilities of a new century percolated in his young mind.

Guest curator Phillip Prodger said: "One of the things I wanted to do was get at some of the radicalism and the experimentalism of Ansel Adams when he came on the scene.

That he wasn't just a maker of pretty pictures but he also contributed philosophically to the advancement of photography as an artform."

Adams' first picture - found by Prodger in the archives - was taken when he was 13 and was of the world's fair itself. Although made in the classic Victorian "pictorial style" - soft and sentimental - he labelled it Portals Of The Past suggesting he, too, was hungry to embrace radical concepts and progressive interpretations.

His journey, through his life and captured in this exhibition, showed he was in the forefront of the Modernist movement - taking photos that were hard, uncompromised, sharp and uncontrived.

This austerity of style encompassed the Group f/64 movement (named after a lens aperture that tightens depth of field) whose manifesto rejected any ideological notion of art and aesthetics.

However, he was restless, artistically and geographically. He became a perennial retoucher in the darkroom.

He would say the negative was the equivalent of a music score and the print, the conductor's performance.

In fact, he was, in his later years, as much a print maker as a photographer and the vast American Trust murals of the '50s, on show in the exhibition, demanded innovative thinking and precise execution, revealing a craftsman and perfectionist at the height of his powers.

He said: "A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels in the deepest sense about what is being photographed."

This exhibition is the fullest expression of Ansel Adams - a restless life in search of moments, of beauty and order in a reckless landscape.

■ Ansel Adams: Photography From The Mountains To The Sea, until April 28, £7, rmg.co.uk.

Image: Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California, about 1937 Photograph by Ansel Adams. Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust