Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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And Now for Something Completely Different The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Rated PG13) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS You might want to take some camping gear with you when you go to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (169 minutes). From a relatively short book, Director Peter Jackson manages to get nearly three hours of footage, primarily by leaving the audience in Bag End for nearly an hour. I admit to being a little bit horrified upon hearing that this was the first of three movies ��� three movies is more than a little bit indulgent since one would have been more than enough. For perspective, consider that the source material for The Lord of the Rings was three books, each one substantially longer than the source material for The Hobbit, and that was a direct onebook-to-one-movie trilogy. Call me cynical, but this choice screams profit-driven. Just before the events depicted in The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo Baggins (Sir Ian Holm/Martin Freeman) writes the story of a journey he took with Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellen) and 13 dwarves. The exposition fairy comes and sprinkles backstory all over the before-title scenes. There are elves and dwarves and dragons (oh my!). The Bilbo voiceover transitions into young Bilbo receiving a visit from Gandalf, who, for reasons unknown, drags Bilbo into the quest of Thorin (Richard Armitage) and his band of wandering dwarves. This takes up nearly a third of the film. While this highlights two really good dwarf songs it could have been covered in 10 to 15 minutes. Feel free to go and get some popcorn while waiting for the fight scenes that take up most of the rest of the film. The group is headed deep into Middle-Earth when trolls capture them, tie them up and begin roasting them for dinner. Bilbo manages to stall long enough for Gandalf to appear. As they continue their journey they run into Radagast the Brown (Sylvester McCoy), a wood wizard, who warns them that a great necromancer has emerged and is threatening the Greenwood. If they have a plan to deal with that, the audience doesn���t get to hear it because just then oodles of orcs on wargs show up and chase the band into Rivendell. Everybody chills out for a while. Gandalf consults with Lord Elrond (Hugo Weaving), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and Saruman the White (Sir Christopher Lee). This is when the film starts to get really good. Up until this point all it had going for it was dwarf songs, scenery and a comic bit with trolls. Once the adventurers leave Rivendell they get caught up in the middle of Rock Giants and chased through the Misty Mountains by goblins. Except for Bilbo. He ends up in a mountain cleft playing a game of riddles with Gollum (Andy Serkis). For all its slow pacing, The Hobbit has some beautiful visuals. If it seems I am being too hard on it, that is only because the film���s overall quality serves to magnify its defects. I���ve read some reviews that fail to find any splendor in Jackson���s sweeping camera work, but they aren���t me, so they are wrong. Overall, the film does take some time to pick up and is a bit darker than the Tolkien story I remember. However, it is still Peter Jackson directing the prequel to the films he dedicated more than 10 years to and does it well. We may call it a derivative money grab that could have been done in 90 minutes, but I can���t imagine any other director who would have done it half as well. Now showing at Wynnsong HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing 7, Carmike 12 and Carmike Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@upandMarket Fair 15. comingweekly.com. God Bless America Shirley MacLaine gives the Brits a run for their money in Downton Abbey TV by DEAN ROBBINS Downton Abbey, Masterpiece Classic���s period soap opera, returns amid post-World War I turmoil (Sunday, 9 p.m., PBS). Money troubles and personal crises abound in the grand country estate, requiring a stiff upper lip from both the aristocrats and their servants. And if you doubt the stiffness of these particular upper lips, well, you must have missed the last couple seasons. The heir to Downton, Matthew (Dan Stevens), is set to marry Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), but the family funds have dried up. Matthew mopes around the tasteful sets, acting nobly ��� so nobly that the season premiere threatens to be dull. Right on cue comes Martha (Shirley MacLaine), mother of Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), with a fortune that could potentially save the estate. Loud and sarcastic, MacLaine gives the episode a badly needed jolt of American-style energy. She exquisitely overplays the role, making Martha a counterpart to Maggie Smith���s exquisitely underplayed Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham. As Martha flings insults at the staid Brits, Violet mutters, ���Just how long is she here for?��� I hope it���s for a long, long time. The Biggest Loser Sunday, 9 pm (NBC) Just in time for New Year���s resolutions comes season 14 of the weight-loss competition. This reality show is irresistible to us Americans, given our Emersonian tradition of self-reliance. A new group of overeaters earnestly vow to reinvent themselves, with help from The Biggest Loser���s strict trainers. The big news is that the strictest of them all, Jillian Michaels, has returned after a childbearing hiatus. Did I say ���strict���? ���Sadistic��� would be more accurate. Jillian seems happiest when her charges fall off their treadmills, beg for mercy or cry, because then she gets to yell at them even louder. ���Take your sorry ass out of my gym!��� she shouts at one poor man who can���t handle her relentless workout. ���I don���t have time for your pathology!��� Such scenes make it hard not to contemplate one���s own sorry ass, of which Jillian WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM would certainly disapprove. Deception Monday, 10 pm (NBC) When a troubled socialite turns up dead, her onetime friend ��� a cop named Joanna (Meagan Good) ��� goes undercover in the family mansion to figure out whodunit. Joanna grew up in the mansion herself, as the maid���s daughter, so she has a history with this creepy clan. Deception skillfully establishes her perilous circumstances, and Good makes you feel her mounting distress. The series pilot keeps piling on the complications: drug abuse, sexual misbehavior, corporate shenanigans, marital trouble, paternity issues, assassination. ���This thing is huge,��� Joanna exclaims near the end. I���d have to agree. I can���t wait to see her get to the bottom of it all in 2013. American Experience Tuesday, 9 pm (PBS) ���The Abolitionists��� recounts one of the most inspiring stories in American history. It profiles the 19th-century reformers who achieved moral clarity about slavery long before the rest of their countrymen did. William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Angelina Grimke and other fearless abolitionists bravely denounced America���s ���peculiar institution��� despite being widely denounced themselves. The material is so dramatic that you forgive the preponderance of bonnets and top hats in the extensive reenactments. You���d have to be made of stone not to thrill to rhetoric like this, from the pen of Garrison: ���I am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned and bound for advocating African rights, and I shall deserve to be a slave myself if I shrink from that duty or danger.��� For expressing such enlightened sentiments, Garrison was attacked by a lynch mob, and South Carolina put a bounty on his head. Is it time to carve out room on Mount Rushmore for these national heroes ��� perhaps right between slaveholders Washington and Jefferson? JANUARY 2-8, 2013 UCW 17