My favorite screenshot from La Battalla de Los Cinco Ejercitos. This is the scene I saw at the exact moment my channel surfing took me to Cine Canal a few moments ago.
Alas, no SAP for the channel – not that I needed a translation for the shenanigans between Dain and Thorin – and I did catch Thorin say, as he sped away on his ram, something about basura ( garbage). This was a dubbed version. I watched for only a few moments – not Richard Armitage’s voice, to be sure, but the dubbing people did choose someone with a very deep voice. Oddly, Bard sounded a lot like Luke Evans, or maybe, I just don’t know his voice.
An extended version of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies — which will play in theaters on October — will apparently be a darker vision, as the MPAA has given it an R rating.
The Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), a division of the MPAA, revealed that the Battle of the Five Armies Extended Edition will be bumped up from the original film’s PG-13 to an R. All three of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films and their extended editions, as well as the last two The Hobbit films and their longer versions all received PG-13 ratings.
The only description given for the rating change is “some violence,” while the original Five Armies received its rating for “extended sequences of intense fantasy action violence, and frightening images.”
The MPAA did not immediately respond to a request for further comment on the rating change.
BOTFA may have been more violent, but DOS was scarier ( those spiders)
He’s up against J.K Simmons for Whiplash, who has won just about everything for this role, and, coincidentally, Andy Serkis for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. All in all, BOTFA got five nominations.
It’s pointless and frustrating to bemoan the exclusion of The Hobbit: the Battle of the Five Armies from almost any recognition from The Academy Awards. There are reasons – there are reasons – we know. But last night, I got a little angry, because there was no reason that it, or more accurately, Lord of the Rings, should have been excluded from the opening musical number, which seemed to be a hodgepodge of clips and live dancing and singing by “characters” from past popular and important movies – I mean they had Star Wars, The Hulk, – they couldn’t include Middle Earth? They should have included Middle Earth and Peter Jackson’s achievements. Talk about popular movies.
And then, to make matters worse, The Hobbit became the set-up for a joke, the punchline delivered by David Oyelowo.
As to the nominees, although I didn’t see all the movies nominated for very category, after looking at the clips, it seemed to me that The Hobbit should have been included in make-up and hair, production design and a few other categories.
So basically, I was more pissed watching the actual Oscars than I was when the nominations were announced and BOTFA was only nominated for one technical award.
Read this NY Time article about how the academy sees audiences. and some critique of the Academy’s performance this year.
I think it’s wonderful that there were so many original, fantastic, smaller movies this year to get recognition, and we need even more of those. Those are actually the kind of movies I like to see. But, when determining awards, the Academy ought to be as cognizant of what audiences want and are paying money to see. Then perhaps, more people would care about the Oscars. ( Viewership was way down this year).
Armitage Agonistes 