The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Hello fellows, here we are once again and this time we’ll be talking about the HOBBIT (we know, guess what? WE LOVE IT TOO!).

OK, before you start asking yourself “Why Hobbit?”, this week we had two options, OK three, but one was instantly put aside, the other option, besides The Hobbit, was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, although we also like Harry Potter, we are major fans of Tolkien’s work, and so we decided to write about the first movie (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey). António was with high expectations about this movie, since he watched The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy, and for him, it went as expected, but he keeps thinking that LOTR is so much better. For Rodrigo, it was the first time that he was watching a film adaptation of a Tolkien's masterpiece, after watching it and thinking "OMG what was I missing?" he saw the whole LOTR trilogy two days later!

OK, before we start describing the movie, please press play on this video:

Done? So, here we go..

         Once upon a time, there was a guy, white as snow, weak as a chicken waiting to go to the aviary, and small as a 5 year-old kid. His name was Bilbo Baggins, and he was a Hobbit! Before you start wondering "what the hell is a Hobbit" and start looking for it on wikipedia, I will tell you: it's a kind of a small human specie that lives in The Shire, a colourful place where everybody smiles, but nothing happens. Ok that's all I can tell you.

  

         So, let's go back to the narrative... This guy, Bilbo, is invited by a giant wizard, Gandalf, the Grey, to go on an adventure with him and a group of dwarves (Oin, Gloin, Bombur, Bifur, Bofur, Ori, Nori, Fili, Kili, Balin, Dwalin and Dori [the guys in the picture above]), leaded by Thorin Oakenshield (another dwarf), son of Thrain, son of Thror, from the line of Durin, the next king under the mountain (yes, António did his homework). The purpose of their adventure was to reclaim Erebor and to recover the dwarves’ long-forgotten gold, a shinny treasure that was being safe kept by Smaug, the Terrible (a dragon that took over the city of Erebor, in the Lonely Mountain, and stole the dwarves’ gold, killing many dwarves and, even worst than that, destroying a kid's toy [SHAME ON YOU, SMAUG!]).

         During this adventure, returning to Bag End, his home, was something that crossed Bilbo's mind several times, but after they found “Sting” (his sword) he kind of gain some courage that made him keep going, no matter how hard and dangerous it got. It is in this film that we see Bilbo finding The One ring (the one forged by Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom) that so far belonged to Gollum. After he found it he was able to become invisible and run away from Gollum and from the Goblins’ cave.

         When he finds this ring, he gets the chance to know a creepy but cutie weird "creature", Smeagol, basically, a guy that talks with himself (there was no psychologist in Middle-Earth...), and that has a creepy face:

         We wont tell you anything more about the plot, otherwise you would not get curious to watch the movie, and that would be shameful!!!!

So, now here it comes our opinion (noooo, don't close the blog!!!):

In our sincere, opinion, this movie is amazing! Great plot, great action scenes, great music, great EVERYTHING (except their size, don't forget that most of them are dwarves...)! But once we can only give a 10 to the LOTR trilogy, we are very sad to tell you that we gave this super nice movie a shameful 9,9! :(

Before we finish this kind of a review, we want to congratulate Peter Jackson for another great job (yeah, we are talking about the first Hobbit, obviously!), it was a great choice of actors, and even with some modifications to the book, he managed to do a great adaptation of it!

        This is pretty much our opinion, maybe if Rodrigo had given António the opportunity to write even more, you would probably be finishing the lecture of this super well written text (or not) with your grandchildren saying "Happy 120th Birthday!" (assuming that you are 10 now).

 See you later, you hater! :D

Globalisation

Hey guys, what's up?

So, today we are not going to write another film review! We are here writing you about Globalisation, and, because of that we will focus on two different points of view: one of them is the impact of globalisation on cinema, the other one is the impact of cinema on globalisation! I know they look just the same, but trust us, they aren't. And even if you don't trust us, they still aren't the same, so, you should believe us! ;)

On the one hand, this phenomenon of getting into a global culture has a lot of impact on movies, if each country had it own culture without sharing it with other countries, this would definitely change the movie business. Firstly, we wouldn't be able to see the mixing of cultures on movies and on TV series, such as Modern Family (we would probably be watching Regular Family and it wouldn't have the success that Modern Family has nowadays), instead of having a movie with a lot of cultures and ideas, we would have a lot of movies about a lot of cultures, individually... BORING!

On the other hand, movies have been contributing to the process of globalisation, for instance with the American movies, since these are the ones with the highest audiences and with that, the message they want to pass on is reaching the entire world. Due to that, many cultures have been influenced by the American lifestyle, making the different countries getting closer to each other in terms of culture, Americanising the world! And instead of having the United States culture, it would be the UCW (United Countries of the World) [if somebody picks up this idea, let us know... we have dangerous connects, (we believe that the guy working on the pizzeria belongs to La Mafia, so be careful!)]

So, vote UCW! Oh wait, this is not a campaign promoting peace in the world, so, let's try again:

So... see you later, hater! :D

Our opinnion on "Romeo + Juliet" (1996)

   Hey guys, what's going on?

   We have some good news for you... WE ARE BACK!!! :D (even if you think that these are not good news, please don't break our hearts...)

   Ok, like we said on the first post this blog is focused on cinema and our english teacher suggested two themes for this week: the Elizabethan era, and the contemporaneity of Shakespeare. So, limited to that two options, we looked at one another and our eyes just said "We are not going to write about 'ellaborated' (=horrible) hairstyles". So, here we are, writing about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

   Our teacher showed us a part of the movie "Romeo + Juliet" (1996), but even without knowing if we liked that "parts" (we were confused...), we were curious about the rest of it, and after a romantic lunch, we went to Rodrigo's house (we're not going to tell you the address!!!!), and we just watched the whole movie.

   The first thing we want to tell you about this movie, is that: DON'T WATCH IT!!!!

   We are kidding, actually, although we didn't like the effects, the "Movie Maker transitions" and the excess of stupidity in some scenes, we really enjoyed the movie, and, from 0 to 10, we would give it a 7,49999999(9).

   Actually, we forgot how to write a film review, so we decided to write our opinion and express it the best way we could.

   The first good thing about this movie, is Claire Danes, a great, an amazing and wonderful... actress! 

   The second positive aspect about the movie was the fact they challenged themselves to use the original script, and even if it sometimes got to ridiculous (gangsters speaking on such a "polite" english...), it made the whole movie much more interesting! And we liked the way they used the "chorus" from the original script, as a newscast...

   The third positive aspect we will mention, before we start highlighting more negative aspects, is the fact that even using the original script, Baz Luhrmann managed to bring this story to a different time... Instead of having a plot situated on a far (far, far.....) away time, like in the original script, this plot is situated on modern times, and the rivalry between the House of Montague, and the House of Capulet, is represented as gangs quarrel, with everything related to Mafia, the guns (as a metaphor for the "swords"), the cars, etc.

   On the bad side, we noticed that sometimes, as it happens in our blog, the humour gets too excessive (look at the image above...), and this takes the credibility away... And don't forget everything we said before starting to highlight the positive aspects...

   But, in spite of that, we enjoyed the movie and there was never a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

   

   See you later, you hater! :D

(P.S: The only purpose of this picture is showing that we did watch the movie, even if this text couldn't prove it...)

Hey Guys, welcome to the Popcorner! This super awesome blog is owned by 2 cinema masters: Rodrigo Pinheiro and António Valente. Ok, we are not cinema masters, but this blog is our unexpected journey through the movies and TV shows world. We have been challenged by our english teacher to create this blog, and, therefore, we will publish here many posts about everything related to cinema, from film reviews, to the technical parts of a specific movie (maybe Hobbit, once António is just Hobbit's #1 Fan!)... Our posts may be in the form of texts written by us, or vlogs starring your 2 favourite guys (us), maybe if we want to do that one day, you may will see short animations or other stuff! The design of this blog (the background) is 100% ours as you can see in the 2 circles with ours blog name on it!

We hope you enjoyed our first post, and that you will keep on following us!

Readers, we think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!

Rodrigo Pinheiro

António Valente