Tag: movies

The desolation of The Hobbit

In which John C. Wright explains how Peter Jackson rapes the corpse of JRR Tolkien’s beloved book in the first unnecessary cinematic sequel:

Where is the Hobbit in this film, allegedly called THE HOBBIT, again?

Ah, but then we see Bilbo. After his friends are captured by wood elves, using his ring of invisibility, he sneaks into the buried palace of the elf lord. Unseen, his wily eyes spy out that the elves drink wine imported from Laketown, and float the empty barrels downstream as part of their trade and traffic with the human settlment.

He waits until the jailor is drunk, steals the keys, frees the dwarves, and, instead of attempting to sneak them past the heavily guarded upper gates, takes them to the loading dock beneath the wine cellar, seals them in the barrels, and clings, still unseen, to a barrel himself as the unsuspecting elf prentices pole the empty barrels downstream to the Laketown. It is simple and brilliant. Unfortunately, he gets a wetting, and takes a headcold: little bit of realism, if not comedy relief.

Oh, no, wait. That is not what happens.

Just then, just when I thought I would be free from the repeated blows to my tender head of the Stupidity Hammer, the Stupidity Hammer rose up from the shining screen, drew back, whirled hugely and with great force and might and main slammed me right between the eyes so my brain squirted out my ears a yard past my shoulders in both directions.

Bilbo does not seal the barrels.

I will wait for you to recover in case you just got the sensation of a Stupidity Hammer clonking you from the computer screen. They I will repeat myself, because it is so dumb you might not believe me:

Bilbo does not seal the barrels. He leaves the tops open.

So the dwarves are perfectly visible, by which I mean visible to the eye, by which I mean not hidden. By which I mean people with eyeballs can see them, such as the elf-people from whom they are allegedly trying to escape.

Bilbo leaves the barrel tops open when he is dumping the barrels into the water, which is a substance, so I am given to believe, that enters openings and makes things wet inside, and sometimes even sinks things….

Just when I picked myself again off the sticky floor of the theater, blearily wondering where the Hobbit character was after whom this movie was apparently named might be, BAM! The familiar Hammer came down again. This time, it was a scene where Orlando Bloom is standing a zillion feet away from the evil orc bounty hunter Slopgog the Unmentionable or whatever his name is, and he does not shoot him with an elf arrow.

I sat there, rocking back and forth with my eyes crossed, and through the stream of drool and vitreous humor leaking down my chin I muttered again and again, “Shoot him with an elf arrow. Shoot. Him. With. An. Elf. Arrow. SHOOT HIM WITH AN ELF ARROW!”

But no. No elf arrow was forthcoming.

Blogsnog the Debunker or whatever his name is strolled in a leisurely fashion down the narrow walkway of Laketown, not ducking for cover, and meanwhile no one was calling for the town guard, and the elf guy continued not to shoot him with an elf arrow.

You see, the film slimer, er, maker, wanted this scene to be like a gunfight in an iconic Western, with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne staring at each other with narrowed eyes as each strides menacingly ever closer, spurs jangling with each step. Of course, in a Western, both are armed with revolvers, and both are wary of making the first move lest the other man prove fast enough to draw and shoot first, but then both shooters want to close the distance to improve their aim. That is what makes such scenes tense.

Here was what makes a sense spectacularly NOT tense. One guy has a gun and the other had a knife, or a club, or maybe strangling wire or even a stick of butter, because no one gives a rat’s fart for what the other guy has because you can shoot him first.

If you have the weapon that, you know, shoots, you can shoot the guy who has no weapon that shoots, and so there is no downside to letting him see you go for your gun, or, for that matter, use a winch to load your crossbow in a leisurely manner, because you can raise it and turn him into a pincushion before he can attack you with his club or strangling wire. Or stick of butter.

In such a case, he will be running toward you at full speed, because if he walks a menacing walk, well, that give you time to roll a cigarette, light it, put your foot in the stirrup thingie on the crossbow, clamp it to your belt winch, and crank the string back, yawn, read a magazine, drop a bolt in the slot, check the grease on the bolt, aim, make vacation plans, check the wind speed, and fire a bolt through this heart and left lung and out his back in a three-dee spray of unnamed orcish life fluids.

Unless you are superspeed acrobat the wonder elf, in which case you can shoot him nine times a second and spell out your monogram in his vital organs.

Well, who cares? Neither character was in the book anyway. I think I lost consciousness overcome by the fumes of the butter-substitute substance coating the theater floor between the seats. I woke a little later, and elfboy still had not shot Urgslug the Irkisonic, or whatever his name is. My wife had to stuff a wide handful of popcorn flavored food substitute into my face, in order to smother the broken, wretched burbling — shoot him … with …  an elf arrow.

I didn’t bother seeing the second and third movies in the Matrix trilogy. I didn’t bother seeing the second and third movies in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. And I don’t think I’ll bother seeing the second and third movies in The Hobbit, ah, trilogy either.

You know it is bad when even hardcore Tolkien fans not only can’t be bothered to see it, but devoutly wish to avoid ever being forced to lay eyes upon it. A commenter named Rainforest Giant summarizes the problem, not only with Peter Jackson ruining The Hobbit, but with the entire edifice of Pink and Postmodern SF/F:

“Jackson… ruins heroics because he cannot
understand heroism. He ruins a fairy tale because his world lacks the
deep magic. His villains are straight out of Scooby Doo. His special
effects mere lights smoke and mirrors. His understanding of war and
conflict as meaningless as Xena or Buffy. Tolkien understood war, sacrifice, magic (as a storyteller and
father), heroes and villains, hope and despair. Jackson lacks a deeper
soul thats why he writes bad fan fiction and cartoon action.”

It could have been even worse. At least the dwarves weren’t offering each other blow jobs because ground forces. Imagine if McRapey had chosen to rip off Tolkien instead of Heinlein, Dick, and Star Trek. “Famine for the spirit” and “a hog trough for the mind” is an exact description of the state of SF/F today.

The scouring of The Hobbit

This review of the second part of Peter Jackson’s second trilogy does not sound at all promising:

There is, in short, an awful lot of Desolation to wade through before we arrive, weary and panting, on Smaug’s rocky porch. But that was always going to be the drawback of spinning out a 276-page children’s story into more than eight hours of blockbuster movie, particularly when the director is keener to build a prequel trilogy to his own operatic Lord of the Rings films than do justice to Tolkien’s original playful, uncluttered vision.

The tone is one hundred percent Jackson – a kind of thundering gloominess, cut with the occasional glint of Discworld mischief. Jackson and his co-writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have decapitated bodies twitching on the ground, and a captured dwarf leering at a female elf: “Aren’t you going to search me? I could have anything down my trousers.” Maybe this really is what a lot of people want to see from a film version of The Hobbit, but let’s at least accept that Tolkien would probably not have been among them….

There is also an extended cameo for Orlando Bloom’s Legolas, with jokes
foreshadowing his Lord of the Rings role, and the creation of a new, female
elf warrior called Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), whose main purpose is to be
the third leg in an inter-species love triangle. Will she end up with the
dishy elf or the hunky dwarf?

Ye cats. It is becoming abundantly clear that Jackson’s biggest blunder was choosing his co-writers. Seriously, he couldn’t find anyone better than HIS FREAKING WIFE AND HER FRIEND?

This is rapidly approaching Star Wars prequel-levels of absurdity. Permitting Pink SF to invade MIDDLE EARTH is a crime against literature. It’s a crime against HUMANITY. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said Pink SF is a cancer. It is an infectious disease that ruins everything it touches. Defiling the literary grave of Tolkien goes well beyond girls doing their usual shitting in the boys’ sandbox, this is the Pink SF equivalent of suicide bombers.

Why not throw in an orc-human romance while he’s at it? Why not lasers and lectures on global warming? Or, even better, an UNDEAD ORC-human-werewarg love triangle!

A surreal presidency

While the Obama presidency has proven to be an even more amusing comedy of errors than I expected it to be, it’s starting to get a little weird. Mr. Obama has fallen from being the Lightbringer capable of commanding the oceans to lying about crashing at his uncle’s pad in college. And now, we’re informed that he is beyond criticism because movie.

With “12 Years a Slave” petering out at the box office after a decent
but unspectacular run (currently $34 million and losing screens),
liberals are increasingly angry that the well-filmed, erratically-acted, and poorly-scripted biopic remake has failed to shut down criticism of President Obama. 

Pity George W. Bush never thought of that. How can you criticize me?  Did you not see “Lord of the Rings’? The problem most people have with Obama isn’t that he’s an uppity Negro. They simply dislike that he’s a narcissistic fraud of modest intelligence.

Technology and the decline of the gatekeepers

The same forces are at work undermining the power of gatekeepers in every entertainment industry, film, books, and games:

“Let me give you the simplest math,” he replied. “The simple, simple, simple math.”
Good,
I thought. Because my friends and I are not so great at math. I can
guesstimate the budget of a big movie to within a hundred thousand
dollars by reading the script, but I can’t add the columns therein.
“The
movie business,” Peter said, “the historical studio business, if you
put all the studios together, runs at about a ten percent profit margin.
For every billion dollars in revenue, they make a hundred million
dollars in profits. That’s the business, right?”
I nodded, the good student, excited that someone was finally going to explain this to me.
“The
DVD business represented fifty percent of their profits,” he went on.
“Fifty percent. The decline of that business means their entire profit
could come down between forty and fifty percent for new movies.”
For
those of you like me who are not good at math, let me make Peter’s
statement even simpler. If a studio’s margin of profit was only 10
percent in the Old Abnormal, now with the collapsing DVD market that
profit margin was hovering around 6 percent. The loss of profit on those
little silver discs had nearly halved our profit margin.
This
was, literally, a Great Contraction. Something drastic had happened to
our industry, and this was it. Surely there were other factors: Young
males were disappearing into video games; there were hundreds of home
entertainment choices available for nesting families; the Net. But
slicing a huge chunk of reliable profits right out of the bottom line
forever?
This was mind-boggling to me, and I’ve been in the business for thirty years….
When Peter referred to the “transition of the DVD market,” and
technology destroying the DVD, he was talking about the implications
of the fact that our movies were now proliferating for free—not just on
the streets of Beijing and Hong Kong and Rio. And even legitimate users,
as Peter pointed out, who would never pirate, were going for $3 or $4
video-on-demand (VOD) rentals instead of $15 DVD purchases.
“When did the collapse begin?”
“The bad news started in 2008,” he said. “Bad 2009. Bad 2010. Bad 2011.”
It was as if he were scolding those years. They were bad, very bad. I wouldn’t want to be those years.
“The
international market will still grow,” he said, “but the DVD
sell-through business is not coming back again. Consumers will buy their
movies on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon et al. before they will purchase a
DVD.” What had been our profit margin has gone the way of the old media.

This is the very point that the SFWA members didn’t understand when I tried to warn them about the sale of ebooks through non-Amazon channels such as games.  The big mainstream publishers, (and more importantly, the genre publishers owned by them), not only don’t have these channels, they can’t even sell through them because their legacy distribution contracts prohibit them from selling books for virtual currencies.  And I very much doubt Ingram or Barnes & Noble is going to allow publishers to rewrite contracts in order to help them bypass the conventional channels into which they are locked.

Amazon is putting serious pressure on ebook pricing, but it is also maintaining a strong floor.  That floor will disappear once the in-game channel starts to see decent volume. So on the one side, their profit margins are going to decline as ebook prices continue to fall – the average price of an ebook bestseller fell from $11.79 in October 2012 to $6.59 in May 2013 – on the other, they’re not going to be able to sell game tie-in books much longer once Microsoft starts selling HALO ebooks through the Xbox and Disney starts selling Star Wars ebooks through its in-game stores.

It will probably surprise no one to discover that the primary response of the forward-thinking futurists was to declare their opinion that First Sword was unlikely to sell enough ebooks to matter one way or the other, as if the universal adoption of 3D hardware texture-mapped acceleration that Big Chilly and I introduced in Rebel Moon, and the 16-bit color we introduced in Rebel Moon Rising, had anything at all to do with how many copies of those games were sold. 

Speaking of First Sword, I’m working on the standard contract for in-game ebook sales right now, and I would welcome any comments or suggestions those interested in selling either original Selenoth-related fiction or unrelated material through First Sword and other games might have.

In a hole in the ground….

I understand that someone has made a movie that is of some interest to the Tolkien fans in these parts.  I haven’t seen it yet myself, but those of you who have can discuss it here freely.  Don’t worry about “spoilers”, as I could not be less concerned about spoiling any surprises for those sad, unfortunate few who have not read the book.

I do hope Jackson has put a muzzle on whomever was responsible for all of the “humorous” dialogue in The Lord of the Rings.  One thing filmmakers never seem to understand is that because a lot of the dialogue is being provided by a writer whose work is popular enough to support a film, the chances are very high that any new dialogue is going to suffer badly by comparison.  Therefore, it should be kept to the minimum possible.  This is particularly true when the writer concerned happens to be one of the all-time greats.

I was very conscious of this in writing the Argument in Summa Elvetica.  The reason it worked so well that one reviewer thought the whole thing was actually written by Thomas Aquinas was that I took phrases and even complete sentences from the Summa and his other works.  I connected them together in a coherent manner using as few of my own words as possible.  Those who have read A Throne of Bones will probably be aware that I utilized the same technique there and drew upon ancient historical documents in a number of important places.  Had I more time, I would have liked to have gone through the entire dialogue and done it that way.

Star Wars is dead

Not that George Lucas hasn’t methodically gone about ruining his creation for decades, beginning with The Return of the Jedi and those damned Ewoks, but the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney pretty much guarantees that the franchise will never, ever, return to its erstwhile glory.  This take on the acquisition by a Slashdot commenter named Doctor Jest summed it up rather nicely:

Mark my words…. Episode 7 will be all goddamned Ewoks. And
Chewbacca will have a perm and PTSD from the final battle. Then we have
to have the token black guy/chick… forget Billy Dee Williams. We’re
getting Will Smith or his bratty little kid. C3P0 will finally come out
of the closet and admit he’s been taking it up the exhaust pipe from
IG-88 for years. R2D2 will be turned into a karaoke machine…. Luke
will become a homeless religious nut while Han Solo and Leia will have six
kids on galactic welfare… and the evil Ritt Momney will threaten to
close the youth center Han and Leia run unless the duo can field a
tiddlywinks team in time for the big tournament on Yaavin IV. Meanwhile,
the Emperor’s clones will become the universe’s ugliest choir.

Now
I know the franchise is truly dead. Thank goodness I got it on Blu Ray
before Disney got their slimy dickskinners on the franchise. Disney
fucked the Muppets… (I believe they killed Henson because he was
having second thoughts on the sale… ok, so I made that up… but
Disney’s fucking evil!)

It’s sad, because Disney used to be a wonderful organization itself.  Now it is the evil vampire squid of the entertainment world, mindlessly devouring and excreting out the stinking remnants of one entertainment franchise after another.  It was never going to happen, but imagine how much creativity could have been unleashed if George Lucas had released Star Wars under the LGPL.  Instead, we’re going to get gay Ewoks singing musical numbers and Hispanic princesses wielding lightsabers and going on intergalactic voyages with sparkly alien vampires where they defeat the evil Ritt Momney and Pand Raul in the process of learning the important lesson that the ultimate truth in life is to be tolerant of others who are different… unless they are Republicans.

Headline of the day

If it weren’t so wordy, giving away the punchline right there in the headline, it might be my favorite headline ever.  I laughed, I cried, much better than CATS:

Screaming children flee cinema in terror after bungling staff show Paranormal Activity instead of Madagascar 3

And let’s face it, considering the drek that the cinema has been serving up for the last twenty years, this sort of aversion therapy could really be seen as a positive thing.

Navies in space

Foreign Policy interviews a naval analyst concerning what science fiction gets right and what it gets wrong about warfare, especially from the naval perspective upon which so much fictional space war is based.

FP: The United States is in the midst of a major
debate on what our defense policy, especially given shrinking budgets and the
rise of China as Pacific sea power.  Does
sci-fi offer lessons on how the United States can resolve this?

CW: Fiction does not replace policy analysis.  But science fiction is the literature of
“what if?”  Not just “what
if X happens?” but also “what if we continue what we’re doing?”  In that way, science fiction can inform
policy making directly, and it can inform those who build scenarios for
wargames and exercises and the like. One of the great strengths of science
fiction is that it allows you have a conversation about something that you
otherwise couldn’t talk about because it’s too politically charged. It allows
you to create the universe you need in order to have the conversation you want
to have. Battlestar Galactica spent a lot of time talking about the war in
Iraq. There were lots of things on that show about how you treat prisoners.
They never came out and said that directly. They didn’t have to. At the Naval
War College, one of the core courses on strategy and policy had a section on
the Peloponnesian War. It was added to the curriculum in the mid-1970s because
the Vietnam War was too close, so they couldn’t talk about it, except by going
back to 400 BC. 

I’m a big believer in the martial utility of wargaming, but as the article notes, most wargames and all science fiction tend to completely omit the more tedious elements of war, especially logistics and bureaucracy.  Unsurprisingly, wargames tend to do a better job of addressing strategic assumptions and strategic goals than other entertainment media, although even the wargaming implimentation are usually built into the game design rather than left up to the player.

Mailvox: the big questions

LA queries:

I had a question–do you have an opinion on the movie Airplane!?
 The
humor on this movie has always escaped me.  I’ve always found many
comedy movies to be fairly stupid but I can always suspend disbelief,
put aside logical problems in a decent sci fi or comedy movie, and find
some way to enjoy the humor even if it isn’t my normal cup of tea.
 But this movie has always been the one film I cannot stand.
 Anyway,
a friend that reads Vox Popoli and I were having a spat about it and it
made me curious if you enjoyed it or if you ever saw it, and whether
you care one way or another.

I thought Airplane had its amusing moments, but would not put it in my personal top 25 movies or even top 20 comedies.  I can stand it, but only in short doses; I’ve never been able to watch it all the way through.  Its humor is mostly of the sort that I consider to be too broad-based and obvious to be more than moderately funny even when done right.  I think an element of surprise, or at least unpredictability, is necessary to make something genuinely hilarious, and most of Airplane’s humor is entirely predictable, being based on stupid and unlikely misunderstandings.

As a writer once said that if the plot of your novel is dependent upon your characters being stupid, you don’t have an actual book.  In like manner, I don’t find humor that depends upon the characters being borderline retarded to be amusing.  And if a “humorous” pratfall is somehow involved, I am left colder than cold.  I simply don’t find people falling down, particularly in a theatrical manner, to be be funny at all.  When I see an adult laugh at someone slapping their forehead and falling down, or pretending to faint, I seriously wonder what is wrong with them.

But Airplane! does have its moments.  The “I speak jive” line is funny, although the actual execution of the jivespeak borders on the painful.  The surely/Shirley bit is almost Wodehousean and is done well in a deadpan manner that probably wouldn’t have worked nearly as well for anyone not named Leslie Nielsen.  And the short exchanges between Joey and the Captain are downright quoteworthy.  That being said, I looked at the list of what are supposedly the greatest quotes from the movie and noted that less than a quarter of them actually struck me as funny.

To me, easily the funniest movie ever made is Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Other movies that I found to be funnier than Airplane! include Heathers, Weird Science, The Hangover, The Gods Must Be Crazy, The Big Lebowski, Old School, A Fish Called Wanda, Dodgeball, Grosse Pointe Blank, Notting Hill, the first two American Pie films, Stripes, The Pink Panther, and Being There.