Tag: movies

The only good thing about The Hobbit III is that it means Peter Jackson and his two-woman Harem of Stank is done squatting and urinating upon the text of Tolkien.

It’s a damn shame that the three Hobbit films feature so little of the titular hobbit.

Martin Freeman has established himself as a quietly great actor with serious dramatic and comedic chops, and his scenes in these movies have consistently been the best thing about the films. Bilbo Baggins is the only character capable of eliciting genuine reactions from the audience, which is what Peter Jackson’s bloated Hobbit trilogy needed more than anything—Bilbo’s scenes form the kernel of what could have been a smaller, quieter, but ultimately more narratively successful series of films, one where Bilbo’s personal journey isn’t swallowed whole by loud Lord of the Rings-style battle sequences.

Other than Freeman’s wonderful, quiet little scenes and a bare handful of others, Battle of the Five Armies is one big two-hour-and-24-minute-long argument against splitting the book up into three films.

The disappointing thing is that Jackson actually got off to a pretty good start. He did a wonderful job bringing the scenery of Middle Earth to life. The Shire and the hobbits were excellent. The first thing he really got wrong, in my opinion, was Arwen Evensong, followed by Rivendell and Elrond. But Arwen was a harbinger for Jackson’s lack of respect for the text, which only got worse as the movies went on, culminating in the insane decision to completely vivisect and spread out The Hobbit over three cash-grabbing vehicles.

Verdict: “These movies aren’t Star Wars prequel-level unredeemable, but both as a follow up to the Lord of the Rings movies and an adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, this new trilogy misses the mark in just about every possible way.”

The movies were not a complete loss. The first three were genuinely enjoyable despite the “improvements” to Tolkien’s masterpiece. Perhaps in another generation, a filmmaker will do the sort of justice to his books that the producers of A Game of Thrones have done to George Martin’s.

I haven’t paid any attention whatsoever to the Star Wars universe since seeing what was called Episode I. Not the games, not the movies, not the animated LEGO cartoons, nothing. So, I’ll have to wait and see what the verdict is on this Episode VII before I even think about bothering to see it. It would be nice to think that Disney isn’t going to make an even bigger fiasco of the franchise than George Lucas did, but I’m not particularly optimistic. Let’s face it, Disney movies all have one basic theme these days: the supreme importance of being yourself.

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.

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.

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.