(High) Hobbit Hopes

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that I’ve watched both trailers for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey about 50 times each.  I’ve watched all of the production videos multiple times.  I’ve spent hours looking at shot-by-shot analyses of the footage on the Internet.  Not to mention that I’ve read The Lord of the Rings seven times, that I once watched all three extended editions of the movies in one day, and that I listed The Fellowship of the Ring as one of the 10 greatest films of all time.  To say that I’m excited for The Hobbit would be an understatement.  A much more accurate statement would be something like “I’m an obsessive nerd who should probably get a life” but why would I want to do that?

But since I am not just a Tolkien nerd, but a film nerd in general, it seems strange that not once on this blog have I commented on the various issues surrounding The Hobbit that have other film nerds anxious: 3D, 48 fps, two-no wait-THREE movies out of one children’s book!  It seems that everyone with access to a computer has made some comment about all of this, but there’s been silence from Esoteric?!  Well, it’s time to rectify that.

I don’t really want to focus on the 3D/48 fps issue.  I’m not a fan of 3D.  Nothing that I’ve seen of 3D has really impressed me.  I loved Hugo and Prometheus, but when I think about them, I don’t remember the 3D.  Movies that I’ve seen in post-converted 3D like Captain America, The Avengers and Finding Nemo haven’t convinced me that they really needed it.  Then again, I saw Avatar in 2D instead of 3D, so maybe I’m not really qualified to place judgment on 3D in general.  All I can say is that I don’t like the 3D that I’ve seen.

But I’m still willing to give it a chance.  One of Peter Jackson’s production videos demonstrated the system that he is using to shoot The Hobbit in 3D, and I must say that I found it fascinating.  I’m completely open to the possibility that these movies will (post-) convert me to the 3D side.  My plan right now is to see An Unexpected Journey in 2D first, and then see it a second time in 3D on a huge screen, sitting fairly close to the front with a bucket of really salty and buttery popcorn and see if I can really enjoy the experience.  And I would like to give 48 fps a shot, too.  I’d probably prefer to see it in 24 fps for the first time, but I would like to see how this looks.

Neither 3D nor 48 fps really concerns me.  My main focus in this post is with the fact that Jackson and his team are turning a fairly short children’s book (shorter than any one of the LOTR books) into a trilogy of (presumably) 3 hour films.  This decision has caused a great deal of controversy.  I would guess that hundreds of essays and think pieces have been written about it.  I have found very few of these satisfying (here is one exception from Kristin Thompson).

Part of my frustration is with the general characterization that I have seen of the book.  The idea seems to be that this rather short book (not more than 300 pages) could not possibly generate enough material for three movies without feeling bloated and stretched out.  The phrase “butter scraped over too much bread” comes to mind.  I must confess that I had the same thoughts back when Jackson and Guillermo del Toro (remember those days?) were discussing the possibility of two movies.  But here’s the thing: it had been many years since I had actually read the book.  And I think that many of the people criticizing the trilogy decision have also not read the book in a long time or perhaps not read it at all.  I generally don’t have much patience with people who say: “You don’t get it because you haven’t read the book.”  But, well, that’s just the truth in this case.  Because when I went back to reread The Hobbit this summer, I realized how this whole trilogy thing might work.

Jackson has talked about how they have added material to The Hobbit from Tolkien’s Appendices at the end of The Return of the King.  For those unfamiliar with the Appendices, it is essentially a collection of background information about Middle-Earth that Tolkien could not fit into The Lord of the Rings.  It contains histories of men and dwarves (including the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, some of which appeared in the film of The Two Towers), a timeline of events from Second, Third and Fourth Ages (even covering events that occur after the series ends), information about languages and lots of other things that nerds like me love to obsess over.

Some of this material will add to what is already laid out in The Hobbit, namely the history and culture of the dwarves.  This is something that Jackson did not have much time for in The Lord of the Rings, but will be very important for The Hobbit because of the importance of the dwarves in this story.  This is one of the things that I am most looking forward to in this new trilogy.  The dwarves in The Hobbit are comical, sometimes silly characters, but when battle comes, they are fierce warriors.  Some of this already came across in LOTR, but the story of Thorin Oakenshield adds a new dimension.  Reading The Hobbit on its own, his story is just a treasure hunt, but after reading the material in the Appendices, it becomes a very compelling story of exile and recapturing a lost home.  This will be an incredible way to give the story more weight.

Some of the Appendices material will also go to supplement a plotline that is only hinted at in the book of The Hobbit, but is sure to be emphasized in the films (this may be a spoiler, but it has already been strongly alluded to in the trailers).  In the book, Gandalf joins Bilbo and the dwarves on the journey, but he often disappears for long stretches of time without explanation.  At the end of the book, it is revealed that Gandalf was involved in combating a villain known as the Necromancer who is occasionally mentioned but seemingly irrelevant to the main plot.  But in The Lord of the Rings books, it is revealed that the Necromancer was actually Sauron, the main villain of LOTR, who was gathering his strength in Mirkwood before Gandalf and the White Council drove him out.

Now, think about this for a moment.  Picture The Hobbit with Gandalf just disappearing from the action with no explanation until the very end when he reveals that he was dealing with the big villain from LOTR.  Would you really find that satisfying?  Or would you feel kind of cheated?  Perhaps if Jackson had made The Hobbit before The Lord of the Rings, it might have worked.  But now, they have to address the Necromancer.  Adding this plotline certainly expands the material, possibly enough for two movies.

But three movies? (Possible spoiler territory continuing) While rereading The Hobbit, I noticed a structural reason for this decision.  Namely, the story has two climaxes.  The first climax occurs about two-thirds of the way through the book, and the second occurs close to the end like a standard climax.  This might have worked with two movies if both climaxes occurred in the same movie (distributing the climaxes between the two would have resulted in an overstuffed first film and a comparatively stretched out second film).  But given how frustrated many people were with the “drawn-out” ending(s) of The Return of the King, it’s not hard to imagine audiences growing restless after the first climax.

I’m going to start being more specific now and less maddeningly vague (serious spoilers now, get out if you haven’t read the book, though please come back a little further down the page).

OK, so it’s just people who’ve read The Hobbit now, right?  Remember how Smaug dies well before the ending of the book?  Can’t you imagine people being frustrated and confused during the lead up to the Battle of Five Armies.  I mean, it could have worked, but I think that this might give enough of a rationale to have everything after Smaug’s death be it’s own movie.

And, I think that this could also be an interesting opportunity.  Tolkien sometimes tends to describe momentous events very briefly, while spending pages describing minute details of his world (but this is why we love him).  Sometimes, this also involves spending very little time with important characters.  So, in The Hobbit, Bard is introduced just before he kills Smaug.  Dain only speaks one sentence in the entire book.  The events leading up to the Battle of Five Armies are described very broadly without a lot of specifics.  Now, imagine what all of this might be like if all of these characters and events were given their own movie.

Not only would this mean more character development and more detail, but it also provides an opportunity to deal with some interesting moral questions that don’t often appear in this series.  The buildup to the Battle of Five Armies pushes Elves and Men to the brink of war with the Dwarves.  The enmity between Elves and Dwarves is something that LOTR alludes to, but in The Hobbit, we actually see them prepared to kill each other.  And Bilbo’s story during all of this is fascinating.  He has developed a close bond with the dwarves, but after seeing Thorin beginning to slip into madness, Bilbo is forced to betray his companions.  Imagine what this third movie could be, especially with strong characterization for Bilbo, Thorin, Bard, Dain and Thranduil, something for which more room in the two previous movies could allow.  The Hobbit: There and Back Again could really be something that we haven’t seen before.

Now, there is another opportunity that a trilogy presents, but here’s where I think my hopes may be a bit too high.  The Appendices detail a horrific war between the dwarves and the goblins, something that Tolkien alludes to in The Hobbit but doesn’t describe in detail.  With more room to tell the story, Jackson could develop the culture and characters of the goblins.  This is an area where Tolkien’s stories have been lacking: they have great monsters, but they don’t really have great villains.  If Jackson is able to turn the goblins into really great villains (in addition to Smaug, of course), it could make this trilogy really great.

But there is a reason why I think this hope may be a bit to a high, and it leads into my main concern with the third film.  If they have all of the stuff with the White Council and Dol Guldur, that means they must have Sauron in the film.  This creates all sorts of problems.  One is the issue of upstaging The Lord of the Rings.  Sauron can’t take physical form in The Lord of the Rings, so if he actually appears in The Hobbit, it will undermine what is to come.  He will just be less menacing in LOTR.  There is also the issue that was already there in the material, which is that the Ring passes dangerously close to Sauron during the events of The Hobbit.  And this could lead to the biggest issue of them all: I am afraid that Sauron will show up at the Battle of Five Armies.  There were rumors of this when Benedict Cumberbatch alluded to that possibility during an interview.  And it sort of makes sense.  At the same time that he is driven out of Dol Guldur, there is a battle involving the goblins not too far away, a battle right where the Ring is.  It would make sense that Sauron would be involved with this battle.  What I don’t like about this idea is that it robs the goblins of their agency.  In The Hobbit, Bolg leads the goblins into battle because he wants revenge for the death of his father at the hands (um, axe) of Dain.  It would be much less interesting if Sauron just orders him there. 

But there’s a bigger problem.  If Sauron enters this battle, that means that he must be defeated.  And that.  Can’t.  Happen!  If Sauron is defeated in The Hobbit, it will completely undermine the threat in LOTR.  Maybe my fears are irrational, but I can almost see a big special effects fight between Sauron and Gandalf, which will completely change everything about who these two characters are, not to mention the Balrog (nobody ever thinks about the Balrog).  Gandalf the Grey cannot be someone who has faced Sauron and defeated him.  If he is, why would he possibly be afraid of anything in LOTR?  It would be a walk in the park for him. 

But there’s another reason why I’m afraid of Sauron at the Battle of Five Armies (well, isn’t everybody afraid of Sauron?).  It makes sense from a story perspective to have Sauron there because that’s where the Ring is.  It creates conflict that leads into LOTR and draws Bilbo into the climax, whereas in the book he is largely absent.  The problem is that this is absolutely WRONG!  Sauron cannot know who has the Ring, and he especially cannot know that Bilbo has it.  Sauron cannot have even heard of hobbits until Gollum tells him.  That’s the whole point of this story.  Sauron thinks that these little people are not at all important, therefore HE DIES!  It is completely undermined if he finds out before LOTR that a hobbit has the Ring.  Again, maybe this is irrational.  Jackson (and Fran Walsh and Phillippa Boyens) had originally planned for Aragorn to fight Sauron at the Black Gate, but they came to their senses and changed that.  Maybe they will be sensible here, too.  In the book, Sauron has pretty much left Dol Guldur by the time the White Council gets there, so maybe there won’t be a direct battle with Sauron. 

But just in case: Hugo Weaving said that they haven’t shot the battle yet, so Peter (or Pete or Mr. Jackson, whatever you prefer), if you’re reading this and you’re still thinking about having Sauron at the Battle of Five Armies, please don’t.  I’m not saying this to be a smartass fanboy.  I’m saying this because The Lord of the Rings is my favorite movie (the whole thing, though if I had to chose, I would pick Fellowship), and I want The Hobbit movies to be great.  I want them to be the best movies that I have ever seen.  And I know that you have to make changes with an adaptation, but I really think that this particular change will be very bad not just for The Hobbit, but for The Lord of the Rings, too.  So please, don’t ruin my favorite movie.

OK, so if we still have people hiding from spoilers, you can come back now.  You missed quite a rant, but if you go read The Hobbit, you can come back and read this.  Or you can wait three years, see the entire trilogy, and then come back here to see if Peter Jackson proved me wrong.

As you can see, I have some worries about The Hobbit, too, so I can sympathize with others who are worried about the decision to make this a trilogy.  I think that there is a general fear from many people who do like The Lord of the Rings (if they didn’t, why would they care?) that we are about to see the equivalent of another Star Wars prequel trilogy.  And a lot of people have not found Jackson’s post-LOTR work to be very encouraging.  I have not seen The Lovely Bones, so I cannot comment on that.  But the trilogy decision does seem an awful lot like Jackson’s decision to make King Kong three hours long.

But again, I think I have to diverge with what may be the general opinion.  King Kong has problems, but I don’t think the running time is really a big one.  In fact, the problem with King Kong is not that it’s stretched out, but that it’s overstuffed with more characters than it knows how to handle and too many ideas that it wants to explore.  And in an era when so many movies rush to chases and explosions, why is it a lamentable decision to take an hour at the start of a movie to establish characters and a tone before all hell breaks loose?  I’ve written before about how frustrated I am with movies, especially fantasy movies that don’t want to take any time to establish tone, atmosphere and character and instead rush to the action and special effects.  The Lord of the Rings trilogy is among the few examples of movies that really know how to manage tone, and the purpose of the three-hour running time in King Kong is make sure the movie establishes its characters and its tone before the adventure starts.

And that’s what I’m really hoping for from The Hobbit.  I think what I may be looking forward to most from the first film is everything that happens before the adventure begins.  With more time to tell the story, the Unexpected Party (like the Long-Expected Party in Fellowship) could be like the wedding scene in The Godfather: a long sequence that gives enough time to establish most of the characters that we need to know for this story.  Just thinking about all of the things that Jackson needs to cover here is making me excited: the introduction of all the dwarves, the comedy of the dwarves’ bad manners and general raucousness, the moment (already in the first trailer) when the tone shifts (mirroring how the tone will have to shift between light and dark throughout the trilogy) and the dwarves start singing “Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold”, explaining the quest and the history of Erebor, and then the moment when Bilbo decides to go on the adventure.  After all, that’s the big difference between The Hobbit and LOTR.  Frodo doesn’t really have a choice in the matter, but Bilbo does.  He could very well decide to just stay at home and let the dwarves find someone else.  But for some reason (it’s the Tookish side of him) he decides to leave his comfortable life and go on an adventure (we can already see a little bit of this in the most recent trailer).  This is the moment that Jackson really has to nail, and I think he can do it.

But I suppose many might not be quite won over.  Describing how more time could be used to expand the opening (and probably my mention of The Godfather) might confirm to some that The Hobbit movies will be bloated.  Memories of the hour-long curtain raiser of King Kong might be coming to mind.  Maybe these imaginary objectors will be right.  Maybe this will be another King Kong: an ambitious but ultimately flawed movie that doesn’t really hold together.  Yes, King Kong is “flawed” and doesn’t quite work.  But it has moments of real beauty, and at least it’s clearly made not out of some crass commercial calculation, but out of genuine love for and belief in its material and a desire to create something truly wonderful.  That’s also the spirit of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and even though this new trilogy might not match LOTR in quality, if The Hobbit has this spirit, too, then I’ll be happy.

Why do we fall? So we can learn to Rise.

Spoilers for The Dark Knight Trilogy ahead.

 

Christopher Nolan's Batman films are kids movies for adults.  They are comic book movies after all, and we tend to think of comic books as an art form primarily directed at children.  And yet, as every comic book fan knows, comic books are not always intended for children.  There are certain forms of storytelling that we tend to think belong entirely to certain age groups.  We enjoy comic books and fantasies when we're young, but when we get older, we'll move on to more serious things.  We won't need comic books anymore.  Based on his Batman films, Christopher Nolan seems to think differently.

 

Even though these movies are not really for kids, children are everywhere in Nolan's Batman trilogy: the kid who watches Batman climb a building from his balcony in Batman Begins and the two kids playing in a car as Batman drives by in The Dark Knight are two examples, but they are even more abundant in The Dark Knight Rises with its orphanage full of children.  The series is all about children and their relationships with parents or parental figures: mentors, policemen, superheroes.  That is to say, it's about comic books.  It makes perfect sense that when John Blake was a kid, he was able to figure out something that never crossed the mind of any adult: that Bruce Wayne is Batman.  And of course, the kids in the orphanage still believe in Batman, despite what everyone says about him.  Adults often marvel about how dark Nolan's Batman movies are.  Comic book movies shouldn't be this dark.  They should be for kids.  But no kid ever gets confused between Batman and Superman.  They all know that Batman is the darkest and most mysterious of all superheroes.  When I was a kid, I remember that every time we would pretend to be Batman, we would say something along the lines of: "I'm your worst nightmare" (I think this was a reference to the animated series).  This was never something that made me scared of Batman.  I always knew that Batman was a good guy.  But somehow, this made Batman a much more exciting superhero than all the others.  Batman was scary, but he didn't scare me.  He scared the bad guys.  Think of how comforting that can be for a child.  When kids are scared of something, they don't want a protector who's going to be nice to the bad guys.  They want a protector who's going to make the bad guys scared.

 

Thomas Wayne: "All creatures feel fear."

Bruce Wayne: "Even the scary ones?"

Thomas Wayne: "Especially the scary ones."

 

The early scenes in Batman Begins set the foundations for the Batman legend: Bruce Wayne falling down a well as a child and encountering a frightening batcave, followed soon by the murder of his parents in an alley.  For Nolan, the focus in these scenes is on four father figures in Bruce's young life.  The first is his actual father who says with his dying breath, "Bruce, it's ok.  Don't be afraid."  The second father figure is Jim Gordon who, in a police station after the murder, wraps Bruce in his father's coat "to let him know the world hadn't ended."  Significantly, like Bruce's father, Gordon tells Bruce: "It's ok."  The primary purpose of these two father figures is to comfort young Bruce in a moment of extreme fear and despair.  However, the other two father figures are not simply there to provide comfort.  Alfred is a comforting figure after the funeral, but he also tells Bruce something extremely important when Bruce starts saying that his parents' deaths were his own fault: "It was nothing you did.  It was him, and him alone."  It is interesting that Alfred doesn't specify who "him" is because Bruce's mentor and fourth father figure Henri Ducard/Ra's Al Ghul tells him: "Your parents' death was not your fault.  It was your father's."  Bruce's journey from the alley of his parents' murder to becoming Batman is journey between parental figures.  Even his parent's never really leave him.  Bruce constantly worries about what his father might think of him throughout Batman Begins.  The pearls that Selina Kyle steals in The Dark Knight Rises are not just any pearls; they are his mother's pearls.  And the reason why Bruce becomes angry at Ducard's words about his father is because a parent (especially for children, and especially for Bruce Wayne) is more than someone who creates a child.  A parent has to raise that child.  A parent is a hero.

 

Nolan's interpretation of Batman takes place in a world with people in dire need of comforting.  Much has been made over the "realistic" approach that Nolan takes with the material as well as the many references to contemporary issues.  Yet, it is important to note that Nolan's Batman films don't actually take place in the real world.  In his review of The Dark Knight Rises at the AVClub, Scott Tobias describes the series as a "nightmare of the early 21st century."  Nolan's trilogy is the worst kind of nightmare: the kind that seems real.  The films are realistic (whatever that means), but they are not actually real.  They take place in a nightmare world that is frighteningly similar to our own.  While Tim Burton's interpretation does have occasional real world elements involving urban crime, they almost exclusively take place in a fantasy world  (To be clear, these are both legitimate interpretations).  Burton sees Gotham City as an enormous freak show (hence all the circus imagery) with these larger-than-life characters living their own twisted lives separate from reality.

 

In contrast, Nolan's Batman films take place in a nightmare that looks and feels just like the real world.  While Gotham City appears to be a real city, it isn't quite real.  It has a shifting geography, at different times resembling a different American metropolis.  In Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, the city was distinctly Chicago, but in The Dark Knight Rises, it begins to resemble New York City.  When people refer to it, they say the name of this city as if it is a bad word.  "I never wanted you to come back to Gotham.  I knew there was nothing here for you but pain and tragedy."  "Innocent is a strong word to throw around Gotham."  Gotham is more than a city.  It is a place in the mind and the soul for these characters.  It is a nightmare city, and it looks just like one of ours. 

 

The events in this nightmare world are exaggerated worst-case-scenario versions of real world fears.  In The Dark Knight, the Joker is a terrorist with an almost superhuman ability to be anywhere in Gotham, who engineers destruction across the city and cannot "be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with."  And the only way to catch him is to violate the individual liberties of Gotham's citizens.  The Dark Knight Rises depicts a class war similar to the French Revolution, and just like in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Nolan doesn't paint a very flattering portrait of either the oblivious aristocracy or the mob that replaces it.  Some have criticized Nolan for "muddled" politics: the film seems to take both sides of the issue.  The Dark Knight seems to do something similar with the issue of warrantless wiretapping: Batman does this in order to find the Joker, but Lucius Fox destroys the eavesdropping machine at the end of the film.  I don't find this criticism particularly compelling.  Part of this could be because I'm not very interested in a movie (or any work of art) with an obvious message (especially a political one).  I get excited when a movie doesn't present easy answers or when the hero does something that the movie itself does not necessarily condone.  I walk out of the theater thinking about what I've just seen, asking myself what was the right thing to do, rather than simply having the movie answer those questions for me.  But what might be the most important aspect of the trilogy's seemingly contradictory politics is that they enhance both the nightmarish and realistic aspects of this world.  One of the most frightening situations to be in is one in which you cannot be sure what the right course of action is.  And even more frightening is realizing that this situation does not only belong in nightmares; it happens all the time in reality.

 

One of the other major aspects of Nolan's Batman nightmare comes from his visual style.  Nolan usually makes films about loners, about people who are cut off from their fellow human beings, and his visual style reflects this.  He often uses the frame to isolate characters.  Rather than having a dialogue scene done in one medium shot showing the characters talking, he often cuts between close ups of the characters.  It's as if the frame is a prison cell keeping these people from really interacting with each other.  Even though they may seem to be in the same room as each other, these characters are alone.  Of course there are exceptions, and it is usually important when they happen.  One of the most significant examples of this is a dialogue scene between Batman, Harvey Dent and Jim Gordon at the Batsignal early in The Dark Knight.  The scene is done almost entirely in one shot as the camera slowly circles around them, as if to stay away and just let them talk with each other, even going behind the Batsignal at one point.  Even though Gordon and Dent argue with each other, the three of them are united in a common purpose, and Nolan places all of them in the frame at once to show this.  Contrast this scene with the final confrontation between these three characters at the end of the film as Harvey/Two-Face threatens to kill Gordon's son.  They are all in separate frames.  Each character is alone, and the unity that made them so strong at the beginning has now disappeared.  But when Batman and Gordon stand over Harvey's dead body contemplating their seeming defeat at the hands of the Joker, the two of them are back in the same frame again.

 

Nolan continues using this technique in The Dark Knight Rises, but there seem to be more shots featuring two or more characters.  Even though things have never been more grim in this series, people seem to be more connected with each other.  One of my favorite moments comes when Batman has decided to use the Bat to fly the nuclear bomb away from Gotham.  Selina Kyle walks with him, asking why he came back to the city, and Nolan cuts between two shots tracking alongside them, each shot favoring one of the characters over the other.  But when they stop and kiss, the camera swings around to look at both of them in profile as they embrace, capturing both of them equaling in the frame.  Yet, the most important use of this technique comes near the very end as Alfred, Gordon, Fox and John Blake stand beside the graves of the Wayne family: Bruce and his parents.  Nolan shows them all in a wide shot with the characters framed against Wayne Manor in the background.  There is a low metal fence surronding the graves, almost like a cage.  The world may be a prison, but at least they are all together in the same cell: the young and the old, the living and the dead.

 

Perhaps the most important aspect of the nightmare world that Christopher Nolan has created is that the fears that fuel it belong to both children and adults.  But many of these fears are directed in such a way to appeal mainly to adults, especially the references to major contemporary fears: terrorism, economic troubles, class conflict, enemies with goals and motivations that we don't understand, who "just want to watch the world burn."  And of course, adults fear being alone in the world just as much as children do.  Perhaps the biggest difference between Nolan's interpretation of Batman and all of the others is that Nolan's films are not really about the masked weirdos who run around doing outlandish things.  Nolan's Batman films are about the normal people who have to live through this nightmare, people that these movies believe are flawed, perhaps selfish and easily led, but are essentially good: the people on the ferries in The Dark Knight and the people emerging cautiously from their homes at the end of The Dark Knight Rises.  "People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy."  People need heroes. 

 

The key scene for Nolan's interpretation of Batman comes at the end of The Dark Knight.  Bruce does not really mention his parents during this film, but the film recalls their memory during the scene when Gordon returns to his family after faking his death.  As he sits beside his son's bed, the music that plays on the soundtrack is the same theme that played during Bruce's memories of his father's stethoscope in Batman Begins.  Parents and children are everywhere in these movies: Bruce and his parents, Gordon and his children, Ra's and Talia Al Ghul (watch the way that Nolan uses editing and camera movement to mirror his behavior in hers and the climax of The Dark Knight Rises becomes even more powerful), the orphans who are searching for a hero and see Batman (not Bruce Wayne, of course) doing the most heroic thing anyone can do.  These children look up to their parents as heroes because they need someone to guide them, someone to tell them that everything's going to be ok, someone to perform the same function that comic book superheroes perform.  After Batman saves his life, Gordon's son asks why Batman is running away.  Gordon responds very simply: "Because we have to chase him."  But as he continues talking, it doesn't really sound like he's talking to a child anymore: "Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now.  So we'll hunt him.  Because he can take it.  Because he's not a hero.  He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector.  A dark knight."  Gordon is not just comforting his son here.  He is comforting himself with the thought that there is someone out there willing to sacrifice everything, even willing to sacrifice being a good person in order to protect him and his children and ensure that they can be good people.  He is telling himself that everything is going to be alright, just like he told his son "It's going to be alright" as Two Face held a gun to his head.  This entire series could be summed up in a parent telling a child, "It's ok.  Don't be afraid."  And the important thing is that this parent is saying the same thing to himself.  This is the same thing that comic books do: they give kids a hero, a protector and tell them that everything's going to be alright.  Maybe that's not quite true, but the kid needs to hear it.  With his Batman trilogy, Christopher Nolan is saying that adults need comic books, too.

The Greatest Films of All Time

As Sight and Sound Magazine unveils their list of the Greatest Films of All Time today, I thought it would be a good idea to publish my own list.  It's in alphabetical order, so it's not ranked.

Citizen Kane (Welles)

Yes, you knew it had to be on the list.  And it deserves to be on the list, not just for its technical and narrative innovations, but for the simple fact that it is just a fantastic movie.  I get the sense that many people who haven't seen it, but hear the phrase "greatest film of all time" are under the impression that Citizen Kane is long and boring.  On the contrary, it is less than two hours long and ferociously paced with scenes that jump through enormous spans of time in a matter of seconds ("Merry Christmas, Charles...").  The early scenes are wildly entertaining, but as the film moves on, the weight of years begins to sink in.  Not that it becomes boring, mind you, but we begin to get a sense of the fact that this movie is dealing with the full story of a man's life.  And though it's the story of an important (fictional?) public figure, it's not just the story of newspaper headlines, political campaigns, divorces and scandals.  It's also about the small moments that make up life: a child playing in the snow, a marriage falling apart over breakfast(s), shadow puppets on a wall, a girl with a white parasol.  At the end of the movie, there is a sequence showing a group of reporters picking through the last remanants of a man's life, things that have very little meaning to these people.  But we recognize them from earlier in the movie, and it feels as if they really are memories from a long time ago, instead of two hours.  And then there is that haunting shot when the camera glides through the great hall of Xanadu over statues, trophies, bed posts, and far more things beyond count, finally resting on the one object that everyone in this movie has been looking for, something that a man once lost and never recovered, something that explains everything and nothing about Charles Foster Kane.

A Hard Day's Night (Lester)

It's as if they took pure unadulterated joy and turned it into a movie.  The entire film is bursting with the energy and excitement of seeing and (as the film makes it seem) being The Beatles.  Even the camera gets possessed by this.  As the Fab Four run away from hordes of screaming girls, the handheld camera runs alongside them.  Who would even think of locking the camera down for this movie?  And what a daring movie it is.  Not content to simply coast on being a pop culture entity, the picture is filled with surprising, surrealist sequences that if only made a few years later would be termed Pythonesque: John disappearing in the bathwater; "She looks more like him than I do"; a marketing executive who claims to know what the kids like but doesn't recognize George Harrison.  And then there are the scenes that serve no narrative purpose but are absolutely indispensable: the boys playing in a field to "Can't Buy Me Love" and of course the lengthy (yet far too short) concert scene culminating in "She Loves You."  And while it's always great to see The Beatles performing, what makes this one of the greatest films of all time and not just an extended Ed Sullivan Show performance is intercutting The Beatles with closeups of the audience as they scream and cry because (why else?) IT'S THE BEATLES!

Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)

A vast and empty desert fills the 70mm frame.  The sun beats down mercilessly from the sky as a young man stares out into the emptiness, waiting for something.  Then, the young man starts moving forward on his camel, and just like him, the camera pushes forward into the desert, slowly at first, but soon it begins moving faster.  Suddenly, we realize that the desert isn't empty after all: there is a tiny dot on the horizon, and slowly but surely, this dot turns into a human being.  A bold, humanist statement done entirely with images and music.  This movie isn't about the desert; it's about that tiny dot on the horizon.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson)

The greatest cinematic fantasy, the standard-bearer for the best that CGI-aided cinema has to offer, and a testament to cinema's ability to create wonderful images and tell absolutely thrilling stories.  Using what is perhaps the greatest literary fantasy as its foundation, Peter Jackson brings a complete world to the screen, where every place and creature has a history, sometimes spoken of, but always suggested in the locations and the set design.  Think of the ruined Dwarf kingdom in the Mines of Moria, the enormous statues of the Argonath guarding the passage down the river, the cities of Edoras and Minas Tirith.  The entire trilogy is a work of beauty, but the first film in the series is the best: a film of joy and terror, an elegy, and a wonderful adventure, directed with the spirit of a Ray Harryhausen monster movie combined with Jackson's earlier horror/splatter pictures.  Yes, the story has not been finished after this movie is over, but I couldn't ask for a better ending: a gloriously pulpy third act; a mighty, yet flawed character who redeems himself in death; a man who finally decides to accept his destiny; and a hobbit who realizes he can't really continue his journey alone; and of course: "We travel light.  Let's hunt some orc."  Every time the end credits roll after this movie, I remember what it was like to be nine years old, seeing it for the first time, and not being able to wait until I could either see it again or see the rest of the story.  You mean there's still more adventure to come?  Yes!

My Darling Clementine (Ford)

The greatest film from the master of the Western, it is a retelling of the Wyatt Earp legend with Henry Fonda as the famous marshall and Walter Brennan as the head of the evil Clantons.  It's a classic Western in many ways, yet it stands apart even from Ford's other great films.  It's all there in the title, really.  The movie is named not for the Earps, the Clantons or the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but for Clementine, the young woman from the East who has come to Tombstone chasing after "Doctor John Holliday."  Even though Ford perfectly sets up the mythic confrontation between the Earps and the Clantons, the moments that I remember most are the quiet ones, the ones that suggest that the era of the Old West, the era of gunfights is coming to an end, and a new era is beginning.  One of the strangest and most poetic scenes in all of cinema comes when a Shakespearean actor visits Tombstone and drunkenly recites Hamlet's famous soliloquy in a bar at gunpoint; when he stops midway through, it is Doc Holliday who finishes for him, and the entire world seems to come to a halt as Doc recites these words.  It is his soliloquy, too.  But of course, the most important scene in perhaps any Western comes when Wyatt Earp escorts Clementine to a church dance.  As Ford's favorite hymn plays ("Shall We Gather at the River"), he pulls to a wide shot to show Wyatt and Clementine slowly walking together.  John Ford painted his Western mythology in larger-than-life images: think of his frequent filming locations in Monument Valley, or for that matter, his frequent collaborations with John Wayne.  Yet, in the stately way that these two characters walk to the dance in My Darling Clementine, Ford creates another kind of mythic image.  This time, it is to mark the end of a legend.  In these few shots, he marks its passing, but it is crucial that he is not really mourning it.  After all, they are not going to church for a funeral.  They are going there for a dance.

Nashville (Altman)

"I'm just trying to be heard."  It doesn't really matter which character in Robert Altman's masterpiece actually says this line because all of them are saying it in some way or another.  No filmmaker listens quite like Altman, and in this movie, he hears the voices of more than 20 major characters (he designed an entirely new sound system in order to do this).  The film is aimless and generally plotless, watching and listening as all of these characters go about their lives over the course of a few days in Nashville, Tennessee.  The first experience of watching the film creates that glorious feeling of being lost in the world of the movie, but when you watch it again and again (the film demands multiple viewings), try picking out a few characters that you hadn't really paid attention to before and follow their storylines closely.  Then, choose a different set of characters next time.  It's amazing how Altman juggles so many characters, and yet, if you watch closely enough, you'll see that he gives each of them their due.  He hears everyone singing (even the ones that don't sing), and even though not everyone is willing to listen to them, Altman is more than willing.  And when tragedy strikes at the end, someone who has never really been heard in her entire life has the chance (or maybe duty) to sing.  It's the most emotionally devastating ending in all of cinema, and perhaps the greatest American film ever made.  "Life may be a one way street.  It don't worry me."

Notorious (Hitchcock)

The Master's (not just of Suspense) most entertaining picture: a spy drama, a romance, a visual wonder, and an exploration of Hitchcock's obsession with the difference between a man's idea of a woman and who she actually is.  This is really a movie about irrational behavior; the entire plot is based on a decision that no rational person would make.  Ingrid Bergman is the daughter of a Nazi spy who is recruited by U.S. Intelligence man Cary Grant to spy on some of her father's friends after her father goes to prison.  There is the suggestion that she is doing this to redeem herself for her country: patriotism, itself an irrational behavior.  But it takes more than patriotism for her to perform her assignment, which is to sleep with the head of a Nazi spy ring in Brazil.  She does this because she has fallen in love with Cary Grant and she thinks that he wants her to do it, very irrational indeed.  The movie is filled with sequences marked by Hitchcock's exhilirating visual style and scenes of incredible suspense.  But the more I think about it, the more I realize that this movie is essentially a catalogue of behaviors that really should not make sense, and are therefore very human.  Alcohol plays an enormous role in the movie.  Wine bottles are not only the MacGuffin, but there is also a wonderful scene at a party where the stock of bottles acts as a kind of timebomb.  There is also an interesting connection between the enormous amount of drinking that Bergman does at the beginning of the film and the drink that the Nazis use to poison her near the end (which ends up confusing Cary Grant).  But of course, the movie is really about the most human and irrational feeling of all: love; how irrational it is to love someone who does not love you back (two characters are guilty of this) and how irrational it is not to love someone who loves you.  The climax of the movie is sequence in which two men both realize how irrational they really were.  And then it ends with one final irrational decision as a character walks up a staircase to his death.

The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)

Every time I see this film, I am simply in awe of it.  It is without question the greatest action picture ever made, and maybe the greatest cinematic epic. The running time is nearly four hours long, and yet the film is paced so that it zips by faster than most 90 minute films.  The action sequences are breathtaking, the locations and situations so well-established beforehand, and the action so frenetically intense when it arrives.  The story of a group of samurai hired to defend a village from bandits is one of the most influential plots in all of movies.  Between this film, Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress, American action pictures might owe their very existence to Akira Kurosawa.  Yet, The Seven Samurai is anything but simplistic.  The villagers are not innocent victims.  They don't trust the samurai who are dying to protect them, and they have their own secrets about past dealings with samurai.  When their samurai protectors find out their secret, one of them says, "I would like to kill every farmer in this village."  And yet, these samurai still fight to protect this village, even though they stand to gain nothing from it other than three meals a day.  They get no money and no honor.  In fact, most of them are ronin who have no honor anyway.  Even if they win, the victory will not really be theirs.  Yet, they fight and some die for villagers who aren't sure that they want the samurai.  The answer to this mystery may be found in the master swordsman who joins the group.  At first, he refuses because his only concern is in perfecting his craft.  Then why does he ultimately join?  Perhaps because this endeavor, fighting for a nearly hopeless cause that does not promise any reward, is the only way to truly perfect the craft of the warrior.

Sunrise (Murnau)

This silent masterpiece is often celebrated for its techinical excellence: the expressionistic images typical of F.W. Murnau, the use of few (and when used, often beautiful) title cards, the freely moving camera that seems to glide through the air.  But beyond these wonders, Sunrise is a demonstration of the emotional power of cinema.  The history of the medium has shown that cinema is far more adept at expressing emotions than ideas or messages.  Sunrise is 90 minutes of pure emotion.  There is no complex plot here, only the simply story of a man rediscovering his love for his wife after he has an affair.  Of course, the plot is a little more complicated (and darker) than that, but that essentially describes what happens in the picture.  The opening scenes do a fantastic job of establishing everything: the farmer and his wife, the small village they live in, the woman from the city, and the farmer's plot to murder his wife before he realizes his mistake.  The final scenes poise of the edge of heartbreak as the farmer fears that his wife has died in a storm.  But this all pales in comparison to the audacious middle section of the film in which the couple visits the city after taking a trip across the water.  There are few words here and really not much of a plot once the wife has forgiven her husband (this is after he breaks down in tears before her in a wonderful moment that would probably be over the top in a sound picture but is perfect in a silent).  The couple wanders aimlessly around the city for a long stretch of time, lost in the joy of being together.  They stop at a restaurant, a church and a barbershop.  They get a picture taken together.  And in one of the gloriously romantic moments in cinema, they stop and kiss in the middle of a street, causing a major traffic jam.  What a wonderful, bold and thoroughly cinematic idea.  Instead of telling a story with words, Sunrise tells a story with pure and simple emotion.

The Third Man (Reed)

For me, this film is the epitome of what cinema should accomplish.  That does not necessarily mean that it is the greatest film of all time, just that this movie represents everything that a movie should be.  It is non-stop excitement from the beginning to the end.  Yet, even though the movie is a wonderful entertainment, there is a deep and utter darkness beneath its surface.  The movie has the feel of a jaunty adventure at the beginning as a visiting American in postwar Vienna tries to solve the mystery of friend's death, but the more time he spends there, we begin to realize that he really does not understand this place.  Like many Americans, he thinks that the world is going to be like a bad Western: he'll ride into town, shoot the bad guy with the black hat and then ride out.  But postwar Europe is not nearly as simple as he thinks it is.  The film is really the supreme artistic work on American naiveté in foreign affairs and should probably be required viewing for anyone going into U.S. foreign policy.  It is also an interesting take on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, as our hero meets another visitor who has discovered and embraced the darkness in a place that has just recently endured hell on earth.  The movie is an exhilarating entertainment with the most gorgeous cinematography ever put on film.  And yet it also contains this speech on a Ferris wheel above a park: "Look down there.  Would you really feel anything if one of those dots stopped moving forever?  If I gave you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you really tell me to keep my money or would you...calculate how many of those dots you could afford to lose?"

Film Nerd Blasphemy

Spoilers for Memento and Inception ahead.

It’s hard for me to know how I would have reacted to Memento if I had seen it when it was first released without knowing anything about it.  Maybe I would have been as enthusiastic about it as just about everyone else was.  All I can possibly know is that when I finally saw it after seeing every one of Christopher Nolan’s other films at that time (it was sometime in 2011), I was underwhelmed and a little disappointed.

What went wrong?  Nolan is one of my favorite modern filmmakers (as a quick glance through this blog’s archive will tell you).  I consider The Dark Knight and Inception to be among the very best films of recent years, and I think Batman Begins and The Prestige are fantastic movies.  I even enjoyed Insomnia and his very first feature Following.  So why couldn’t I enjoy the movie that many consider to be Nolan’s first masterpiece, that even many of his detractors acknowledge as a good film.

Maybe, as I suggested above, part of it had to do with knowing too much about the movie before viewing.  It’s a little ironic (given the famous structure of the film) that Memento, the movie that launched Nolan’s career was the last of his films that I went back to watch.  By that point, I already knew a lot about it: that the protagonist has short-term memory loss, that the film is told backwards and that it is eventually revealed that the protagonist is responsible for his wife’s death.  This is one of the problems that arises when a movie with a twist of some kind becomes a pop culture phenomenon: it becomes hard to avoid spoilers.  There are examples of movies that I have enjoyed even when I already knew The Big Secret: Fight Club, The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game come to mind.  But there are also movies that depend so heavily on a big reveal at the end that the movie becomes hard for me to enjoy if I already know the secret: The Usual Suspects comes to mind.

Memento fell into the latter category for me.  The purpose of the backwards-chronology narrative is to give viewers a sense of memory loss similar to the protagonist’s (Leonard).  But if you already know the secret, the movie becomes a game of trying to figure out how the pieces are eventually going to fit the way you expect them to.  It also creates the frustrating situation of knowing that a character is on a wild-goose chase, which means that I tend to stop caring about what happens because I know that it ultimately won’t matter.

Obviously, this is not really Nolan’s fault.  He constructed a movie that is intended to be seen (like all movies) with open eyes and no preconceptions.  However, Nolan is responsible for a movie that cannot stand up to repeated viewings.  Unlike Inception (which I think requires multiple viewings in order to understand the movie’s themes), Memento begins to fall apart the second time through.  The behavior of Carrie-Anne Moss’ character in particular makes no sense upon second viewing.  In terms of the film’s narrative, her behavior follows the rhythms of a standard film noir femme fatale: at first the audience trusts her because we think she’s helping the (anti-)hero, but then she reveals that she can’t be trusted.  But since the movie is told in reverse, her actual behavior is that she uses him for her own purposes first, and after she has used him, she helps him and acts like he should trust her. 

I really don’t understand why she helps him at this point.  She knows that Teddy arranged the meeting that got her boyfriend killed, but there is nothing to suggest that she knows she is giving him Teddy’s real name.  Even if she does, she could not possibly have known his license plate from Leonard’s tattoo.  So, the idea that she is still using him for her own purposes is out.  Maybe she has begun to feel sympathy for him?  But I don’t really buy that either (despite what Leonard writes on his Polaroid of her).  She has gotten frustrated with his constant talk of his wife, and she has used several unkind words to describe her.  There is a nice scene when she takes off his shirt and sees his tattoos, so maybe seeing the extent of his obsession makes her want to help him.  But it still doesn’t make sense that she would take off his shirt in the first place.  Her behavior essentially feels dictated by the plot and not by her character.  Nolan has never been particularly good at writing parts for women, but I think his characterization of Mal in Inception is a way of acknowledging this, so hopefully this weekend will reveal that he has broken that streak.

I like that Nolan was playing around with story structure in Memento, but the film is full of elements that he has been able to do much better in subsequent films.  After the brilliant opening scene showing Leonard killing Teddy in reverse, the rhythm of the first few scenes feels wrong.  The scenes are frustratingly short so not only is the audience confused (which is fine), but I was also feeling like I was being jerked around.  It doesn’t help that each short scene is bookended by quick fades to and from black, creating a sense that these are just separate scenes placed one after the other instead of a complete movie (he used a similar technique in Following).  My dad tells me he almost walked out on the movie when he first saw it and with this frustrating opening, I can’t say that I really blame him.  In contrast, Nolan’s film The Prestige has a far less frustrating time-shifting narrative.  The crucial difference is that almost every transition in this film is done with a straight cut rather than fading to black as Memento does to distinguish different timelines.  As a result, The Prestige flows much more easily as a narrative than Memento.

The emotional purpose of Memento’s structure is to create a sense of reaching further into a character’s past while the story is moving forward, eventually arriving at a major secret, but I think Nolan does this to a much more powerful effect in Inception.  Part of this is because Nolan disguises it in Inception by making the audience think that we are watching a straightforward narrative film.  There is a fascinating tension as realize that while the story is moving forward, we have also been moving steadily backward in Cobb’s past.  The timeline here is marked with three utterances of a line, the first two times by Mal, the third time by Cobb: “You’re waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away.  You know where you hope this train will take you, but you can’t know for sure…”  Each time this line appears, it takes on more meaning until we arrive at its origin.  The tension between a forward narrative direction and a backward emotional direction make this all the more powerful.  Yet in Memento, the audience knows after a certain point that the story is being told in reverse and that they should expect a big revelation at the end.  It lacks the narrative tension that makes the revelation in Inception so powerful. 

Nolan also accomplishes the revelation in Memento with what is essentially an enormous info dump.  A common criticism of Nolan’s films is that he uses dialogue rather than images to explain things.  Memento is the worst offender in this regard, which makes it odd that Nolan detractors sometimes consider this to be his best work.  Inception uses dialogue to explain its revelation, but the power of this scene doesn’t come from Cobb’s description of planting a thought in Mal’s head, but from the circumstances surrounding the third utterance of the repeated line: that we’ve heard it before, but each time from Mal; that Cobb is now saying it; that we can see where they are when Cobb says it.  Now, we understand what this means.  It’s a combination of dialogue, images, placement in the structure of the story, and the fact that this revelation is occurring at the same time as an enormous action climax involving three other sets of characters (just thinking about all of that is making my heart pound a little faster).  Memento’s dialogue-driven revelation just comes up short.

For me, the most disappointing thing about Memento is that the ironic twist just makes things feel smaller.  After two viewings, it leaves me with a feeling that nothing in the movie really matters.  This also contributed to my lack of interest in the film during my second viewing.  I just didn’t really care.  The idea of a man seeking revenge because he can’t remember that he has already accomplished it is an interesting idea, but I don’t think Memento really makes it work.  I think Nolan intends the movie to be a tragic film noir (listen to the music; it’s clearly scored for something powerful and significant), and it is possible to do this.  Look at The Third Man or The Dark Knight for that matter.  Hell, “Hamlet” is essentially a noir tragedy.  But the ending of Memento reveals that is neither noir nor tragedy.  The essence of noir is of a man (traditionally) trying to accomplish something, trying to do good for himself or someone else, and discovering that the world is a place that won’t let him do this.  The world won’t let him be a hero.  In Memento, it’s not the world or the system that has trapped Leonard.  Leonard has knowingly trapped himself using his own mental condition (knowing both that he has trapped himself and that he will forget the trap).  This is not the same as a character trapped in his own mistakes or his own hubris.  The deliberate decision to do this just doesn’t really fit with film noir.  It’s more absurdist than noir, more Waiting for Godot or The Myth of Sisyphus than Double Indemnity (come to think of it, Sisyphus is a really good comparison with Leonard).  And before you say anything, yes, noir can be existential (Le Samourai, The American), but existentialism and absurdism are two different things.  Existentialism questions whether there is meaning in life.  Absurdism believes there is no meaning. 

I suppose there could be an absurdist noir, but certainly not an absurdist tragedy.  Tragedy can certainly be pessimistic, but there must be meaning in it, there must be a catharsis.  Above all, tragedy demands that the audience care about what happens.  The first time seeing Memento, I did feel something for Leonard, but it was closer to pity than sympathy.  I felt that it was a sad situation for him to be in, but that certainly is not enough emotion for tragedy.  After the second viewing, I honestly didn’t care about Leonard at all.  In fact, the only character I felt anything for was Teddy (yes, I know that’s not his real name).  The last shot of Teddy in the movie is of him scrounging through bushes looking for his keys while Leonard plots his death.  Teddy isn’t a good guy, but he isn’t particularly evil.  He’s a fool with a goofy smile, and I felt some pity for him knowing that he was going to get his head blown to pieces at the beginning/end of the movie.  But like I said before, pity is not enough emotion for tragedy.  Maybe if Leonard had a different relationship with Teddy there would be some tragedy in the knowledge that Leonard would eventually kill him.  But as it is, Teddy’s just a silly goof who gets his head blown off by a guy who isn’t even going to remember it.

Is all this to say that Memento is a bad film?  No, just one that I found disappointing.  There are moments that I like (“I don’t feel drunk” and “No, he’s chasing me” are particularly memorable).  Almost all of the individual scenes work well.  It’s a great-looking movie (Nolan’s first collaboration with Wally Pfister!), and it’s clear from Memento that Nolan is a good director.  And Guy Pearce does a good job with the difficult role of playing a character who doesn’t really grow or change and can’t really know anything in any scene.  But for a movie with its reputation, it was quite a letdown when I finally saw it (I guess I understand how people felt when they weren’t as impressed with The Dark Knight and Inception as lots of people).  I don’t approve of the term “overrated,” but if I were going to use it, I would use it to describe Memento.  Essentially, I think it’s a clever screenwriting exercise by a filmmaker who would go on to make much better movies.