A Celebration of Cinema for the Year 2012

I really was planning on doing the list earlier this year.  Most, if not all critics make their lists of the best films of the year in December before the year even ends.  Those of us without access to screenings weeks before release dates often have to wait until January to see some of the films that critics consider to be the very best.  But it just so happened that none of the films that I saw after deadline (so to speak) ended up on my Top Ten list, so really, I could have posted this during December, too.  But here I am again, just like last year, posting my list of the best films of 2012 on the same weekend as the Oscars.  Like I wrote last year, the timing actually makes sense.  As the Academy celebrates the year in film, we’re going to do our own celebration here at Esoteric.  The following is a list of what I think is worth celebrating in the cinema of 2012.

The best picture that I saw this year was Rian Johnson’s Looper: an exhilarating and emotionally powerful science-fiction film about time travel.  A scene midway through the picture provides its central image: two men are sitting at a diner, a young man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and an older man (Bruce Willis).  They are, in fact, the same man.  Willis is from 30 years in the future and has been sent back in time to be killed by his younger self: Gordon-Levitt.  Here we have those questions that we think about all the time: what would you say to the person you were years ago or the person you will become?  Are you a completely different person?  What has happened in 30 years to turn that young man into that old man?

Of course, Looper is not only about existential questions.  It’s an exciting sci-fi crime thriller.  In the future, when the mob wants to murder someone, they send that person back in time to be killed and disposed of by an assassin like Gordon-Levitt.  Eventually, these assassins have to kill their own future selves, guaranteeing that there will be no loose ends.  When Gordon-Levitt fails to kill his future self, he becomes the target of his fellow assassins.  The first half of the movie is a pulse-pounding action picture with strong characterization, visual ingenuity, and such memorable sci-fi images as a man from the future watching parts of his body disappear as his past self is being tortured.

But the heart of the film comes in the second half when Gordon-Levitt hides out from the mob on a farm where a woman (Emily Blunt) lives with her son.  And while the excitement never drops, Looper becomes a more intimate character piece in its second half as the assassin discovers the true reason why his future self traveled back in time and the disturbing secret of the farmer’s son.  Writer-director Johnson displays remarkable storytelling dexterity as he shifts audience sympathy between the two versions of the same man: between Gordon-Levitt, who begins the story as a not entirely sympathetic murderer, and Willis, who is revealed to have heartbreaking and dark motivations for his journey through time. 

The issue that always lurks at the heart of Looper is the question of how a person becomes the person he or she will be in ten, thirty or fifty years.  Will that be the same person?  Has that future been predetermined?  In its second half, Looper hones in on the most significant symbol of this question: raising a child.  The picture is filled with parental figures: a crime boss who guides a boy into a life of crime; a woman who heals a broken, middle-aged killer; and a mother who believes that with her love she can make her troubled son into a good man despite all evidence to the contrary.  It all leads up to a shattering, genius conclusion that solidifies Looper’s place as a masterpiece of science-fiction.

The first sound heard in Moonrise Kingdom is a thunderclap, and indeed a cloud of melancholy hangs over Wes Anderson’s tale of young love in an island town during the 1960s.  When two twelve-year-olds run away from their homes, the entire island becomes involved in the search for them, and all the while, a storm is preparing to strike.  As hilarious as the picture is, the characters are all so deeply sad and melancholy.  Even the children have a certain sadness just like the adults.  The young lovers are seizing their chance for a romantic adventure out of the young adult books that the girl reads constantly.  But the end of childhood is approaching in the form of a storm that threatens to wipe out the carefree kingdom that they have created for themselves.  Anderson brings to the picture his inimitable visual style, his witty dialogue, and his love for the beauty in things that are destined to fade.

Near the beginning of the dreamlike Turkish police procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a police officer tells a doctor that he could tell the story of their long night together as if it was a fairy tale, and that perfectly describes the style of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film: the story of the hunt for a dead body in the Anatolian steppes.  Two men have already confessed to a murder, but they cannot remember where they have buried the body.  So begins a long night as the prisoners, several police officers, a prosecutor, and a doctor drive through the landscape searching for the corpse.  They appear to be journeying through a dream or a fairy tale with ghostly images of headlights floating through hills of waving grass, statues of monsters hidden beside the road, an anecdote about a woman predicting the exact day of her death, and a girl who walks through a village carrying a light in the dark like an angel.  But the fairy tale ends when the sun rises and the body is found.  And the story shifts from the dreamlike landscape to a cold, hard city.  There are no angels here, just the wife and son of a murdered man.  Now, the mysterious story of the woman who predicted her death has an explanation.  And a doctor discovers that some truths are too terrible to be told.  The dream is over.  The only thing left is an autopsy.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is far from just being a history lesson: it is a dynamic, thoroughly engrossing picture about the exciting, messy process of democracy.  Daniel Day-Lewis commands the screen as the 16^th President trying to get the 13^th Amendment passed through the House of Representatives.  His portrayal is incredibly human, bringing us the image of an often quiet, very eccentric man who could still use the power of his voice to sway others.  Tony Kushner’s script is fascinating and accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of turning the legislative process into an exciting entertainment.  Spielberg and his gifted cinematographer Janusz Kaminski make the picture a wonderful visual experience with depths of light and shadow filling the film’s many interiors.  And Day-Lewis’ performance is not the only great one in the film: Sally Field brings powerful resonance to her portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln, and Tommy Lee Jones has fury and thunder as abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens.  Lincoln is not a rosy-hued look at the passage of the 13^th Amendment.  It acknowledges that this came about through shady backroom deals and compromises.  But in Stevens, the film finds a powerful moral center: after Stevens compromises his values on the floor of the House, one of his fellow abolitionists asks him with disgust if he would be willing to say anything.  Stevens responds that yes, in fact, he would be willing to do and say anything to end the evil of slavery.  This picture is Hollywood entertainment at its finest.

The Dark Knight Rises, the towering conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, is one of the great screen epics.  The film centers on a former superhero who is old, broken and past his prime.  It confronts him with a villain who is physically stronger and possesses a strong sense of his own moral righteousness.  The battle between these two characters takes place in a nightmare extension of our own reality in which the wealthy aristocracy is cold and oblivious to the people below them and the mob that replaces them is actually no better, in which the proliferation of nuclear technology comes back to threaten the American Empire, and in which the practice of invaders claiming to be liberators, so familiar after the Iraq War, is instead used against an American city.  In that vein, it is fitting that the picture would be about people whose sins come back to haunt them: about the child of a former enemy who returns to fulfill her father’s goals, and about two people who thought they had buried a city’s evil only to find that it has literally been building up underground.  While it doesn’t challenge the conventions of the superhero film like its predecessor, The Dark Knight Rises does create an incredible emotional power.  Part of this is due to the performances.  Christian Bale continues his portrayal of Bruce Wayne, not only as a superhero but as a man trying to bury his past; Michael Caine brings extraordinary emotion as he tries to talk Bruce out of his self-destructive behavior.  And Anne Hathaway steals the show as the Cat to Christian Bale’s Bat.  Nolan mounts an impressive spectacle that manages to give weight to both the grand and the intimate.  Nowhere is this more apparent than the sequence when a child sings the National Anthem at a football game as a masked villain lays out the final pieces of his plan and walks down a hallway to his destiny.

Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths is a wonderful, explosive mix of violence, pitch-black humor and surprisingly thoughtfulness, the story of two dog-nappers who must flee a mobster when they kidnap his dog, while their friend (Colin Farrell) struggles with a screenplay idea.  Sam Rockwell gives a wild, outlandish performance as a man obsessed with the excitement of movie violence, a performance only matched by the quiet soulfulness of Christopher Walken’s work as Rockwell’s partner, a man with his own history of violence.  The picture is funny, sickening and exhilarating, not at all surprising from the writer/director of In Bruges.  What is surprising is the thoughtful way McDonagh weaves America’s history of violence into the proceedings, particularly the violence of racism in the 20^th Century and the atrocities of the Vietnam War.  Farrell’s screenplay idea includes an unfinished scene involving a Vietnamese man preparing to commit an act of revenge for the atrocities at My Lai, a scene that Farrell can only see ending in violence.  So he doesn’t want to finish it.  The solution that Walken provides for this scene is one of the most thought-provoking and moving moments in any film this year.

Michael Haneke’s Amour is a love story about death.  More specifically, it is about inevitable death, death that you can see coming for a long time but have no power to stop.  It is a love story about an old man whose wife has a stroke.  Director Haneke simply watches the husband care for his wife as she slowly slips toward death.  He must feed her, wash her, even help her to use the toilet.  Eventually there comes the moment when her words stop making sense, and he realizes that he will never actually have another conversation with his wife.  They used to talk about music, poetry and art, but even though she is still alive, they will never do that again.  The next step is inevitable.  There is no hope, no last minute cure.  The picture is almost unbearably painful at times, but what keeps it together is the simple fact that this is a film about true love.  The kind of love that is simply flowers and candy would not last this long.  The love onscreen in Amour is true love.  It’s not pretty, and no one writes poetry about it.  No one, that is, except Michael Haneke.

The Cabin in the Woods is a picture charged with excitement and originality.  It appears to be a horror film about a group of college students being chased by monsters through the woods.  At least, it appears so from the trailer.  In fact, the first scene of the film is straight out of an office comedy.  But the office is no ordinary office.  It is the control center for a real-life horror film.  The script from Joss Whedon and director Drew Goddard dances back and forth between comedy and horror as the office workers in the control center monitor the actions of the college co-eds who have stumbled into their trap and take bets on how they will be killed.  But the picture doesn’t just stop at that twist.  As the film progresses, more secrets are revealed, and more and more hell breaks loose.  The film works as a fascinating deconstruction of the horror genre, but it works even better as a wildly original entertainment.

One of the reasons why I go to the movies is to see pictures like Safety Not Guaranteed: a film so completely unexpected, so funny, and so full of humanity that I forget that I’m sitting in a movie theater while I’m watching it.  The picture finds a young magazine intern (Aubrey Plaza) assigned to investigate an incredibly eccentric man (Mark Duplass) who claims to have invented time travel.  She convinces the man that she wants to time travel with him, and as he tells her his paranoid stories, involves her in crimes, and gives her his training lessons for the journey she’s sure is impossible, she falls in love with him.  The movie enfolds so naturally and effortlessly that we hold our breath, hoping that this experience isn’t too good to be real.  Even though it loses a bit of its magic in the third act, the picture still ends up being an absolutely wonderful experience.

As the first part of a trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is not a complete narrative, but it is a complete emotional experience, a grand and glorious adventure.  Martin Freeman gives a wonderful performance as Bilbo Baggins, the home-loving hobbit who is convinced to join in an adventure with a wizard and thirteen dwarves, an adventure that will have important consequences leading to the story we know as The Lord of the Rings.  Director Peter Jackson does not disappoint in delivering spectacular action sequences: standouts include an encounter with three trolls, a rollercoaster battle with goblins, and a cliff-hanging climax in a mountain forest.  But the most memorable moments are quiet dialogue scenes.  The lengthy opening party scene at Bilbo’s home in the Shire is reminiscent of the wedding scenes in The Godfather and The Deer Hunter in how it establishes the many characters we will follow on the journey: it features two particularly wonderful dialogue sequences in which Gandalf the wizard tries to coax Bilbo to go on the adventure and a cautious dwarf attempts to talk his leader out of the quest.  One of my favorite moments comes later in the picture as one of Bilbo’s companions realizes that he has never known what it is like to have a home.  But the most memorable scene in the entire film is the confrontation between Bilbo and Gollum beneath the Misty Mountains.  Here is where Bilbo finds a very special gold ring and makes a crucial decision to spare a life.  In returning to Middle-Earth, Peter Jackson has created another stunning adventure.

A list of ten films is certainly not enough for a celebration of film, so here is a list of the other pictures that I enjoyed in 2012 (in alphabetical order):

Argo: Ben Affleck’s 1970’s-style thriller about the attempt to rescue six Americans from Iran after the 1979 revolution using a cover story from Hollywood.  The opening sequence depicting the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran is masterful cinema.  A summer entertainment for adults.

The Avengers: Joss Whedon’s exhilarating comic book epic was one of the finest mainstream entertainments in years.

Beasts of the Southern Wild: A dreamlike examination of nature and destruction from a child’s point of view.  Young Quvenzhané Wallis has a commanding screen presence.

Bernie: Richard Linklater’s biting dark comedy starring Jack Black as a beloved man in a Texas town who almost gets away with the murder of a widely-hated old woman.

Brave: Pixar’s visually wonderful film about an independent-minded Scottish princess and her mother.

Django Unchained: Quentin Tarantino’s violent, funny and disturbing slavery-western-exploitation picture.  Jamie Foxx creates a classic Western hero and Christoph Waltz brings great emotional resonance to the film.

Flight: Denzel Washington is fantastic in the role of an alcoholic pilot who comes under scrutiny after he pulls off a miraculous landing of a broken airliner.  Director Robert Zemeckis returns to live action with an intimate character study that also happens to contain an airplane crash that is one of the most terrifying sequences in recent film history.

The Grey: A harrowing film about survival in a land of ice and wolves with a fantastic lead performance by Liam Neeson and surprisingly thoughtful dialogue about life and death.

The Hunger Games: The exhilarating adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ novel about a futuristic dystopia where teenagers fight to the death on national television.    

Killing Them Softly: A fascinating crime picture about a stickup that sends shockwaves through a community of New Orleans criminals.  Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini and Richard Jenkins give great performances as people who have spent far too many years in their lives of crime, and the robbery scene is a masterpiece of suspense.

The Master: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitious and elusive film about a cult leader and the disturbed war veteran who encounters him.  I must admit that I still don’t understand this picture, but I also have to admit that I have never seen anything quite like it.

Prometheus: A thought-provoking and visually astonishing science-fiction/horror film from Ridley Scott about a group of scientists searching a distant planet for the creators of humanity.

Red Hook Summer: Spike Lee’s messy, exhilarating return to Brooklyn with an astonishing performance by Clarke Peters as a preacher with a secret.

Silver Linings Playbook: David O. Russell’s romantic comedy about a man just released from a mental institute and a woman with her own emotional problems.  Jennifer Lawrence gives an exciting, high-wire performance.

Zero Dark Thirty: A thrilling and horrifying account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.  Jessica Chastain is terrific as the woman who doggedly pursued him, representing an entire country that destroyed its soul in a decade-long pursuit of vengeance.

Since I did not have a chance to see everything I would have liked to see this year, here is a list of all the films that I wanted to see but missed: Anna Karenina, Cloud Atlas, The Deep Blue Sea, Haywire, Holy Motors, The Impossible, The Imposter, The Kid With a Bike, Rust and Bone, Side by Side, This is Not a Film, The Turin Horse.

And here we are again, at the end of a year in cinema and the start of a brand new one…

The UnMasterful "Hitchcock"

The new film Hitchcock has just opened in the UK, leading to a new milestone: my first negative review, which can be found at the LSE Beaver.

http://issuu.com/readbeaveronline/docs/785/18

Actual Movie Reviews

I normally don't consider most of the posts on this blog to be actual movie reviews.  The purpose of a review is to give the reader a sense of what the experience of a movie is like so that the reader can decide whether or not to see the picture in question.  These posts are more like rambling, nerdy essays where I obsess over one or more particular details or themes of a movie, and they rarely make any sense if you haven't seen it.

But now I've finally written some movie reviews!  Here are links to two reviews that I've written for The Beaver, the student newspaper of the London School of Economics.

The first is a review of a re-release of Lawrence of Arabia from last November:
http://issuu.com/readbeaveronline/docs/778/15

The second is a more recent review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, essentially a shorter and probably better version of the post about it that I wrote on this blog.
http://issuu.com/readbeaveronline/docs/782/21

“What was before we’ll see once more”: Peter Jackson Taking Back Erebor

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey begins with four people looking through memories of a glorious past, dreaming of the day when those glories will come again.  Bilbo Baggins is an old hobbit.  He turns 111 years old this very day, in fact.  It has been 60 years since he went on a great adventure, and his hole is filled with reminders of this: golden treasures lie about, an old map is on a table, and a strange sword sits in a chest.  Bilbo finds a drawing of his younger self and gasps in astonishment at just how young that hobbit looks (though how will this make sense with the exclamation soon to come that he hasn’t aged a day?).  And those of us familiar with the events to come know that later this day, Bilbo will try to reclaim the past and begin a new adventure.  But before he does this, he wants to relive his memories one more time and pass the true version of the events to “my dear Frodo.”

Yet, telling his tale requires memories that belong not to him, but to the dwarf prince Thorin Oakenshield.  Thorin is heir to the kingdom of Erebor, the Lonely Mountain that was the home of the dwarves until they were driven out by the dragon Smaug.  For many years, Thorin has wandered in exile, but now the time has come for him to not just reclaim the homeland of his people but also to reclaim their glorious past.

The decision to begin the story with 111-year-old Bilbo looking back on his memories was absolutely correct (even though the scene ultimately goes on a bit long with Bilbo and Frodo discussing the problems with the Sackville-Bagginses) because it sets up the thematic nature of the tale.  This is a story about characters that are living after the glory days.  Old Bilbo sets this up because he has been living “peacefully” in the Shire for 60 years after his adventures, wanting to go on another adventure, wanting to see mountains again, “mountains, Gandalf!”

And while this is not the Bilbo we see once the real story begins, the Thorin that we see for the entire story has been living with the glory days of his people in the past.  The Dwarves wander in exile.  There is organization among them, enough for them to have a council that Thorin has just returned from when he arrives at the Unexpected Party, but none of them are willing to confront Smaug and reclaim their lost kingdom.  None, that is, save for 12 dwarves.  The heart of the picture comes during the party in Bag End, after the dwarves have had their fun at Bilbo’s expense and Gandalf and Thorin have explained the quest.  Balin, Thorin’s oldest friend, tells the prince that it might be best if they did not undertake this journey.  “What are we?” he asks.  “Miners, tinkers, toy makers.”  And the few warriors they have with them are “old warriors.”  One of the gifts of the decision to expand the story into three films is the time spent with the dwarves in Bag End.  When Ori stands up and exclaims that he is not afraid of the dragon before his brother Dori brings him back down to his seat, we can sense the uncertainty in his voice, and we know that these dwarves might not be ready for this journey.  But they were the only ones who answered Thorin’s call.  Balin knows that the dwarves have been brought low, and he wonders if it might not be better to stay that way.  He tells Thorin that they have a good, peaceful life now that is “worth more than all the gold in Erebor.”  But Thorin knows that this is his last chance reclaim his heritage.

The emphasis on the past is very fitting because the third person who begins The Hobbit by looking into the past is J.R.R. Tolkien.  You could say that The Shadow of the Past plays a large role in all of Tolkien’s work.  Much has been written about Tolkien’s fondness for the English countryside before it was eaten away by industrialization, but even without knowing about the author’s life, it is clear that the past is very important in his stories.  The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place in a world that has already seen its glory days.  The events that Tolkien describes in The Silmarillion are so epic that they dwarf (pun intended) the most spectacular events of The Hobbit and LOTR: the Battles of Five Armies and Pelennor Fields pale in comparison to the Battles of Sudden Flame and Unnumbered Tears; Smaug and Shelob would be no match for Glaurung and Ungoliant; even Sauron is never as powerful his old master Morgoth.  Yet all of this makes the tales of the Third Age all the more powerful.  It gives the stories an incredible sense of history.  The Balrog in Moria and Shelob in Cirith Ungol are not just monsters; they are the remnants of a lost world.  As much as I love The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin, I’m more interested in the stories that take place when the glory days are only a memory.  The elegiac feeling of The Lord of the Rings is part of what makes it so powerful.

The Hobbit is not as elegiac as The Lord of the Rings, perhaps because Thorin would rather fight to reclaim Erebor than write an elegy for it, while the Elves write elegies for the lost land of Beleriand.  Yet the past is always present in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  While on the road, Gandalf comes across a ruined building and observes to himself, “A farmer and his family used to live here.”  After a group of trolls turn to stone, Gandalf again looks into the past, saying that trolls had not been seen so far from Misty Mountains in a long time: “not since a darker power ruled these lands.”  And that brings us to the major subplot of the picture: the return of Sauron.  The adaptation adds a scene only described in the Appendices of The Return of the King depicting a meeting of the White Council: Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond and Saruman.  Tolkien does not specifically describe this meeting beyond saying that Gandalf believes an evil power has come to Dol Guldur and that Saruman will not agree to an attack.  The meeting is also a little different in the text: Tolkien has the meeting occurring 90 years before it occurs in the film and specifies that Gandalf has already discovered that it is actually Sauron in Dol Guldur while in the film he never actually says this.  However, even with the changes, this scene in the movie does justice to Tolkien because its presence emphasizes how important the past is to this story.  Does the past remain in the past as “no more than a memory?”  Or (to quote another great 20^th Century writer) is it “not even past?” 

Actually, there is an interesting parallel (one that I’m sure Professor Tolkien would reject, but no matter) between Sauron and Thorin: two figures who were driven from power and seek to reclaim what they once had.  And that creates a parallel between Smaug and the White Council: both have grown too comfortable in their power, not foreseeing that an ancient enemy will return for revenge.  There is a danger in ignoring the past, yet I think Tolkien also sees a danger in trying to reclaim it.  After all, Thorin, Bilbo and Sauron are all unsuccessful in their attempts to reclaim the past.  I suspect that Tolkien would not quite agree with Faulker that “the past is not dead; it is not even past” or with Fitzgerald that we are “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  While Tolkien constantly looked to the past, would have us be mindful of the past, and probably believed the past to be better than the present, The Lord of the Rings, with its elegy for the Eldar Days and its greeting of the new Age of Men suggests that Tolkien believed that the past is the past and will probably stay that way.

And this creates interesting implications for the fourth person reliving the glorious past at the beginning of The Hobbit: director Peter Jackson.  It would not be a stretch to claim that The Lord of the Rings trilogy was probably the peak of Jackson’s career.  Not only was it a milestone in the history of cinema, but it also lifted him to a level of success and acclaim beyond anything he had reached previously, even the Oscar-nominated Heavenly Creatures.  And he has not been able to repeat the same success or acclaim since, though his remake of King Kong has moments of real beauty and majesty and I haven’t seen The Lovely Bones so I cannot pass judgment on it.  It would be tempting to characterize Jackson’s motives in making The Hobbit as greedy, particularly as there are so many references to gold in this picture.  But I just don’t think this is really the case (also, speculation about the filmmaker’s motives doesn’t really belong in film criticism, though I know I’m kind of doing that anyway).  The impression that I’ve gotten from Jackson’s production videos is that he is genuinely excited to be making another trilogy in Middle-Earth.  To indulge in some inappropriate speculation about filmmaker motives, I would say that I think Jackson wants to repeat the experience of The Lord of the Rings which means the experience of making the movies, spending years with Tolkien’s mythology and then giving it to the fans for several years.

So, the question on everybody’s mind (and the question that it took me nearly two thousand words to finally start answering) is this: is Peter Jackson succeeding in his quest to reclaim the past?  Of course, it is impossible to fully answer that question until the quest is complete, but at this point, my answer is yes.  Well, it’s not as good as The Fellowship of the Ring, but I put that picture on my list of the Ten Greatest Films of All Time, not to mention that it’s probably my favorite movie ever made.  I can hardly penalize An Unexpected Journey for not equaling that.  Part of the reason it falls short is because I don’t think the source material equals LOTR either.  And while The Hobbit will ultimately end up with some big emotion, the emotions in Unexpected Journey don’t reach the level of the powerhouse sequences in Fellowship, particularly the Bridge of Khazad-dum and the climax at Amon Hen. 

And there are some missteps.  The prologue with Frodo and Old Bilbo goes on a bit too long.  A little bit of it is good, but at a certain point we want to get into the story (though I like the transition from Old Bilbo to Young Bilbo).  Despite what you may have heard, the pacing of this movie is not too leisurely, but actually a little too frenetic at times.  One section involves, in quick succession: a battle with trolls, a false alarm with Radagast, a flashback to Radagast’s investigation of Dol Guldur and a subsequent chase through Mirkwood, a quick fight with wargs, then a lengthy chase scene with the wargs.  I think the quick rhythm of these scenes prevents each of them from really being involving on their own terms.  Finally, while I’m sure the scenes involving Dol Guldur and the return of Sauron will pay off in films two and/or three, the lack of payoff in this film is a little frustrating.

But even with those missteps, what a glorious film this is.  Martin Freeman is terrific as Bilbo, and Ian McKellen is great as Gandalf, not unexpectedly.  Their first meeting is wonderful.  The dwarves are all great, too.  And what a fantastic, wonderful idea to slow down the film and take time to set up the characters and the tone for the story (something I find lacking in a lot of modern cinema).  The whole Bag End sequence is a masterstroke: the arrivals and introductions of the dwarves, the first dwarf song, the scene of Gandalf explaining to Bilbo why he should go on the quest, the conversation between Thorin and Balin (both of whom are shaping up to be great characters), and the chilling second dwarf song.  The big action sequences do not disappoint either; the standouts are the battle with the three trolls, the stone giants in the mountains, and the dwarves’ escape through Goblin Town (there is an interesting parallel between the dwarves and the goblins: they both have vast, subterranean dwellings that look very similar).  But I think the scenes that meant the most to me where some of the dialogue scenes: the sequence in Bag End, a conversation between Bilbo and Bofur, and of course, the riddles in the dark between Bilbo and Gollum followed by what may be the most important moment of the entire saga.  I even liked the 3D!  I haven’t seen it in 48 frames per second so I can’t comment on that yet.  But I liked how the 3D gave a sense of depth to the visuals, particularly the scenes in Bag End.  By the end of my first viewing (I’ve seen it twice now), I was rather exhausted by the picture’s frenetic pace (which, even though I thought it was too frenetic in the first half, works rather well in the second half), but I was thoroughly exhilarated and eager to see the story continue.

Is The Hobbit equal to The Lord of the Rings so far?  No, but then Rivendell is not equal to Gondolin.  It cannot quite equal the glories that have come before.  But you know what?  Rivendell is pretty great, too.  From now until 2014, the experience of The Lord of the Rings is not just a memory.  So far, Peter Jackson has been successful in reclaiming the past.

(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.