Peter Jackson's The Hobbit

Since I've got almost exactly the same things to say about Peter Jackson's Hobbit as I said about his King Kong, I might as well start with excerpts from that review.

But there's a serious problem. The movie is too long. Way, way too long...it's all spectacular. It's a visual treat...but there's just too much of it. There's not nearly enough story for a 3-hour movie. There are far too many scenes that don't do anything to move the narrative forward. At all. ...From start to finish, it takes longer to get from point A to point B than the story really warrants. ..The casting is all fine, the performances are all good, the visuals are virtually uniformly spectacular. It's just that every step the film takes after the opening is a ponderous step. Jackson's so in love with the images that he's putting on screen, that he can't actually use them to service a story.

That was my reaction to King Kong.  My reaction to The Hobbit?

Ditto.

It was, frankly, better than I expected up through the Rivendell scene.  I found it almost unwatchable after that. (Ok, that might be a bit strong, as the Bilbo-Gollum scene was well done.)  But the Goblin scene was (and I know, I've said this before) just Too.  Darned.  Long.  And far, far too visually busy.  It was the visual equivalent of white noise.

 The people in my house that know the source material (I've only read it 2 or 3 times, and the last one was 15 years ago) were bothered by changes that didn't bother me.

I thought it was very typical Peter Jackson - superbly made but just too long, too repetitive, and too visually busy. It reminded me of his King Kong. He falls in love with everything he can do, everything he films, and gives it to us, even when it doesn't advance the story in any way.

"Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!"

I'm never, ever going to read Ralph Nader's new novel, but I'm glad that he wrote it, so that I could read Rob Long's review of it...

An American Carol

An American Carol is not a perfect movie. It rockets between slapstick, farce and pathos, at times so quickly that the pieces step on one another. There's a framing device that serves to provide a paycheck for Leslie Nielsen and not much else. Some of the satire is ham-handed, some of the jokes fall flat, and the story is not, perhaps, as coherent as it might be.

That said, it is also a very funny movie, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. As one might guess from the title, this is yet another riff off of Charles Dickens' classic 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. This one is not set at Christmas, however, but the fourth of July.

Kevin Farley (younger brother of former SNL comedian Chris) stars as Michael Malone, an overweight, unshaven maker of successful documentary films highlighting flaws in America. (Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental, or only for the purpose of parody and satire.) As the movie begins, Malone is filming a paean to the Cuban healthcare system, winning the Leni Riefenstahl Award for Documentary Filmmaking at the Mooveon.org Award ceremony for his film "Die You American Pigs!" and working to ban military recruiters from college campuses. And he's getting ready to lead a demonstration to abolish the fourth of July as a national holiday. But he's certainly not anti-American. "I love America," he says. "That's why I have to destroy it."

If you're familiar with the template (and really, who isn't?) then you know what comes next. Malone's hero, President John F. Kennedy, steps out of his television to warn him that he's missed some important things, and there are going to be three spirits visiting him to help him learn them.

And help him they do. The primary guide for Malone's journey is General George S. Patton, played by Kelsey Grammer, who walks Malone through history, alternate history and alternate reality. Along the way, we're treated to a not-strictly-accurate depiction of Chamberlain's meeting with Hitler, Gary Coleman polishing Malone's car in a modern-day America in which Lincoln had refused to go to war, and an appearance on Bill O'Reilly with Rosie O'Connell, who has produced another documentary. (I don't want to give much away, but I think it's safe to say that An American Carol's is the first screenplay to ever feature the term "Episcopal suppository bomber.")

It's clear that director David Zucker, of Airplane! and Top Secret fame, has a point to make, and it isn't subtle. It's the same point that I've made before - if you're riding around with a "War is Not The Answer" bumper sticker, it's very possible that you didn't understand the question. There are people who will be offended by this movie. (Although I suspect that most of the people that would really be offended aren't actually going to see it - they were outraged enough by the concept and trailers, and can drop 1-star reviews at imdb.com without actually paying to sit through it.)

It is not as funny as Airplane! was, although there are inspired moments that clearly came from the same imagination. (Malone's farewell to his navy nephew was classic Airplane! type farce.) The terrorist side-story with Aziz, Ahmed and Mohammed provides some laughs but probably could have been improved upon. The language is a little rough in a couple of spots, but not awful on the whole.

I don't get to the movie theater often, and generally only when I'm taking my kids to something for the whole family. But I wanted to support Zucker in his attempt to make something telling our side of the story, the "America is a force for good in the world, we were attacked, it wasn't our fault, they're the bad guys" side that Hollywood never does. They're too busy "speaking truth to power" by producing brave works attacking an ex-Senator from Wisconsin who's been dead for 51 years. (Another point which Zucker amusingly made in this film.) So I was favorably disposed when I walked into the theater. I wanted to like it.

And I did. Far more than I'd expected to. It isn't the sort of thing that my wife would generally want to see, and she laughed most of the way through, too. It was very funny, in a Homer Simpson "it's funny 'cause it's true" kind of way. And it was even touching in spots. On the whole, I enjoyed it enormously, and greatly appreciate Zucker for making it (and Grammer, Jon Voigt, James Woods, Dennis Hopper and Robert Davi, among others, for being willing to come "out of the closet," as it were, and join him.) It won't win any Oscars (and shouldn't), and it won't get any great reviews, but it was a lot of fun, and I'm glad to have seen it.

Wall-E

When Luxo Jr. first made his appearance pushing balls around on Sesame Street, we knew that the animation was something special. What we did not know was that the makers of those short segments would go on to become the 500 pound gorilla in the family entertainment industry. But that is just what they've become, with an unbroken string of successes from the first Toy Story movie in 1995 through 2007's Ratatouille.

And Wall-E is the latest entry in that list. It's obviously far too early to know how it will eventually succeed at the box office, but it had a bigger opening weekend than either of the last two Pixar films, both of which ended up doing over $200 million in the US.

Wall-E is essentially a trash compactor on wheels. Once upon a time, there were apparently hundreds of Wall-E's, but all indications are that he is the only one left working. And the work he's doing is cleaning up the planet. The human beings left, having rendered the planet incapable of supporting life, and Wall-E remained behind to clean it up. Which he does. He goes about his business of gathering the trash, compressing it into little cubes, and stacking the cubes into skyscraper sized piles. He's curious about many of the things that he sees, and has gathered an impressive collection of artifacts. He works during the day, returns to his collection at night, and watches Hello, Dolly on his video iPod.

And then one day, everything changes. Something large comes out of the sky, and when it departs, there's a new robot left behind. Smooth and sleek (and very deadly), the Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (Eve) definitely intrigues Wall-E. Boy meets girl, and (not for the first time) boy is more interested in girl than they other way around. And, also not for the first time, various obstacles threaten the relationship. What the obstacles are, how they are overcome, and what results when they are overcome - those are the things that make up the rest of the film.

I have mixed emotions about Wall-E. It was certainly entertaining, and one thing remains true - each time Pixar releases a new film, the state of the art in computer generated animation takes a step forward. It is never boring, and Pixar understands, the way that other animation producers have not, that it is character and story that make movies, not just special effects.

But I had difficulty suspending my disbelief, and, as much as I enjoyed what I was watching (most of the time), it never transported me to another world the way that some of their earlier efforts did. Wall-E is, as all of Pixar's characters have been, fully realized, tremendously expressive, and just plain fun to look at. But the film never completely drew me in the way that Pixar's previous efforts have. There was a barrier, a threshold that I never crossed.

It would be patently ridiculous to attack the movie as implausible. They have made a movie with a certain set of assumptions, and, as quibbling over why the robot garbage disposal has sentience would be both pointless and unfair, I won't do that. Nothing in Wall-E, at least nothing related to the robot characters, is any more implausible than events in Monsters, Inc. or Cars or The Incredibles, all of which I love unreservedly. So I want it clearly understood that I am not challenging any of the robot actions, feelings or relationships on the grounds of implausibility. Within the universe the film inhabits, those things are all fine and essentially consistent.

The problem, I suspect, is that they have made their universe too much like the one which we currently inhabit. That will sound, again, inconsistent on my part - after all, don't the characters in Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story and Cars inhabit our own universe? But the answer to that is actually, "no, they do not." The characters in Monsters, Inc. inhabit a universe like ours, but with a fundamental difference - there really ARE monsters that jump out of closets and scare children. The Toy Story universe is like ours, but with a fundamental difference - toys come to life when we aren't watching.

But in Wall-E, the producers seem to be implying that it is our universe. The planet shots are Earth and they talk about returning to Earth. Wall-E's collection includes a light bulb and a Rubik's cube. And he enjoys watching Hello, Dolly on his video iPod. The first twenty minutes, as entertaining as it is, as visually interesting and spectacular as it is to watch, feels like a twenty minute lecture from the Sierra Club or Al Gore. (OK, it probably feels like 20 second lecture, which would feel like a 20 minute lecture, from Al Gore.) A lecture on conspicuous consumption and consumerism from a group of people who have generated billions of dollars by selling leisure activities and related action figures. I have no objection to a movie having a point of view or trying to make a point, but a little bit of subtlety would be OK, too.

And this, I think, is where I lost the ability to suspend my disbelief. The premise that, sometime in the next century or two, human beings would have "cluttered" their way off the planet was not one that I was able to buy. Talking, sentient trash-compactor? No problem. Skyscraper sized piles of garbage everywhere? Sorry, I'm unable to suspend my disbelief that far. (For what it's worth, I wasn't alone in that - my kids felt the same way.) One of the strongest trends in human development is the trend towards reducing pollution and cleaning up the world as technology increases. Indeed, there is not a thing in the movie more implausible than its premise that the same society produced both the mess that Wall-E is cleaning, and the pristine paradise of a spacecraft on which the humans have taken shelter. Wall-E's evolved sentience is a lot easier to swallow than that.

Societies that aren't merely struggling to feed and house themselves develop arts and leisure activities, and then they start doing things like cleaning up the air and water. Societies, like people, move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and more advanced societies (as this one had to have been) reach the need for "self-esteem" and then "self-actualization." And the focus turns to technology, and the technology increases the amount of recycleable and recycled material¹. In other words, while there are both legitimate environmentalists and strident "watermelons" (green on the outside, red on the inside) peddling apocalyptic scenarios, none of them feel real or likely. And Wall-E's premise of a world deserted because the discard piles got too high is less likely than most.

All that said, there is no dialogue during that opening section. The movie does not actually lecture on the topic of trash. If you aren't already sensitive about the subject, or if you agree with the environmental extremist point of view, it may well be possible to suspend disbelief and be completely drawn in. It certainly wasn't preachy the way the unwatchable Happy Feet was, and I don't want to suggest that it was.

No, it just shows Wall-E going about his business. And he's certainly amusing to watch. The film never ceases to be entertaining and visually impressive. And the human beings do show some initiative and gumption at the end. Pixar is going to make a lot of money, again, on Wall-E, and they'll deserve to, as they've made another wonderful entertainment, and I'm glad to have seen it. But I didn't walk out of the theater with the same affection that I had for the others. And five years from now, I suspect, there will be millions of Wall-E figures and disks adding ironically to whatever clutter and consumerism problems that the producers of Wall-E are concerned about...




¹ - This remains one of the big reasons that incurring massive economic damage now in hopes of mitigating against potential future climate changes which are likely to be, on the whole, far less costly, is a bad idea. IF mankind is actually causing global warming and IF global warming is actually going to be bad for humanity (and those are both big IFs), the best solution is far more likely to come from technology developed in a free market than in draconian restrictions imposed on the world's economic engine.


Update: Baseball Crank agrees that "the trash-will-overwhelm-us doomsday scenario was self-evidently absurd even within the context of the movie (they show the humans' new spaceship home as gleamingly spotless because they have the technology to jettison their garbage into space)..."

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Warning: Some spoilers

Some movies get made because people have a story to tell. Some movies get made because the makers are looking to get paid. And others get made because the people involved just like making movies. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was, I suspect, made almost entirely for the third reason. It certainly wasn't made for the first.

When Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in the summer of 1981, it was a throwback for a certain generation, and a revelation for another. It was modeled on cliffhangers of the 40s and 50s, the black and white serials, and at the same time, there had never been anything like it. They had a wonderfully appealing hero, tremendous production values, and a story that moved from peril to peril seamlessly, allowing just the right amount of time to catch your breath before moving into the next hopeless situation. And while there were certain liberties taken with reality, at no point during that movie did the action strain credulity to the point where the suspension of disbelief was broken.

"Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," on the other hand, was made as if they were concerned that the first three Indiana Jones movies were too realistic, and they wanted to ensure that this one could never be mistaken for a documentary. When Dr. Jones climbs out of the refrigerator and walks away, the filmmakers have already made it clear that all critical thinking skills must be suspended in order to remain in your seats. Don't bother wondering how it's possible that a special truck can cut a road through the heart of the rainforest at 30 miles per hour. Don't bother wondering why the truck is there in the first place, since it gets blown up and the chase continues on what appear to be two parallel roads. Don't wonder how Mutt's Tarzan act is a) possible or b) perfectly coordinated with the car chase. Don’t look for suspense on the river, or a clever response from anyone involved – just wait until they get to the bottom so they can set up the next set piece. It's all there, not because it's an integral part of any story, not because it's necessary, but just because they can do it.

But the more the action gets ratcheted up, the less interesting and exciting it is. The need to constantly top what came before has resulted in a situation where there is nothing plausible remaining. (See Bond, James for further examples.) You go into a movie like this knowing beforehand that the main characters are going to survive, but the thrill and suspense in a tight situation is the "how."

As the action removes from reality, the "how" becomes "movie magic" and suddenly ceases to be interesting other than as an exercise in visual effects. When Indiana Jones is hanging over a pit on a vine in the first movie, you know that he'll survive but there is still suspense - the vine could break, or he could slip, and save himself another way, but it feels like real danger. When he plunges over a waterfall in the fourth movie, there's no suspense, no sense of peril at all. There is no way to survive it, so they just blithely move on to the next scene. A "thriller" as this is supposed to be should have the viewer on the edge of his seat. It does not.

I have a couple more little quibbles. The first is one that no one else seemed to notice, and it is certainly true that it concerns a subject about which I am, possibly, overly sensitive. It irritated me - greatly - when Dr. Jones was fired from his teaching job. There is no question that the anti-communist environment of the 1950s ended up damaging some people. But it's an article of faith with the Hollywood left that Joe McCarthy led a "witch hunt" worse than anything that happened in Salem, and the anti-communist patriots in this country during that age are, at this point, a convenient, conventional and clichéd "bogeyman." It's tiresome and it annoys me. That scene served no purpose in the film - it contributed nothing to the story other than to give Jim Broadbent a few lines and let us know that Denholm Elliot was dead. There were other ways that they could have done that, and possibly even moved the story forward. They took the easy way out, and annoyed me in the process¹.

The second thing that bothered me was this - the movie inhabits a different universe than the first ones. One need not be a religious person to recognize that one of the key precepts of Raiders of the Lost Ark is that the Old Testament is true. The Ark of the Covenant was real, meaning that the God of the Old Testament was real, the wrath of God was real, the Jews were the chosen people, and the biblical story was true. The third movie established that the New Testament was true. The Knights Templar were, in fact, guarding the real Holy Grail, which existed and confirmed that the New Testament was true.

That universe has no room in it for trans-dimensional aliens in a flying saucer². It is out of context.

All that said, the movie is fun, and most fans of the first three will enjoy it. Harrison Ford still has great screen presence, and everyone involved does the job that needs to be done. But it's not a great movie, and more than a sequel or even an homage, it a caricature of the first one. The production values are strong, it never gets boring, and there are certainly worse ways to spend a couple of hours. But, with the possible exception of “closing” the Marion story, it does nothing to enhance the franchise.



¹ - As I say, I'm sensitized to that. Two other people who'd seen the movie had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned it. The firing is, as I say, utterly irrelevant to ANYTHING else that happens in the film.

² - When we left the theatre, my 14-year old daughter said, "Not just a spaceship, but a flying saucer! Could it be any more cliché?"

Peter Jackson's King Kong

I don't remember what we were in the theater to see - possibly Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire - when I we first saw the trailer for Peter Jackson's King Kong, but I do remember my reaction. My wife and I both looked at each other and mouthed, "Wow!" It looked spectacular.

Well, I've now seen it, and it is. Jackson's a master at putting impressive visuals together, as he demonstrated in The Lord Of The Rings. King Kong was clearly a labor of love for Jackson, and it shows in every frame.

But there's a serious problem. The movie is too long. Way, way too long. The departure from New York takes too long. It takes too long to get to the island. The scene with the ship in trouble is too long. The scene when they meet the natives is too long. The trek across the island is too long. The fight with the giant insects is too long. The fight between Kong and the dinosaurs is too long. The capture scene is too long. Kong wanders the streets of New York for too long. The scene on the Empire State building is too long.

Don't misunderstand - it's all spectacular. It's a visual treat (with a couple of minor exceptions - the men running through the dinosaur stampede didn't work. The effects were overdone, and looked fake. Oh, and it went on too long) but there's just too much of it. There's not nearly enough story for a 3-hour movie. There are far too many scenes that don't do anything to move the narrative forward. At all. From how many evils, exactly, does Kong need to rescue Ann for us to understand that he's caring for her? How many dinosaurs does he need to kill to demonstrate that they can show us that? How many sailors need to die at the hands of how many monsters to establish that the island is full of dangerous creatures?

In 1933, Merian Cooper produced the original King Kong move. It runs about 1 hour and 45 minutes. Jackson's version, which follows the original very closely from a plot point-of-view, takes nearly 3 hours. The extra 1:15, while looking great, does nothing to enhance the movie. And even at that length, he doesn't close all of the plots that he opens. You've got the story of Jimmy, for example, which is fraught with ominous portents and goes nowhere. He went to all the trouble of getting the police out to the dock for Denham, of having the news wired out to the ship that Denham was wanted, but didn't bother with even a line or two about the return.

It took Cooper 20 minutes to get from Kong's appearance on Broadway to the end of the film, and it doesn't feel rushed. Jackson took 40 minutes. In the 1933 version, it's about 24 minutes from the opening titles to the landing on Skull Island. Jackson managed to cram that into 54 minutes, with very little additional benefit. Again, the 1933 version wasn't rushed - the 2005 version is overblown.

From start to finish, it takes longer to get from point A to point B than the story really warrants. Yes, we know that Kong loves Ann. Does he really need to take her ice skating? Wouldn't seeing him chase the car around 5 corners have been sufficient? Did he need to go around 7 more? Is a fight with 7 Tyrannosaurus really more impressive than a fight with 2?

That isn't to say that all of the additional time is wasted. I fell in love with the film from the start, as the first scene is fabulous. He opened by setting the scene, early-depression era New York. With "Sitting On Top Of The World" playing, he intercuts between the vaudeville stage, prohibition raids, steel-workers assembling the NY skyline and shanty-towns. It's extremely well-done, enormously effective.

But then everything just slows down. The casting is all fine, the performances are all good, the visuals are virtually uniformly spectacular. It's just that every step the film takes after the opening is a ponderous step. Jackson's so in love with the images that he's putting on screen, that he can't actually use them to service a story. He's using the story just as an excuse for putting the images on screen.

When Thomas Wolfe brought his manuscript entitled "O, Lost" to Charles Scribner's in 1928 it was brilliant. It was also too long, rambling and unfocused. Maxwell Perkins worked with Wolfe, fought with Wolfe, and, in the editing process, cut hundreds of pages from what would go on to be the classic novel, "Look Homeward, Angel." Peter Jackson's King Kong would have been immeasurably improved by an editor fighting with Jackson to cut an hour out of it...


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