MOVIE REVIEW: The Hobbit

For me, the modern movie-going experience is hideous so it’s quite the occasion when I visit my neighborhood theater. In this case a number of factors conspired to bring it about. First, of course, it’s The Hobbit. I’ve been a Tolkien fan for 35+ years, since my father bought The Two Towers for me one weekend. (I was a bit clueless at the time so hadn’t realized that the book was the second in a trilogy. The opening threw me for a bit until I realized my mistake, which was soon rectified.) By the time I was 11, I had read The Silmarillion and now I have a bookshelf dedicated to Tolkieniana – including at least seven volumes of Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth. Second, I had a free-movie pass (no expiration date) that a friend had given me several years ago. Third, my theater is only two blocks north of where I live. Fourth, I’ve been on vacation for the last week and so had copious free time on my hands and could go to the matinee. And, fifth, a friend had gone to see the film and e-mailed me with his impressions about it.

My going was inevitable.

Overall, I would give Jackson’s Hobbit a moderately positive thumb’s up.

Among the good points:

1. Without a doubt, the best thing about the movie was the casting of Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins. Once you’ve seen him acting, you realize that there could have been no other actor to play the part.
2. The Dwarves. I was impressed that Jackson managed to make many of Thorin’s Company reasonably distinct. I can’t claim to be able to identify all thirteen but I did know who Fili, Kili, Balin, Dwalin and Bofur were by the end of the film. (I exclude Thorin, for obvious reasons, and Bombur, since he’s always been “the fat one.”)
3. I liked the fact that Jackson was able to shoehorn “Blunt the Knives” and the lament for lost Erebor into the “Unexpected Party” scenes. But I was disappointed that he didn’t include the Elvish ditty “Down in the Valley” when the Dwarves reach Rivendell. Though considering how the Elves are presented here and in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, I can see why he didn’t (I’ll have more about my dissatisfaction with Jackson’s Elves in the “bad points” section of this review below).
4. I liked the Troll scene. Again, there was a certain amount of disappointment that Jackson excised the part where Gandalf bamboozles them with ventriloquism but his solution – Bilbo distracting them until morning – was OK.
5. I wasn’t bothered by the Thorin/Azog thread Jackson introduced since there is some basis for it in the books. Azog does kill Thror and mutilate the body; however, that sets off the War of the Dwarves and the Orcs, it doesn’t happen at the final battle. Azog is killed at the final battle (by Dain, not Thorin) and it’s his son, Bolg, who leads the Goblin army at the end of the novel. But that may be too complicated for movie-going audiences to follow, so I’m OK with streamlining it.
6. I interpret the character and appearance of the Great Goblin as an homage to the character and appearance of same in the Rankin/Bass animated version from 1977. Now, if only Jackson could have shoehorned the “Down, down to Goblin Town” song into that scene.
7. The riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum is terrific. Not much more to say, except that it captures what happens in the book perfectly.
8. There’s a scene when the Dwarves have escaped from Goblin Town and Bilbo has caught up with them (having eluded Gollum). Thorin asks Bilbo why he came back since he has a home to return to and no reason to continue on with the quest, and Bilbo says (I paraphrase): “I have a home where – indeed – I should be; but you don’t, and I would be a poor Hobbit if I didn’t help you recover yours.” It’s not from the book but it’s certainly Tolkien, and whichever scriptwriter is responsible for it deserves kudos.

Among the bad points:

1. Radagast. This was probably the biggest mistake of the entire film – at least as far as characterizations go. He’s not made up out of whole cloth. Radagast does make a brief appearance in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as the unwitting messenger of Saruman to Gandalf. Even in that fleeting encounter, however, the reader can see that this is a real person with real wisdom. In Jackson’s hands, he becomes a cartoonish caricature covered in bird shit. It’s similar to what he did to Denethor’s character in LotR, who was so much more believable and complex in Tolkien’s hands.
2. Elves. Elves are not metrosexual vegetarians. Somehow, in the years since Tolkien wrote, vulgar fandom, most role-playing games and now Jackson have turned the Professor’s complex and unique creatures into sexless, tee-totaling, arrogant, obnoxious jerks. Elves, like Men and Dwarves, are not just creatures of spirit but of flesh and they are capable of all the desires and evils the latter two races exhibit. In The Silmarillion they’re rapists (Eöl/Aredhel), attempted rapists (Celegorm/Luthien), murderers (the sons of Fëanor), and – yes – even hunters (Beleg Strongbow), i.e., people who kill animals for food. And in Tolkien’s Hobbit, Bilbo manages to free the Dwarves from the Wood-elf king’s dungeons because the wardens get drunk! Here and in LotR, Jackson mischaracterizes them shamefully.
3. The fight scenes. This may be a paradox, but the fight scenes needed to be more realistic. It was better in LotR, but every fight in this movie lasts too long and is so over the top as to descend into the realms of the cartoon or the wuxia flick. In the latter genres, the viewer expects to see outrageous feats of derring-do and utterly unbelievable fighting but that style just doesn’t work in this genre. It’s a tired cliché, but in this case “less is more.”

There’ve been discussions on the internets about the “padding” Jackson has resorted to, to make a three-film epic. Based on this first film, I found the extras and the background info reasonable. It didn’t detract from the story too much, and it’s probably necessary to make sure non-Tolkien geeks can follow what’s going on. I reserve final judgment until I see what Jackson does with the rest of the series.

So, I imagine that – in the end – my relationship to Jackson’s Hobbit will mirror that of my relationship with his Lord of the Rings – A love/hate situation. There’s so much Jackson can get right in translating Tolkien to the screen but – oh, boy – when he gets it wrong (which he does often enough), he really gets it wrong.

Movie Review: The Corpse Grinders

I like the B-grade horror film genre and I love cats (see this post) so when I read the blurb on Netflix about The Corpse Grinders I knew I had to put it in my queue:

In an effort to cut costs, an unscrupulous cat food company buys a supply of
human corpses and grinds them into seemingly harmless chow for kitties. But they
didn't count on the felines suffering a serious side effect: A craving for human
flesh. When cats consume the food, they start attacking their owners in this
campy horror classic from noted "schlock" director Ted V. Mikels.

Going into an experience like this the viewer expects a piece of crap but he hopes for an entertainingly bad piece of crap. In this case, there was enough to make it "so bad it was OK" but not "good" - mainly because of the pacing. It was boring despite egregiously bad writing, acting and continuity. I swear that half of these schlock-fests would be twice as good if their producers had any notion of timing. There's also an almost complete lack of gore or cat presence at all; Mikels did nothing with the possibilities of cats turning on their owners.

The movie opens promisingly: It's a rainy night and a cat is meowing to get inside. Cut to the interior where a 20-something couple watches TV. It's obvious that they're waiting each other out until one breaks down and lets the cat in. Finally, the woman goes to the door, and the cat leaps on her throat. (You assume it leaps, actually; the editor cuts from woman looking out into dark to woman with cat on throat.) The husband rushes to her aid, pulls the cat off and then throws it into the house! Not outside (which he is facing) but inside - turning around and throwing it into the house.

Then we cut to the opening credits.

This is the first of only four cat attacks in the entire film. Of these four, only one is going to be fatal and that's the nearly homeless woman whose throat is torn out while she's sleeping.

After the credits we meet the ... gravedigger? It's hard to tell what this guy's job is but he is the source of our villains' corpses. He reminds me a bit of Torgo from Manos: The Hands of Fate - same hairstyle but he doesn't have the limp. He's married to a harridan who carries around a doll that she treats like a living person, talking to it and seating it at the dinner table to feed it soup. There's no explanation for this behavior and, more significantly, it plays utterly no role in the story. An attempt to establish character? Who knows but it's never mined for any meaning.

Not that the bit parts need much in the way of added quirkiness. The pet-food company goes out of its way to hire decidedly odd people. I suppose because they'll overlook a lot to keep their jobs. We now meet our villains - Landau, the "mastermind" behind this diabolical plot, and Mawpy (spelling?), his dull-witted, moderately necrophiliac partner. In another attempt to establish Landau's bona fides there's a running scene between him and Caleb (the gravedigger) where Caleb keeps asking Landau when he's going to get what's coming to him, and Landau keeps telling him to wait and he'll get exactly what's coming to him, in a snide, unctuous voice that telescopes exactly what you know is going to happen eventually. These would have been prime scenes for heckling on MST3 or Rifftraks.

Having met our villains, we now get to meet our (sigh) heroes, and we get cat-attack number two. Our heroes are a nurse and her doctor boyfriend (whose names I've already forgotten). There's a scene which establishes the nurse's love for her man and the doctor's compassion. She consoles him on the recent death of a patient and he utters, "Every time I lose one, I lose a part of myself." Two minutes later he's trying to get a quickie before she has to go back on duty.

Oh, yeah, the cat attack. For some reason, it's OK for this nurse to bring her cat to the hospital. The cat, whose name is Happy Sack or Hockey Socks, or something, attacks the doctor, scratching him on the chin (maybe, you never see any wound - ever - not even a bandage). And then he (the cat) disappears from the movie. Mind you, he's not killed, he just ... disappears.

The film moves on, albeit slowly. Cat attack number three and the only one that approaches the gore potential that any reasonable B-movie director would be exploiting happens. (And by "approach," I mean as a plane cruising at 35,000 feet over Kansas.) I've mentioned this scene - the poor, sleeping woman whose cat, after eating a can of food, bites her throat. Another near-homeless person hears the commotion, discovers the body and throws the cat against the wall. This scene is less traumatic for cat lovers than you might expect (or maybe you do, considering what I've said so far) - you don't see the cat, just the old man swinging around like he's throwing something, a yowl and a crashing sound. And that's the only cat who buys the farm in the entire film!!

Apparently this town is too small to have a real coroner (or vet) because the old guy brings both bodies to our heroes' clinic. After performing a necropsy, the doctor thinks there may be something wrong with what the cat ate. How he determines this is unclear as the most advanced piece of lab equipment visible is a slide microscope that would put even the most underfunded inner-city high school to shame. But the clinic is astonishingly well equipped in books about feline behavior - he pulls a one which explains exactly how felines behave when they've eaten human flesh from the shelf!

Our heroes decide to take their evidence (sic) to the Food Adulteration Agency (the FAA?), where we meet the 4th victim of these vicious feline maulings - the sexy secretary of the FAA agent. She goes home early: At home, she strips down to bra and panties, gets a beer out of the fridge and then seductively reclines on her couch to watch TV. Her cat, fresh from a corpse-tainted repast, leaps for her jugular (OK - you know the routine, due to editing, you assume he leaps for her throat because that's where he is in the next shot). We then cut to the next scene, though we do learn that she survives in a later bit of dialog.

Meanwhile, at the FAA office, our intrepid duo are getting the runaround from our government bureaucrat (who has no qualms about giving them presumably private information about applicants to open pet-food plants), and they go off to get to the bottom of things all on their own.

My virtual pen grows weary, and I can't justify giving this film more consideration so I'll only mention the scene where Landau has tied our nurse to the conveyor belt of the corpse grinder and laughs maniacally, saying that "No one can stop me now!" Or the scene where a detective, who has only been seen lurking in the background of some scenes taking notes, bursts in and shoots Landau dead. Or the final shot, where some cats who hang around the plant are seen crawling over Landau's body as it lays face down on the ground. Or one of the more glaring continuity problems I've ever seen in a film: Our nurse gets dressed (another opportunity for some gratuitous T&A) in a gold outfit; cut to next scene and she's in a red outfit; cut to the following scene and she's back in the gold; and in the final cut, she's wearing a blue blouse and black mini-skirt!

I followed this with a much better B-grade flick - Hide and Creep - a nice little indie zombie movie with a reasonably humorous script and decent acting. If you're in the mood to pretend you're Joel, Servo and Crow on the Satellite of Love, rent The Corpse Grinders; if you're looking to enjoy a little escapism with an otherwise forgettable film, go with Hide and Creep.

3:10 to Yuma

Just a brief note: If you're a Western movie fan, a fan of Russell Crowe, a fan of Christian Bale, a fan of Glenn Ford or any or all of the above, I would recommend watching both the 1957 and 2007 versions of "3:10 to Yuma."

Personally, I think the Crowe/Bale version superior to the Ford/Heflin version. But it's a close thing; neither lacks for good storytelling or wonderful acting.

And speaking of time, over the course of the last few weeks I've caught four very different examples of the time-travel genre. In order of increasing "artsiness": "Retroactive," "Timecrimes," "Primer" and "Le Jetee."

"Retroactive" is the most "Hollywoodish" of the four but is an entertaining diversion; and it's fun watching the body count continue to rise each time the hapless heroine goes back and tries to make things "right."

"Timecrimes" is a Spanish film that follows a middle-aged man who's accidentally caught up in a time-travel experiment. Probably the best of the lot. A friend of mine who's also seen the film has invested some serious mental effort in justifying some of the less believable aspects. One of the more interesting aspects of the film is the question of whether or not you should even try to change the past knowing the consequences.

"Primer" is the indie film that wowed audiences and critics on the film-festival circuit. It doesn't merit the hyperbolic praise of the critics but it is good, one of its strengths being that it's the story of a man's moral disintegration and the destruction of a friendship rather than just a time-travel story.

"Le Jetee" is a French film (1962) told in a series of still photos and voice over. There's probably no American director who could have pulled this off (except for a young Orson Welles) but Chris Marker succeeds brilliantly. (FYI, this film heavily influenced Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys, a good film in its own right.)