Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fandomsecrets2015-08-27 06:36 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2015-08-27 06:36 pm
[ SECRET POST #3158 ]
⌈ Secret Post #3158 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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[Raedus]
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[American Odyssey]
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 009 secrets from Secret Submission Post #451.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Re: Favorite reviews of stuff
(Anonymous) 2015-08-27 11:05 pm (UTC)(link)Next, Jackson puts his two casting disasters together in a love scene so awful it must be premeditated: Viggo the surfer woos Arwen the groupie. Their tryst is set in a typical NZ commercial forest of trimmed, cloned, identical pines -- about as wild and scary as the Transit Lounge at Auckland Airport. It's the' steeds who steal this scene -- the horses out-act the lovers with ease. You're left to watch the hobbits because there's simply no one else around.
When we arrive at Rivendell, there's a surprise waiting: Jackson has chosen, as Elrond, the most hopelessly typecast actor in all of film: that quirky Aussie who hammed it up as Keanu's nemesis in The Matrix. Short of hiring Joe Isuzu to play Gandalf, Jackson couldn't have telegraphed his malign intent more obviously than by depicting Elrond as the Matrix villain in Spock ears, wrapped in what appears to be Dame Edna Everedge's dressing gown.
This time, the set does its share to destroy the viewer's belief. Rivendell, Elrond's fortress/home, is transformed in Jackson's film to a series of Victorian gazebos, vaguely like the bandshells of small NZ towns -- so wanton a travesty that only great malice or greater stupidity can explain it.
At the focal point of all this kitsch is the actor Jackson offers us as Frodo: an epicene waif who looks creepily like Winona Ryder in Little Women. His one schtick is looking troubled, opening his huge, empty eyes to an extent seen only in the heroines of Japanese animation. Frodo, who is a stolid, fifty-year-old squire in Tolkien's story, ends up as a sump for bathos, a dead center.
The next noble character to be cast as farce is Saruman. In Tolkien, he's the classic sophist -- a formidable, scarily charming egomaniac. And Jackson gives us...Christopher Lee, the oldest working vampire in the film business. He's Christopher Lee. He can never be anyone but Christopher Lee, an old man with the face of a petulant horse.
Farce is piled on farce; Jackson stages the wizards' duel between Gandalf and Saruman as a Naked Gun remake: not a contest of deep and subtle minds but a new, comic martial art: geriatric magic-wand kung fu.. For a long, long time we watch wo aged, fey British thespians in lank white wigs and beards zapping each other with their hippie sticks.
It was here that the audience started laughing outright. That was my first clue that it wasn't just me, that something really was seriously wrong about this movie.
But I'd misread the laughter. It was a mark of trust. The wary, untutored viewers were relaxing; they'd decided to trust Jackson, let him ease them through this thorny, long-avoided text their weird nerd friends used to bore them about. It was safe after all, "an action movie."
That "action movie" bit is a quote from Jackson himself. It's a wonderful phrase, managing to imply all the calculated belittling that turns the only successful modern epic into something Bruce Willis fans can enjoy.
Like all Jackson's betrayals of the trilogy, this "action movie" line is more subtle than might appear. After all, it's true -- LOTR is indeed full of "action," and damn good action at that. But Tolkien didn't spend 30 years inventing an Elvish language, creating linguistically-consistent nomenclatures for a dozen different imaginary cultures, and building a foundation of lore which underlies the trilogy just to do an action story. He was after something far grander: inventing a world. or as one perceptive critic put it, making himself "the creative equivalent of a people."
In his jolly way, then, Jackson's shift of emphasis, from big to small, from layered reality to simple "action," yielded three movies that cater to those who rightly thought they wouldn't like Tolkien. You begin to realize, with something like horror, "He wants it to be bad, to be...ordinary."
Jackson even manages to neutralize the few great actors he employed. Take Sean Bean, a fine actor. Bean's special ability is the knack of looking like a tough guy who actually has things going on inside his head. He would've made a great Aragorn. So naturally Jackson casts him as Boromir, a noble dolt, Tolkien's paradigm of the heedless, rash, unthinking warrior who endangers himself and his men (Roland via the Earl in Battle of Maldon). Bean is so painfully wrong for the role that when he dies at the end of the first film, you get the feeling he was grateful.
Jackson's next piece of miscasting is the most unforgivable of all: Kate Blanchett as Galadriel, elf-queen of Lothlorien. Galadriel is Tolkien's greatest female character, the sum of virtuous female power as understood in Teutonic Europe: subtle, at once tactful and playful, using her power to protect and nurture, seductive yet chaste.
You non-fans probably don't realize how important Galadriel was to hundreds of thousands of us lonely Tolkien loyalists. I loved Galadriel. I wanted to die for her and Lothlorien. Lothlorien -- the name alone was sacred. For example, there was a student coop at UCB named Lothlorien; it had a permanent waiting list, just thanks to the name.
But now that I've sat through Jackson's maiming of her, Galadriel's dead for me. Blanchett shows up in stoner soft-focus, looking crosseyed as she sleepwalks across what seems to be a Santa Cruz treehouse festooned with Xmas lights. Then she puts on the Ring and turns into a solarized chick from some Joplin poster circa 1968. Averting my eyes, I upped the charges against Jackson on the spot. From there on, it was a capital offense. Messing up Aragorn was one thing, but to turn Galadriel to farce -- that I will not forgive.
When the mercy-killing of Sean Bean ends the first film, the worst is over, because the narrative gathers speed, the elves fade from view, and the need to keep all Tolkien's subplots cooking prevents Jackson from falling back on his trademark buffoonery and bathos.
The Two Towers even contains one great scene, when Jackson allows Brad Dourif, a great actor, to show his stuff as the evil vizier-character Wormtongue. As the camera hunches around the beautifully-designed Saxon hall of Rohan, and Dourif's enervating whisper drains the weak King's will to resist, the film actually evokes Tolkien's prose.
But after all, Comrades, one good scene in nine hours of film, costing $300 million dollars, is not an impressive rate of return.
And Jackson, as if unnerved at his brief success, dives back into kitsch in the next episode, the elves' rescue of the Rohirrim besieged in Helm's Deep. As always, he subjects the elves to grotesquely farcical staging. This time around he has them march up to the fortress gates in campy lockstep -- a Busby Berkeley routine, all wearing fey purple robes. To rub the insult in, the elvish commander is a small-time NZ TV actor who used to play a social worker on an NZ soap.
My feelings after seeing the first two films were probably typical of Tolkien loyalists everywhere: confused, even ashamed that for some obscure reason I was unable to share non-fan friends' pleasure in the films. After all, Jackson's treatment is superficially faithful. Most of the dialogue was straight out of the books, and the narrative was virtually identical. But I could sense that somehow the films were working over my private Middle Earth like those spiked starfish devouring a reef.
I sat down to watch the third film, Return of the King, as nervous as at a final exam. And after 3 1/2 long hours of wary viewing, I had to concede that ROTK is a decent movie, far better than the first two. But for we Tolkien fan who had already suffered through Jackson's Fellowship and Two Towers, the third film was too little, too late. We'd already developed a Pavlovian aversion to Jackson's stock shots: dozens of lingering close-ups of Frodo-Winona's unvarying teary stares; slow-paced har-de-har-har samples of Pippin & Merry's vaudeville backchat; Tyler's retarded elf-maiden groupie attempting to register some human emotion; and Aragorn's pinched, sneery profile shuffling around, attempting to look like a man in charge and conveying only the beady-eyed woofing of our own C-in-C.
Still, fair's fair: Return... doesn't seem designed to destroy Tolkien's story the way the first two films were. Unlike them, Return is a war film, and war is something Jackson and his scriptwriters can grasp. Indeed, they do a creditable job, in patches. (Words like "creditable" and "dogged" keep popping up as I write this, like a queasy thesaurus trying to soften the blow.)
Jackson's siege of Minas Tirith is a solid piece of work. Not good by any means -- just compare Jackson's big-budget battle scenes with the fast cut-and-thrust in Sam Raimi's small-budget Army of Darkness to see the difference between real talent (Raimi) and mere plodding competence like Jackson's.
Truth is, no director, not even Penny Goddamn Marshall, could totally wreck Return of the King. The momentum Tolkien's epic has gathered by the time the final battle begins is so vast it shines through Jackson's dogged, plodding treatment.
But this faint praise is all the film deserves. All too often, Jackson's casting shows the same downright malevolent attitude toward all of Tolkien's aristocratic characters. Thus Eowyn, a swordworthy Valkyrie who rides to battle disguised as a man, is played by an NZ actress whose rosy little features would fit better on a milk commercial.
And whenever Jackson has to front up to the task of transferring Tolkien's sense of horror to the screen, he flat-out blows it. The worst failure is his Mordor. Mordor, the scariest place in all literature, just ain't scary in Jackson's movie. Sam and Frodo trudge up and down gravelly slopes with dry ice smoking in the background. It's as scary as a high-school Halloween party. By this time I was reading everything Jackson did as premeditated sabotage -- so he must've dulled down Mordor to keep the non-Tolkien audience from getting too scared. Or was it simple incompetence? Maybe he's just no damn good.
And the bastard kept up his practice of emphasizing the nastiest, most sentimental hobbit-centric scenes at the expense of all Tolkien's wilder, colder narratives. So naturally Jackson offers us a heapin' helpin' of Tolkien's most repellent episode: Sam's blubbering, submissive love-blubbering to his "dear Master" Frodo as the pair trudge toward Mount Doom. Jackson didn't invent this vile stuff; Tolkien gets the blame for it, poor fucked-up bastard, genius though he was. All Jackson did was manage to amplify the worst of Tolkien's tale yet again.
After enduring Sam's weepy bootlicking love scenes, you start to see Gollum's point of view. "Nasty fat hobbit, we hates it, Precious, yesss, always kissing up to Master..." Jackson's Gollum is a decent creation. It would almost have to be; Gollum is by far the easiest character to translate to our Philistines' sensibility, for the simple reason that he's a 20th-c. character, the only one in the whole trilogy. Parachute Gollum into J. Alfred Prufrock's neighborhood and he'd be right at home.
In fact, the middlebrow move would be to make Gollum a sympathetic character -- the same sort of formulaic value reversal that lead half-baked poets to call Judas the only decent apostle, and half-bright screenwriters to turn Hannibal Lecter into Jodie's best pal.
You can count on Jackson to swallow and pass along that sort of lame received idea. Sure enough, Return of the King opens with poor Gollum, still a wee hobbit, falling under the Ring's spell, strangling his brother and ending up the desiccated voice we all love. Poor little murderer! Saint Gollum, right up there with Saint Gacy.