The Sun Also Dances, and so does Gatsby

Usually I resent physical mail delivery, since there is hardly ever anything I want in it and yet it never. stops. coming. except on Sundays, I guess. But I have in hand an advertisement for something I would not have thought existed: it turns out that the Washington Ballet is adapting The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway.

If it takes an English degree to think that's funny then my college education has done me some good. It's not merely that I am still uncultured enough to find ballet itself funny when juxtaposed with just about anything (although that is also undoubtedly true), but a Hemingway-ballet combination is the sort of thing one imagines exploding utterly, like matter and antimatter. Hemingway was such a strange animal in himself, a hyper-masculine and eminently taciturn writer; The Sun Also Rises itself is so bleak and uneventful that what I managed to read of it, in my two separate attempts, is largely a lacuna in my memory. To make The Sun Also Rises expressive, to make it flamboyant--I can hardly imagine that Hemingway would approve.

But then we live in an age of maximalism. The pendulum is at its far extreme from 1926, and if this generation is lost, most of us got that way without ever actually seeing the war that scattered us. Some of the best social commentary in the last 10 years has involved Batman. We don't do understatement anymore. So while Hemingway almost certainly wouldn't approve, maybe something as overblown as ballet would be able to expose the trenchant pathos that he was content to leave unsaid.

On the back of the flyer, the ad announces the ballet as "following on the success of The Great Gatsby." So apparently that was a ballet as well, but I missed it. (Not that I was going to go to Rises, mind you. I'm still in the process of coming to my main point. Thanks for staying with us.) However, I think that Gatsby is a more amenable story to bombastic presentation. Fitzgerald was more comfortable with stylistic flourishes, and excess is in the bones of the story.

In fact, it was the idea of just such a presentation that excited me back when I first got wind of Baz Luhrmann's movie version of The Great Gatsby. In a book that trades so heavily on prose and tone, any straight adaptation of the plot will fall flat--one of those increasingly self-evident truths that I think the brains of Hollywood are immune to. Linguistic flair should translate to the screen as cinematic flair: style and cinematography, of which Mr. Luhrmann at least has no shortage. At any rate, until a movie has come out, you can really only pin your hopes on mistakes that the production has apparently avoided, and I think it's a safe bet that Luhrmann's Gatsby will avoid the mistake of being dull.

I wish I did not have as many hopes for this movie as I do, but I have been pessimistic about the summer movie season so far. Recalling my intense distaste for Iron Man 2, I have few hopes for this year's vaunted sequels (the Iron Men and the Star Treks), precisely because I expect the expectation of money to have thoroughly crushed the life out of the spontaneous originals.

The irony is certainly not lost on me (is any?) that the movie I anticipate most this summer is based on a book that I am ambivalent towards. It read The Great Gatsby in high school, and then again when I was actually old enough to understand it, and I appreciated it but certainly didn't clamor for more. It is perhaps this lack of investment that allows me to hope at all. There is little threat of actual disappointment, as with The Hobbit. I have respect but not affection for the source material. The movie's failings should not gall me; its successes should entertain me. It's all gravy.

Except in spite of my protective disinterest, I find myself in a sort of informational purgatory. I want to read reviews, partly because they will help me determine what I'm doing with me weekend, and partly because I'm bored. Partly because while I'm not invested in the movie per se, I'm invested in my prediction that Baz Luhrmann is a good match for the source material, and I want to find out if people agree with me. All this in spite of knowing full well the aggregate reviews of this movie will be useless. 25% of viewers will hate Baz Luhrmann on principle. 25% of viewers will hate Leonardo DiCaprio on principle. 25% of viewers will want to flaunt their literacy by complaining about how the movie missed the spirit of the book. 25% of viewers will love it as empty audiovisual spectacle. 25% of viewers will be convinced that Gatsby and Daisy are a love story for the ages, no matter how shallow and awful they are supposed to be.

So we'll see. Or, anyway, I probably will.

An unexpected disappointment

I had a sad realization today while walking through a Target. Actually, I had the realization earlier, and then I had it again--can you have a realization twice... I mean, I could say "I had a hamburger yesterday, and I had a hamburger today," but I guess if it were the same hamburger both times that would be gross.

Well. Anyway. Today in Target I passed a display of DVDs and Blu-Rays of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. My realization was not that, hey, The Hobbit is out on video now. My realization is that I had no desire to buy it.

This came as a bit of a shock for me. Understand that there was no question in my mind about getting any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy special edition DVDs. (Not that I bought it--but I made dern sure I got it for Christmas.) So did basically everyone I knew. Remember that when these DVDs came out I lived with three other people. Through most of college we had four copies of the trilogy between us. It wasn't a matter of having access to the movies--there were lots of things I never owned in college because one of my roommates had one.

I don't want to wax too exuberant about the connection my friends and I had with that movie--I really think a lot of people felt the same way--but it was something more than you can get from a really good movie, or from fully leveraging really popular IP. I speak now in the language of the enemy, because I think the enemy really needs to hear that. The reason the Lord of the Rings movies made so much money, and lasted so long as a cultural force, is because people loved them--in a sense that is not just a more intense version of "like."

What possibly makes me sadder than my disappointment in The Hobbit 1/3 itself is the sense that the people in charge of it made too much money to register that they screwed up. But I saw Return of the King three or four times in theaters. I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey once in the theater and, three months later, don't want so much to see it again as I would like to un-see about a third of it.

In the language of the enemy, take $10 for a movie ticket, multiply by two repeat viewings. Add the cost of a special-edition Blu-Ray. Multiply all that by the number of people who think more or less like me.

There's more missed opportunity than actual profit.

Back when it was almost timely I made my opinions on The Hobbit known. Specifically, I said:

I am more optimistic about the second movie than I might be. It will probably consist mostly of fanfic about the White Council and the Necromancer, but I will give that a go if Necky is a more compelling villain than Azog.

It's actually a little frightening how effective TH:tUJ's artistic triage was. Fred and Satan both knew what notes would have to play true in order for fans to come back for part 2/3. What absolutely had to work really worked, but there was lot of slack in between.

 That's what I thought just after seeing it. Three months later, if The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug came out next week, I think I'd read a few reviews. I'd wait and see.

The Miz

I watched the Les Misérables movie on Thursday night, which turned out to be a good use of my time. Girlfriend is taking one of her classes to see it tomorrow, too, which I think might actually be a good use of their time. This surprises me, but it is so.

As another big novel adaptation of the winter movie season (albeit with a major intermediate step), Les Mis bears comparison to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Observation number one: Victor Hugo's approximately-one-million-word novel was reasonably adapted into a reasonably long movie. J.R.R. Tolkien's much shorter novel cannot, apparently, on the other hand, fit in three unreasonably long movies. You would think it had been Tolkien who couldn't shut up about nuns.

A lot of love for the book and the musical evidently went into this movie. It's a useful lesson in how you can lovingly adapt a work without necessarily rubbing every word of your source material into a tremendous lather. The battle between Fred and Satan (which I mentioned regarding TH:UJ) played out quite differently in these two movies. I actually found Satan's influence quite small in Les Miz.

Les puts a lot on the actors' acting ability. Do you remember that scene in Rocky, during the training montage, when Rocky is running past a docked freighter? The camera starts close on Sylvester Stallone and then pans out slowly in a long shot, until it registers with the audience that Stallone must actually be in really good shape. Well, about two hours' worth of Lez consist of that moment, with varying results. The songs are shot in merciless, continuous closeup.

Just how close, and how continuous, seemed to be a function of the character's billing. The bigger the part and the actor, the more the movie relied on their face and voice to tell the story, to the exclusion of all other dramatic expedients. Consequently, I spent a lot of time trying to see around Hugh Jackman's head. Much of Anne Hathaway's torso is allowed to appear in "I Dreamed a Dream." The supporting cast end up in the movie's sweet spot, since it's assumed that they could benefit from some actual mis-en-scene. In almost every case, the relentless camera work reflects well on the actors.

It's been popular among reviewers to find fault with Russell Crowe's performance. He does seem to be the only one who needs to spare concentration from his acting for singing--except when Hugh Jackman falters while running the falsetto gauntlet that is "Bring Him Home." Sweeney Todd did a pretty good job of establishing that it doesn't take a strong singing voice to drive a movie musical. It turns out, though, that while you don't need to be able to project to the cheap seats, you do need to be able to sing and act simultaneously. And Crowe's Javert would have been suitably intense in a Mis cast like Todd; he could have gone rasp for rasp with Johnny Depp. In his present company, though, he comes off as introspective at best, and weak at worst.

Nothing in this movie is totally bad, though. Its flaws are almost entirely the result of too much faith placed in the abilities of extremely talented actors, and that sort of thing can only go so wrong.

In which I hardly spoil The Hobbit at all

I'm going to have to almost beg some of my friends to read this post, since after my post about The Dark Knight Rises my reputation for spoiling things has approached mythic proportions in certain circles. So here goes: Guys, come oonnn. Every single one of you has read the damn book.

That said, if you haven't read The Hobbit, go do that. Seriously, just go. Don't use the internet until you've finished it. Your life will be better for it. I'll wait.

With that out of the way, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was a positive experience on the whole. It also made me sad. Sad because I came away convinced that while Peter Jackson--no, not Peter Jackson, since we can't truly know the minds of the creative people involved*--but some entity or force, either a person or the emanation of commonalities in multiple persons' psyches--we'll call it Fred--brought The Hobbit to the screen as an act of artistic love; and a second entity or force--we'll call it Satan--compelled the story to be stretched into three long movies in a naked grab for money.

This is not actually what I expected. I thought of the Peter Jackson who shopped a two-movie Lord of the Rings for years until Robert Shaye made the brilliant--but then bold--suggestion that the films be a trilogy. When I first read that The Hobbitses would be not two movies but three, the article included some gushing by Mr. Jackson about all the extra material he was excited to be able to fit into the newly trilogized series. I now suspect that Mr. Jackson was compelled by Satan to say this. About 10-20% of the film's run time is padding and cruft that I can't believe anyone was excited to be able to include.

The Hobbit: An Unexpectedly Okay Film is a prolonged battle between Fred and Satan, with both gaining and losing the upper hand at various points. The arc of the movie is a happy one, inasmuch as Satan solidly controls the movie in the beginning but Fred manages to prevail in the end, with only a brief resurgence just before the credits to promise that there will be a sequel.

Fred's influence on the film meant that the worst of my fears were averted. I had worried that there would be no differentiation in tone between The Lord of the Ringses and The Hobbitses. Instead, where Fred had his way, at least, there seemed to be an awareness that LotR belongs to the genre of Epic Fantasy while The Hobbit belongs to the genre of Fantasy Adventure. This is a difference that makes a difference. For example, Tolkien's habit of having his characters spontaneously bust rhymes was suppressed in the LotR movies. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Musical, not every song that Tolkien wrote shows up (by a long shot) but some of the characters sing, and they do so more spontaneously and with more coordination than anyone in the LotR movies did. There's also a slightly cartoonish veneer over the whole thing, which is not wholly unwelcome... but I'll get to that later, because it is mostly unwelcome.

Martin Freeman is definitely a servant of Fred, and Fred's power is at its apogee when Freeman's Bilbo encounters Andy Serkis' Gollum. In fact, this movie actually excited me about the character of Gollum in a way that the LotR movies didn't. LotR Gollum was innovative and praiseworthy; the Riddle Game would have been a brilliant scene if Andy Serkis had been on screen himself in grey makeup.**

Satan's influence on the film meant that I was disappointed in unexpected ways. Perhaps the most pervasive effect of Satan's influence was--believe it or not--the CGI. Basically all the goblins, trolls, wargs, eagles, staircases, hedgehogs, and bunny rabbits are fairly obviously digitized illusions. It seemed pretty blatant that after demanding eight hours of movie, Satan was not willing to shell out for bigatures, props, and makeup on the scale of LotR. (After all, we were all going to see the movie anyway, and aren't computers 10 years better than they were 10 years ago? That has to be enough.) As a result, the movie mostly works, but it never inspires the awe that its predecessors did because it is mostly fake. See the aforementioned cartoonish veneer.

The inserted character Azog, who is apparently set to be the series' visible Big Bad (allowing for Smaug to be handled more intelligently, like Jaws), is particularly unconvincing, which is a particular shame. He also feels thoroughly obligatory and joyless... and pretty detachable. He may not be as much an attempt to pad out the movie as to create a throughline in an otherwise episodic story, but the attempt is misguided. If I were a betting man I would bet that his prominence was ramped up in post-production to fill the void left by the Necromancer, who presumably was going to be the villain of the first half of The Hobbit but will now be contained instead in the second third.

The writing is uneven, in places as insubstantial as the CGI, but I expected weakness there. I am really surprised to have been so visually disappointed by The Hobbit's superfluities. It is true that a lot of the superfluity is super-superfluous. Elijah Wood, in particular, seemed to have just wandered onto set on his way to pick up his check. There are several characters who we are apparently just supposed to be happy to see, and we don't do much more than see them.

I am more optimistic about the second movie than I might be. It will probably consist mostly of fanfic about the White Council and the Necromancer, but I will give that a go if Necky is a more compelling villain than Azog.

It's actually a little frightening how effective TH:tUJ's artistic triage was. Fred and Satan both knew what notes would have to play true in order for fans to come back for part 2/3. What absolutely had to work really worked, but there was lot of slack in between.

Finally, a lot of fuss has been made about the framerate. I can't speak to it. What I saw was obviously old-fashioned 24 FPS, and if anything, it actually ended up blurrier than other movies I've seen. So if you can, I guess, try the 48 FPS, maybe. I don't know. All the reviews I read complained about it. It's probably the future, though, so get used to it, I guess.

* And certain people insist that copies of The Silmarillion burn when Peter Jackson touches them, and he wants to cancel Christmas to make more room in the year for warg attacks.
** Not to minimize the contributions of the digital puppeteers who created the physical performance. It's beyond me to say where Serkis' decisions end and the animators' decisions begin.