Thank you for smoking is a satire of the sanctimony and hypocrisy of the anti-smoking crusade. The anti-hero is Nick Naylor, uber-flack for the tobacco industry, played by Aaron Eckhard with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary grin. The movie sets you up to root for the spinmeister as he talks his way out of jams in board meetings and press conferences, and charms talk show audiences, elementary school kids, a congressional hearing, and his hero-worshipping young son. Our trickster anti-hero outsmarts santimonious opponents including Senator Finisterre, a sourpuss Vermont legislator whose birkenstock sandals and desk covered in maple syrup flasks (everyone is bought, the question is who's paying the bill); Finisterre's hapless nerdy aide; and an attractive, conscience-free journalist who will do anything to get an expose (played by Katie Holmes in a fine display of starlet non-acting).
The best part of the movie is the sharp script, adapted from Christopher Buckley's novel. The second best part is Aaron Eckhart's pr guy who can charm almost anyone into believing that smoking is a statement for personal freedom. The third best is are the sets and setup; the sinister burger joint, with leatherette benches and toxic-looking burgers fries and pies, where Naylor meets his counterparts in the alcohol and firearms pr; the black man in pink suits who put the coffin of Robert Duval's tobacco executive in the ground, leaving him with one last mint julep (evil and entitled to the end); the wood paneling and styrofoam ceiling in Naylor's office.
In trickster stories, you root for the clever, glib bad guy, and he is run out of town in the end. You know he's going to come back; there is an endless tension between smug authority figures and wily, anarchic rebels. The filmmakers leave the trickster triumphant. The moral promoted by Naylor -- and by the director in the DVD aftermatter -- is a libertarian message to "think for yourself." And I think that libertarians are played like fiddles by corporatists who use the rhetoric of enterprise and individual freedom to promote policies that make the world a lot worse (global warming, anyone). I liked the movie, and would rather see the trickster in his customary place.
The Johnny Cash biopic starts with sentimental scenes of the singer as a young boy with his sweet, kind, diligent, protective and fun older brother. You can tell from the sepia indoors, picturesque outdoors, and thoughtful pauses that young Mr. Virtuous is not long for this movie. The fact that the doomed angel child is a cliche from Victorian literature (Dickens, Alcott, et all) doesn't make it easier to take.
The movie is filled with such paint-by-numbers sequences. The young Johnny Cash stumbles on Sam Phillips' storefront recording studio, listens at the back door, and has the door closed in his face. You can tell when Cash is overdosing because the camera goes out of focus. There is a strained moment when Cash's matronly first wife meets his elegant future wife at a music awards night, and hisses at her to stay away from the children.
Cash's father ("you're good for nothing") and first wife ("I don't want you mentioning your band or tour, ever"), never have a kind or supportive word to say about anything. Clearly this chronic rejection drives Cash's self-destruction, as anyone who reads airport bookstore self-help books would know.
The two lead actors do a good job, but the unimaginative or condescending literalness of the movie is a good reminder of what I can't stand about Hollywood style. It's not hatred of emotion, or even melodrama. I loved Farewell My Concubine, which featured a damaged artist, unrequited love, drug addiction fueled by rejection, beautiful photography, and plenty of tragedy per foot of celluloid. The bits that the viewer needs to infer make all the difference.
When I rented both of these movies, I didn't know that they had the same plot.
Both movies are love triangles between two men who are artistic partners and a a woman with a promiscuous past who becomes involved with one of the men. One of men has an unrequited crush on his buddy.
The settings and tone couldn't be more different. Chasing Amy takes place over a year in gritty-bohemian North Jersey and the world of aspiring comic book artists. Farewell My Concubine takes place over fifty tumultuous decades in North China, in the glamorous world of the Peking Opera.
Farewell My Concubine is an intense melodrama in a world of shocking cruelty. At beginning of the movie, a desperate prostitute brings her young son to train for the opera. They won't accept him because he has a sixth finger on one hand, so she shields his eyes and amputates the finger. The Japanese occupation, nationalist regime, communist takeover, and cultural revolution put the relationships among the characters under unbearable strain. What I loved about this movie was the exploration of loyalty and betrayal under test.
Chasing Amy is a bittersweet romantic comedy in a mundane world of diners, little club parties, comic book tradeshows, and business decisions balancing nuances of artistic purity and commercial success. The movie is at its best when it is dramatizing genx sexual mores, when Joey Adams and Jason Lee trade stories of bad highschool sex, and when Jason Lee and Ben Affleck slowly realize they are at a lesbian bar. Joey Lauren Adams gets to preach the films moral in a pc sermon about sexual exploration and true love. Ben Affleck can't act, but the rest of the cast and the clever dialog add up to an entertaining movie.
According to this poll, 70% of high school seniors support gay marriage (53%) or civil unions (20%). In a few decades, plots about doomed and unrequited gay love may go the way of plots about doomed women who try to get jobs.
Mark Cuban thinks it's very important. Of course, he has invested heavily in high definition video content and distribution.
There's a huge audience of people who like sports, and movies about things that explode dramatically. Presumably those are the people for whom "quality" means more pixels.
For me, long tail access and convenience are many times more important than better pictures. I could get by with crappy little pictures for a long time, if I could find the niche content that I care about.
I wonder about the size of the respective markets for mass market content with really pretty pictures, and niche content with ordinary pictures. Probably both very big. Probably the important business insight is to forget that there were once one-size-fits-all tv and movie markets.
Lovely and Amazing is loathesome and hateful. The characters are narcissistic and vapid and masochistic, and dull while they're at it.
In Mostly Martha, the chef tells off her philistine customers, which puts her on thin ice with her boss who has to weigh aggravation and respect. Martha can be a jerk, but a complicated jerk with redeeming qualities.
In Lovely and Amazing, a wannabe artist shops her overpriced crafts to LA boutiques and tells each of the proprietors to fuck off when they turn her down. She has an early school-age daughter, and the most interesting story she has to tell in any social situation is her natural childbirth, followed by her story about being homecoming queen. Her actress sister asks her boyfriend to critique her body, and then berates him for not taking seriously her anxieties about flabby upper arms. She needs to get a pair of dumbbells and stop whining.
The matriarch of the family has a crush on her incompetent plastic surgeon. Her one redeeming feature is her close relationship with an adopted daughter. The movie manages to undermine that by exploiting the various possible stereotypes about an upper-middle-class Jewish woman adopting a black girl; from awkward moments about sunscreen, to hair-straightening, to a taste for fast food. The grownups, black and white, are too busy being awkward about the situation to actually be parents and mentors.
The adult women characters are all linked with cold, disapproving, deceitful men. The attempt at romantic redemption is the wannabe artist's fling with a 17-year old. At least they share a level of maturity.
I didn't get the feeling that the film-makers had a distance on their material. The movie is an exaggerated version of real life, with more socially clueless and floridly insecure characters facing the same traps.
Why did this movie just make me mad, when I thought that Sideways was darkly funny? The self-destructive characters in Sideways were more self-destructive -- one was an alcoholic, and one was a philanderer headed toward marriage. They were further along in unsuccessful artistic careers; one was a several-time unpublished novelist, the other a soap opera romantic lead past his prime.
Maybe because the movie was more literate, in structure and dialog and pictures. Maybe because the characters showed some passion along with their self-destruction. Maybe because the characters didn't have kids, so their idiocies did not seem as cruel. Maybe because the movie took the characters' deceptions -- of women, of themselves -- more seriously.
My favorite scenes in Mostly Martha the "take your neice to work" scenes. A driven head chef at a Hamburg restaurant inherits the care of her eight-year-old neice after her sister dies in a car accident. When a babysitter finds the bereaved and hostile little girl impossible, Martha brings her to the restaurant in the evenings. The girl experiences rosemary and truffles, watches the complex choreography of dozens of gourmet dishes in progress, is charmed into eating by her aunt's boisterous culinary rival, and learns to help out in little ways.
Other excellent restaurant scenes:
* the new Italian sous chef comes in and charms his all of his new co-workers with music and a playful style that contrasts with Martha's high seriousness.
* Martha's ubergeek hostility to restaurant customers - when a customer complains that the foie gras is raw, Martha replies that it is "perfekt", cooked at 140 degrees Celsius for 3 minutes.
* Watching Martha's boss, a tall, blond, imperious fifty-something restaurater, tolerate her prima donna employee
* The showdown: when Martha is unwilling to overtly accept Mario's presence, he offers his resignation with the restaurant crew watching tensely; when his boss says she wants him to stay, he replies: "It's your restaurant, but her kitchen".
Of lesser excellence, the "opposites-attract" romance between the extraverted Italian and the chilly German; fortunately the movie ends before the battles over toothpaste tube hygiene and music volume; they win the "movie couple most likely to be divorced" award.
Interesting contrast between the adoption love story in Mostly Martha and King of Masks. Both movies have a gruff artist conveying their art to an adoptive child; in the Chinese movie, the older and younger characters take on bonds of obligation, and the love between the characters cements the obligation; in the German movie, the older and younger characters make a choice, and the love between the characters cements the choice.
King of Masks is a heartwarming fable set in 1930s China about an aging street performer searching for a male heir to learn the family art. Shower is a heartwarming modern fable set in 90s Beijing, where the elderly proprietor of a traditional bathouse has a retarded son who helps with the business, and a non-disabled son who's busy making money with a high-tech, low-touch version of the family business in south China.
Yi Yi is a bittersweet novelistic film in late 90s Taipei, where the grandmother is in a coma following a stroke. The doctors advice the family to speaking to her in the hope of stimulating a recovery. Her children and grandchildren confide in their mute elder; the confidences reveal crises in the lives of the various family members.
All three movies are about breaks in the passing of tradition across generations. The distance is greatest in the movie set in modern Taiwan, where the grandmother is mute for most of the film, and her descendents are forced to make their own way through the dilemmas of faith, purpose and love.
The themes are kin to the "generation gap" that affected modernizing US culture, with more affection and nostalgia for the changing old ways.
For Peterme who wants recommendations, I thought Masks and Shower were well-crafted and affecting; and Yi Yi was fantastic.
Loved Amores Perros. It gets compared to Pulp Fiction for superficial reasons (interwoven stories; black comedy; violence; first scene is a suspenseful car ride with a a bloody victim in the back seat), but has little in common. Where Pulp Fiction is ice cold, Amores Perros is passionate; it's dark humor comes from nuances of heartbreak. Pulp Fiction is post-modern nihilist; the outcome is defined by genre. Amores Perros is more post-Catholic; the outcome for each of various characters is one part accident; and one part the fatal outcome of decisions.
Didn't like Y Tu Mama Tambien so much, for much the reasons as the various Amazon reviewers who didn't like the movie. The teenage boys were doofuses. The famed sex scenes didn't do much for me. The bleak background scenes of Mexican countryside with occasional pompous voiceovers attempted to instill social relevance to a movie which would be better off honestly shallow. The final plot twist with the female character isn't believable, and gets the storyteller out of the need to forsee the the consequences of the story.
I wish I had more film vocabulary to describe visual styles. A film class someday? Maybe some books or DVDs.
The buddy movie about two forty-ish men -- a failing novelist and a failing actor -- going on a wine-country tour the week before the actor's wedding.
I liked the way Sideways made fun of an intellectual -- the writer's wine snobbery is simultaneously a sign of absurd pretention, unacknowledged alcoholism, and genuine passionate avocation.
I liked some of the structural craftsmanship -- the movie has repeated scenes of iffy driving, but the car crash that eventually happens is different than you'd expect.
I liked the sets -- attentive depictions of America's seedy kitch, without Quentin Tarantino's glamor or Coen caricature. The characters walk from the two-story motor-courtyard motel along the highway by a car lot, to a western-kitch restaurant called "the hitching post". It may be cheesy, but it's our landscape.
I liked the way the writer's chronic hesitancy contrasted with the actor's chronic impulsiveness. Between them, there was a fraction of one mature person. The actor's impulsive suggestion that the characters should run off to start a wine business was the most sensible idea in the movie -- the actor's hucksterism, the writer's estheticism, and the practicality of the female characters might have resulted in a working business.
I think the male actors -- Paul Giamatti and Jack Church -- are funny. The female characters are dull in a love-interest sort of way.
I liked the way the move was about lying to oneself (the writer's alcoholism, the actor's slim chance at marital fidelity) and to others (the writer's taking vacation money from his mother's underwear drawer, the actor's deception of women.
I like the way that in the novelistic tradition, the story is about an economic constraint in society -- creative fields like writing, music, and acting focus on hit-based celebrity of the young.
A number of reviewers complain that the characters aren't likable, or worse, that the filmmakers don't have compassion for the characters. I have a creepy suspicion that the truth may be worse -- that the difference between the characters and the movie makers is that the movie makers make a bit more money and get caught less.
Rushmore had more eccentricity and more heart than The Royal Tenenbaums. The main character is Max, played by Jason Schwartzman, a 15-year old scholarship student at a private school who ringleads theater, debate club, beekeeping, calligraphy, fencing, and other extracurricular activities, while on the verge of failing academically.
The character is a combination of precocious, pretentious, and naively awkward; he's young enough to make lots of embarrasingly painful mistakes, and old enough to cause real damage. He makes friends with a middle-aged millionaire, played by Bill Murray in a midlife secondary-adolescent funk, and they vie with comic and occasionally life-threatening ferocity for the affections of an elementary school teacher.
In The Royal Tenenbaums, the characters' eccentricities were mostly surface, with an internal anomie that was partly the point, and partly just dull. In Rushmore, the eccentricity dramatizes the typical adolescent desire to borrow an identitity through symbols -- a school, a band, fashion; the heart lies in the traversing the path from the hero-worship to relationship.
Like the Tenenbaums, the psychological trajectory involves a main character who starts as a chronic liar and becomes just a little bit more honest. Rushmore's Max doesn't give up his wacky grand schemes, but is able to assimilate just a bit to reality; he admits that his dad is a barber, not a neurosurgeon, he dates a classmate who's a fellow geek, he gets passing grades in public school.
The film has many great scenes; the crew breaking ground for an aquarium, above the protests of the baseball coach; a highschool play set in vietnam, with potted palms and explosions with dynamite; the main character's preppy sidekick, having come to apologize, sitting in Max's dad's barber chair; Bill Murray, watching his wife flirt with a party guest, tossing golfballs into a pool.
For peterme: I really liked the move; and now understand why Jette would say good things about Wes Anderson.
The emotional punch of satire depends on participation in the culture; Jon Stewart telling the Crossfire goons "you're hurting us" was shocking and scathingly funny.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie, Bunuel skewers the social conventions of the postwar French elite; the genteel obsessions with food, the correct way to serve alcohol, polite table manners, formal dress for dining with friends at home. Behind the politeness there is adultery, drug-dealing, murder, and political oppression; and a dream life where fear, violence, torture and death break through the surface.
The humor and shock of Discrete Charm can be appreciated but not quite felt. At times, the satire needs to be deciphered like Moliere and Chaucer. The class satire in particular needs footnotes. A bishop is invited to dinner, though he has signed on as a gardener; military officers are part of the club; the driver and maid are the subject of condescension. I'm surely missing the nuances.
I rented Discreet Charm for remedial film reference. In the making-of-Tenenbaums DVD extra with Wes Anderson, the director called on Luis Bunuel for inspiration with some difficult scene.
From Bunuel, perhaps, Anderson inherits the intertwingling of the bizarre and ordinary. Perhaps Anderson is trying to borrow Bunuel's matter-of-fact tone with the bizarre. Bunuel acheives deadpan, Anderson's tone is sometimes just dead.
The heart of both films is psychological. Anderson's therapeutic themes are angst, anomie, and emotional dishonesty. Bunuel is sincerely Freudian -- ordinary life hides a vivid dreamworld of sex, violence, and death.
I appreciated Discreet Charm, and really enjoyed the 90-minute biography of the filmmaker on the Criterion DVD. The biography interviews Salvador Dali and other contemporaries of Bunuel's avant-garde youth and actors who played in the various films over 50 years. There's footage of Bunuel, Dali, Lorca and crew being young, hip and beautiful.
The repressive cause and high cost of avant garde rebellion is shown in pictures; the theater showing L'Age D'Or that was bombed by right-wing militants; a contemporary shot (I think) of the friends reacting to Lorca's murder by Nationalist soldiers at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War; the church hierarchy giving a Nazi salute; friends who put Bunuel up at their house when he couldn't get a job in the US because of the Hollywood blacklist.
Bunuel's friends and colleagues tell fond stories of roguish humor and strict personal habits; the atheists's attraction to religious ceremonies and priests. The bio is rather hagiographical, leaving out the dirty laundry about cruelty to his wife, drinking, the feud with Dali.
The bio gives context to Bunuel's old-fashioned avant garde esthetic. These days, the idea of shock on film travels across a wide cultural gulf. When Janet Jackson bares a breast on TV, many are shocked, and just as many wonder what the fuss is about. In college film class, Bunuel's work is standard text in college film class, and "transgressive" is a conventional compliment. The horrifying images of Bunuel's early work are the subject of fond father-son conversation in blue-state America. Shocking images in grossout comedies and horror movies are mainstream commercial products.
If I had the time, it would be fascinating to look up the reactions to "Discreet Charm" in 1972. Did people see an old radical domesticated into satire? Were the scenes of marital nookie in the bushes and decorous adultery considered titillating? Were the bloodied ghosts considered chilling or tame? It was a popular movie at the time -- what did people like about it then?
In the Wes Anderson interview in The Royal Tenenbaums, the director talked about how he storyboards the movie down to the last minute detail of decor, but he's always surprised by the way that actors bring the story to life. That comment explains the affect of the Royal Tenenbaums. I'd want to watch it again to catch the the fabulous dollhouse details of the 1970s/80s Chas Adams house, with a family of eccentric ex-prodigies gone to seed. And to catch the subtleties as Gene Hackman plays an aging scoundrel trying to worm his way back into the affections of his alienated family. I just love how he's habitually manipulative, nasty, and mean; and how he fumbles awkwardly with a new resolution to occasionally tell the truth.
But the map and the territory don't quite mesh. The characters inhabiting the eccentric character definitions -- Gwyneth Paltrow's repressed and secretive failed playwright; Luke Wilson's despairing washed-up tennis pro enact the border between anomie and caricature.
Reviews of the movie make a lot of the superficial eccentricity of the set and the mannerisms of the characters. Each character has his or her own shtick; the playwright has a wooden finger; the envious next-door-neighbor pop-western novelist wears fashion cowboy gear and wanders in a chemically-fueled dreamworld.
But the heart of the movie is simpler, more mundane, and more sentimental. Children, raised by a remote mother and absent father, create their own fantasy worlds, and then have to live in them. They confront each other as adults, and struggle with reconciliation and forgiveness. At heart, it's about the imaginary worlds built in the carpeted dens of the lonely children of divorced parents. At heart, it's a therapist's office fable.
The morning after I saw Slacker, I overheard a couple of coffee-shop customers swapping anecdotes about automotive repo jobs. Preachers, apparently, are particularly self-righteous about avoiding bills. One local dealership is trying to improve the quality of its credit portfolio by making the salesmen responsible for reposessing cars from their own delinquent customers.
As a particpant and observer of Austin's cafe culture, I expected Slacker to be a touchstone to Austin's cafe culture, and so it was. The pickup conversation with the dogged conspiracy theorist, off-kilter petty scams, windy pop-culture critiques, convoluted romantic and roommate drama, each vignette unfolds after the other, in desultory succession.
Immediately after I watched the movie, I wasn't sure how much I liked it. At the end of each scene, the camera follows a new person off to another weird tangent; without plot and character development, jolts of recognition and amusement war with ambient boredom. The film improves with recollection and comparison.
Clerks built on the low-budget, indy cred of Slacker. The setting is North Jersey, the anomie is post-highschool rather than post-college. Wierd misadventures afflict the convenience store clerks; a rabid anti-smoking advocate riles up customers coming in to feed their habit; a streethockey game is rescheduled to the store's roof during business hours. Several of the anecdotes are truly funny, other scenes may have been funnier in brainstorming than onscreen, like the customer who obsessively checks for the perfect egg.
Despite the similar low budget, anedotal plot, and slacker characters, Clerks is a more conservative, wannabe Hollywood movie. Unlike Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith cobbles together a plot, tacks on a love interest - Dante, the antihero schlemiel clerk, has an affectionate, go-getter girlfriend but pines for a dramatic and inconstant ex. Smith adds a pop-psych denoument when Dante explains to his best friend the childhood origins of his pathologically passive attitude toward life. The Clerks have opportunities but lack get-up-and-go; there aren't any opportunities for liberal arts grads in recessionary early 90s Austin.
High Fidelity is the slacker film turned into a sitcom, but I liked it best anyway. The John Cusack character is the owner of a small, starving-artist-snobby vintage record store in Chicago. His music geek clerks -- Jack Black's customer-hostile connoiseur and Todd Louiso's adorable nebbish steal the show. Over the course of the movie, the characters learn to transcend slackerdom; Cusack learns that his love life is stuck on repeat breakup because he acts like a jerk; the clerks grow beyond roles as passive critics, becoming actors in love and music.
It would take a Chicago person to explain whether and how the film captures Chicago like Slacker captures the windy aimlessness of Austin cafe culture and Clerks gets the gritty ambition of working class North Jersey. I suspect that it doesn't. Translated from Nick Hornsby's London novel, some of the social types don't ring quite right; the skater punks would probably be better as London working class; the egocentric high-chic girlfriend and would probably be better as British bohemian upper class.
Directed by veteran English-gone-Hollywood director Stephen Frears, the movie is more polished and more conventional than the other two slacker films. The movie tells the story of the sentimental education of geeky guys lightly and well. The retail and romantic vignettes are funny, the emotional tenor is wry and affecting.
In the week of a high-stakes election, the comedy of early 90s anomie seems far away.
Napoleon Dynamite is a "revenge of the nerds" movie that tries to have it both ways.
The main character is an oddball loner in a small-town, Idaho highschool. He wears weird clothes, draws fantasy/sci-fi sketches, plays tether volleyball by himself, stuffs leftover lunch tater tots in his cargo pants, and is tortured by the school jocks and mocked by the popular girls. When the camera visits his house, where his unemployed 30-year old older brother spends hours in pre-internet chatrooms and his uncle yearns to relive his days of almost-highschool-football stardom, you know there's no way out.
The film spends most of its meandering plot inviting the audience to at Napoleon, his loser family, his awkward, fresh-from Mexico friend Pedro, and the unprosperous, uncool ambience of small-town Idaho.
Then, toward the end, the movie evolves into a "follow your dreams" fairy tale. The ideosyncratic loners find each other, and become school heroes.
The audience gets to make fun of the nerds and small-town losers through most of the movie, and then bask in the myth of individualist triumph at the end.
In the genre of misfit triumph, I preferred Muriel's Wedding -- which was simultaneously sweeter and darker. The film shows the awkwardness of the misfit main character and her disfunctional family all the way through, and the triumph is partial, since the main character has internalized the values of her oppressors.
Watched Adaptation over the holidays with the brother and sister-in-law in New Jersey. I enjoyed Nicholas Cage's acting tour de force, playing an angst-ridden, intellectual, original screen-writer, and his cheerful, confident, cliche-loving twin brother, with similar mannerisms and different personalities.
I was entertained by the dogged resistance to making a movie without hollywood plot cliches -- sex, drugs, chase scenes, personal revelation -- and eventual surrender to a short, devastating parody of hollywood style.
The film even plays games with emotional trajectory; there's one red herring, the striving of the New Yorker writer and screen-writer to "follow their bliss"; and the emotional moral the movie chooses; to "be confident, despite critics." The film could have easily swapped themes and worked as well; it's a critique of the tacked on "moral of the story" chosen from at random from the cliches of therapeutic culture.
It's either a measure of a small bit of heart in the movie, despite overall cynicism; or personal vulnerability, but I resonated with the intellectual snobbery toward his sincere and middlebrow brother that the main character has to unlearn.
Ultimately, though, as Judith comments, the film-school cleverness isn't as smart as it thinks it is. A film-school student watches oodles of movies, realizes that there are no new stories left, and that the industry uses golden chains to tie film-makers to sentimental and dramatic cliches.
Shakespeare had that problem -- the groundlings all wanted fight scenes; comedies have a happy ending; tragedies end with blood on the stage. Homer presumably had that problem -- there were hundreds of years of story-telling; he had to get the audience to listen to him, and somehow do something new.
On Fellowship and Two Towers by Renee Perlmutter via Dorothea Salo.
Two interesting points about divergence from the books:
The book is overflowing with honor; the relevant scenes in the movie were exchanged with something else. In the book, Eomer makes his decision despite "the letter of the law", based on his judgement of Aragorn; Faramir does not hesitate for a second, faced with the temptation of the ring; Aragorn stays loyal to Arwen throughout the books - however tempted he is by Eowyn, he does not flirt with her, hug her, or give her false hope. And Merry and Pippin's resistance and courage...Gimli... the Ents.. all gone comic relief. Comic relief, a more comprehensible fare than honor, for how can persons choose the righteous cause unless they are persuaded or threatened or exiled, unless they have no other choice? They cannot, according to TT the movie. But we, who love the Indo-European epic, may know otherwise.
"It has SEXY ELVES. Elves are not supposed to be sexy. Magnificent, blindingly beautiful, frightening maybe; but not sexy."
Not to mention this priceless cartoon.
According to the New York Times, Viggo Mortenson, who plays Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, wore a "No Blood for Oil" t-shirt on the Charlie Rose talk show to make it clear that the movie wasn't US pro-war propaganda.
When I watched the movie, I did think about the danger of portraying the enemy as absolute evil at a time when our government is using the meme - er, bluntly, and portraying enemy armies as zombies when we have technology that removes soldiers far from the act of killing.
I hesitated to post this, since the political interpretations are more boring than the movie. The movie is fun as mythic fantasy; the idea of watching another movie in the series next time this year sounds promising at a time when the year ahead looks uncertain.
Saw the Two Towers yesterday, and enjoyed it a lot.
Good
Not as good: