I planned to outline and put together a comprehensive and long review of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey; however, it isn’t going to happen. Too damn busy with other things. So what follows are some short(-ish) and haphazard observations about the film.
Two things to get out of the way first:
1. I consider Tolkien’s The Hobbit one of the most influential books on my development as a reader. My father (a fantasy and SF guy) read it to me when I was 6-7; and I read it myself at 8 (and again a few years later, and again, and a few more times adding up to 7 or 8 total). Having reread it last month, however, I have few romantic, nostalgic illusions about it overall. It is, in a number of ways, a flawed book, and it doesn’t engage me anywhere near as much as an adult as it did when I was much younger. I’m still a fan, though. I would venture that those who grew up as kids loving the Harry Potter books (which I read the first 3 installments of before deciding not to go further) will feel similarly rereading those books ten or twenty years down the road.
2. What is below the cut will contain so-called spoilers of the film and allof the novel (not just the section the film covers).
The initial trailer for the film adaptation (and I use this term loosely) of Max Brooks’ 2006 novel World War Z premiered last week. I’ll get to my take on it in a minute, but the most noticeable and interesting thing about the trailer’s release was the amount of negative backlash toward it from fans of the book. From what I saw on twitter, comments on the trailer’s youtube, and elsewhere, the level of discontent from fans was (is?) at levels I think of as usually reserved for older, or at least more, I dunno, “canonical” books and characters (Beowulf and certain adaptations of Alan Moore come immediately to mind). Not that some genre fans don’t get all uppity about even the slightest changes made when their beloved, recent texts are translated to film, and often understandably so, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the level of ongoing hatred toward a film that, to be honest, looks like it could be quite good.
As someone who spends a lot of time reading and thinking about science fiction, post-apocalyptic stories, horror, and the like, and who is a fan of said genres, I understand being nitpicky about changes made and pointing out why they make sense or don’t. I am also a huge fan of Brooks’ novel, and have taught it in a college Intro to Fiction course with great success. I’m sympathetic to gripes about changes, but the people condemning the film entirely are going too far in a way that makes them look like foolish Star Wars dorks. Here’s why: There’s absolutely NO WAY you could create a faithful film adaptation of this book (as Arleigh over at Through the Shattered Lens rightly notes, this faithful version would need to be done as a serial on [cable] TV). It’s just not possible. Additionally, since the film began production and info about it started being leaked, fans of the novel who were paying attention have known about certain changes and should probably be resigned to a very different story than the one they loved.
So, to my mind, the bulk of loudmouth, purist fans trashing a film they haven’t seen are engaging in a kind self-important rhetoric without any real function beyond proving that they read it first and are “better” genre fans than those who are willing to say they’ll see the film with an open mind and may even like it. They posture that they won’t even watch it but will spend hours online telling everyone else why it will be so awful. They’re kind of like the kid back in school who knew everything about Star Wars or Harry Potter or whatever and who lived for being a genre pedant who talked down to you and ruined it for everyone else. Such behavior is reactionary and dumb and fundamentally anti-fun.
That said, I would argue that the film version of World War Z, so far as the trailer lets on,does deviate significantly enough from the novel that it would be right, or at least in better faith, to retitle it something else with a sub-title explaining “inspired by Max Brooks’ World War Z” (an argument I’d also make, though more emphatically, for the poorly titled, Will Smith vehicle I am Legend). Or, even better, let it slip into more fictional territory and say: “Based on the true accounts of the zombie war as told in Max Brooks’ World War Z.” To nitpick a bit, the title actually was already apparently changed to omit the subtitle “An Oral History of the Zombie War.” And I’m actually surprised that Brooks didn’t push for something like this given that the entire structure of the storytelling (ie, the multivocal, Studs Terkel-inspired, interview format) seems to have been replaced or sidelined in favor of a pretty standard action, hero’s p.o.v. format. That and retaining the title as “new” for the possibility of doing it in the novel’s style via a serialized, episodic TV format down the road. But I guess WWZ is a catchy title, so I won’t let this usage ruin my potential for enjoying the film they are actually making.
So, here’s the trailer. A few thoughts on it vis-a-vis the novel after the cut:
The always engaging blogger known as trashfilmguru has spent way too much a lot of time thinking about what would make for a great post-Christopher Nolan incarnation of Batman on film. These musings are, at the moment, 10 posts long. I have no idea where he(?) finds the time.
While I haven’t finished the entire series, and I suspect there will be some points where I’ll disagree, I highly recommend any Batman fans out there check these posts out. They’re smart and the author is well-read on the world’s greatest detective.
I had an awesome streak of reading excellent books and seeing pretty good films for a couple months. Which is, in part, why the last few weeks have been pretty disappointing in these same departments. Each of the following are things I had high hopes for but didn’t end up feeling very satisfied with, written up pretty briefly and without major plot spoilers.
Among Others – Jo Walton
This book has won or been nominated for a ton of major fantasy and science fiction awards, and I’ve seen a lot of glowing reviews online. I went in pretty much blind, assuming by the hype that it would be, at least, something I’d feel I should have read. After finishing it, however, I have to say I’m pretty unimpressed and found it mostly forgettable and mediocre.
Among Others is told from the first-person, diary-style point-of-view of Morwenna (Mor), a Welsh teenager who sees fairies and is convinced in the reality of magic. Mor also happens to be disabled, which seems to be a thing in YA lit recently (I don’t have anything insightful to add on this, but I’m sure it is worth thinking about). The novel uses the frame of the boarding house story and focuses on typical teenage themes, albeit in the framework of a world with hidden magic going on (from the protagonist’s p.o.v. anyway).
This is too brief for an actual posting, but I’m headed out for a camping excursion in the morning and need to rep this trailer now or I’d never get back to it.
I just saw the trailer for the new Judge Dredd film. It looks 1000 times better than that travesty/crapfest with Stallone starring as Dredd. Dredd is one of the most iconic characters of 80s comics/science fiction, but he is also problematic as many “heroes” of that era are. This seems to capture that and the dystopian setting of 2000 AD . . . and Karl Urban is well-cast. I am excited; this is a great year for comic book movies.
Play this in the background, then watch this trailer on mute for maximum effect:
The imperatives of blockbuster action films and the composition of The Avengers’ team make for odd bedfellows
Hawkeye wouldn’t stand a chance if Hulk smash
Almost a month after everyone else, I finally got around to seeing Joss Whedon’s The Avengers this past weekend. I was impressed. Though I’m certainly not an Avengers super-fan and have only read a few Avengers team comics, I felt Whedon does a great job doing justice to what I know of the source material and character continuity while still creating a compelling action film. I initially worried a bit about Loki as the villain falling flat, but Tom Hiddleston’s acting and Whedon’s writing/direction pulled it off much better than I expected. One thing that stuck out as a weakness, however, was the make up of the team that Whedon has to work with: the pairing of superhuman heroes with exceptional humans who happen to be at the top of the mere-mortal scale of physical ability. This comes through most clearly in the final, climactic battle scenes, which are mostly thrilling but had me feeling I was actually consciously suspending my disbelief.
Trailer for Baz Luhrman’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby:
Admittedly, I’m not in the group who thinks the novel is amazing. It’s a solid book. I enjoyed reading it each time. And it is certainly important in the way it depicts the era. Maybe it’s that I tend to like liking characters too much, which doesn’t mean I identify with them or that they are “good,” but that they are interesting or compelling or novel or something. None of them in this novel really speak to me in that way. I’ve never been fully able to explain why.
I am, however, of the belief that I might love a film version with the right actors and direction. This trailer seems like that very well might be the case. DiCaprio may be an excellent, compelling Gatsby. Carey Mulligan, despite being British, will likely make a great Daisy. The one that stands out as a, um, probably not is Peter Parker Tobey McGuire as Nick Carraway. Like Daniel Radcliffe and Elijah Wood, this young man brings the baggage of a major, memorable, and recent role with him. Will we be able to forget that he’s Spiderman? We’ll see. I’m hopeful and didn’t love Raimi’s emo-Spiderman all that much anyway.
The sets look amazing. Capturing the decadent frivolity of the era perfectly. A+
And I guess 3D must actually be the thing every Hollywood studio will be doing now, because I can’t imagine why one would film a classic novel adaptation like this in it otherwise. I guess car scenes sort of call for it. I guess. I’ve not seen anything in 3D where I was convinced going out that the 3D had improved my viewing experience. Seemed like a gimmick.
The one thing I found distracting in the trailer was the music. I have a low tolerance for anachronisms of this sort. The film better not be full of that kind of thing. Period music (whether diagetic or non-) would be great, and a score that doesn’t incorporate modern, moody pop/rock/etc., please.
A friend recently proposed an interesting exercise in hypothetical course design where one must select a single American novel for each decade of the 20th century to create a teachable arc for the century (and justify said choices). Given my own interest in genre, I figured I’d adopt/adapt it for utopian/dystopian fiction (dropping the “American” requirement) to see what kind of survey of the genre I might teach (and what works I’d be willing to drop per only having one choice per decade). The difficult part about conceptualizing this as an actual course is there is no way I would be able to teach this without starting with More’s Utopia and some other relevant earlier texts (Campanella? Bellamy and Morris? Wells? etc.) or doing a bunch of work up front introducing literary utopias via describing those works that lead up to what is really the dystopian turn in the genre that takes place at the beginning of the 20th century. Not that I couldn’t do the latter, but I’d much rather have students at least read More to begin.
That problem aside, I’ve still tried to follow a structure that makes sense for how an actual course might play out: works build on previously read works to allow for connections to be made, I begin with shorter texts rather than hitting students with something big and hard to start, and finish with less time-intensive texts so that students in the midst of final papers and finals prep would hopefully still make time for them.
UPDATE: Apparently the studio didn’t like people seeing Ian Joyner’s concept art that they didn’t use. His gallery of the images now reads: “We had a request from the studio to not show this work at this time. I will update this page if/when things change.” Given that the io9 article has had over 33K views, and the art is still there for viewing/fuskering [update 5/26: io9 article now deleted] and isn’t going to just disappear from the internet, I’m not sure what point they are making besides strong-arming an artist. Chalk it up as another incident that shows how out of touch with reality Hollywood is.
Original post from before the art was taken down:
Unused Hunger Games concept art would have made the final arena scenes better
In my review of The Hunger Games film, I wrote that I was a bit disappointed with the sanitization of, and seemingly unnecessary changes to, the end scenes in the arena. The menacing yet generic look of the canine muttations in the movie was an especially disappointing shift from the book for me because it removes an element of how nasty in terms of psychological warfare the Capitol is, and also how technologically sophisticated. So, I’m even more disappointed to find (via io9) that the original film artwork actually incorporated the dead tribute look in pretty awesome fashion. Here’s a few pics of Ian Joyner’s concept art for the film.
Because what the internet needs is another commentary on the film adaptation of The Hunger Games . . .
Going into the release, I quickly reread the first book (for the fourth time) so that I could more easily be pedantic and nitpicky about how they adapted the film, what they chose to play up or omit, and how well it worked as a representation of the overall feel and main themes of the book. Most of the time this kind of thing leads to fannish and annoying pointing out of differences as if trying to show off what a smart, super-fan one is, but I’m going to try to stick to things that actually make a difference in overall tone.
As a whole, my take was that the films was “good but not great” for reasons I’ll explain in a second, and I’m sticking to that even if it makes me a killjoy for those who have wholly embraced it as everything awesome is supposed to be (Scott Tobias’ review at The AV Club is a pretty close mirror to my own thoughts . . . if I weren’t going to itemize and explain every detail I though worth considering). As for the latter folks swept up in the hype, which seems to be far too much of the internet, witness, for example, the simplistic, uncritical accolades from “film critic” Margot McGowan at SF Gate. McGowan’s absurd “review” is narrow in scope and merely lauds the film for not breaking the from those elements that allow for a feminist reading of the book (which is a dubious position for many reasons that other, more capable folks have pointed out). Not that it isn’t a reasonable point to care that Katniss isn’t sexed-up in the film, but in the book that concern is primarily and textually Katniss’ . . . transferred over to the reader via her inner monologue. And the ultimate choice on whether or not to go this route in presenting her is Cinna’s, which he decidedly goes against. Further, concerns McGowan raises about gender equality (in numbers of tributes? seriously?) are patently absurd, as is the ladies working together to save each other angle she generates. The film is loyal to the book on these counts, which isn’t the same as it being “awesome,” which implies levels of both loyalty and creative changes to the source material that still capture the spirit of the novel and enthrall the audience.
[major spoilers follow]
Let me start with the things the film did pretty good or exceptionally well:
two men enter . . . 
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