Completism

The biggest chore on my 2014 to-do list was turning out to be The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Some of the movies I watch this time of year, I watch out of a sense of obligation, and the final Hobbit movie was seeming more like homework than most.

It's not that I'm down on this Hobbit series. Actually, 2012's An Unexpected Journey just missed my top ten, so enchanted was I by my return to Middle Earth. But I was less enchanted by The Desolation of Smaug, and then the general narrative about the Hobbit movies switched to a discussion of exhaustion. Whereas Tolkien lovers were thrilled with each new installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, they were now demonstrating weariness about the bloated and protracted Hobbit series. I can't help if some of that seeped into me. And then, when the reviews for Five Armies started coming in, even more of my enthusiasm was sapped. Especially when a colleague of mine at ReelGood listed the final Hobbit as one of his two worst movies of the year.

But I felt a duty to be completist on my theatrical viewing of these movies, all six of which I felt needed to be seen on a big screen. And instead of just trying to get the final one out of the way as quickly and painlessly as possible, I decided to super-size my viewing, so to speak, by returning to seeing it in 3D HFR. 

That's how I saw (and loved) An Unexpected Journey. Like most people, I thought the images looked a bit like they had been shot on video, but there was also a hyperreal quality to them that made them unique. Both as a financial decision and a means of contrast, I caught The Desolation of Smaug in 2D last year, and didn't like it as much. There was no way to know, of course, whether HFR would have made a big difference for me with the second Hobbit movie. The story should play the biggest role in determining how well a movie like this works for us, but unless you can somehow orchestrate two "first viewings" of the same movie, one in each format, you really don't know.

Still, I thought it made sense to stack the deck in my favor for #3, especially since I could see it on a discount Tuesday night and pay "only" $16 for the movie, including the $4 3D surcharge. I also figured this might be my last opportunity for a while to see a movie in this format. You'd have to think some other filmmaker is working on a project in HFR, but if they are, I haven't heard of it. 

And wouldn't you know it, I did like The Battle of the Five Armies a whole lot more than The Desolation of Smaug. 

HFR probably did play some role, but it would be hard to quantify it. Storywise, I felt this movie was a lot more streamlined than the previous one -- possibly even than the first one, though I like An Unexpected Journey a lot more. That's kind of the opposite of what people have been saying. The consensus seems to be that this movie is most representative of the bloat involved in expanding a 300-page book into more than seven hours of movies. However, I felt it was the most concentrated on one single goal, of any of the six Tolkien movies. Everything and everyone is focused on the thousands of tons of gold resting the belly of the Lonely Mountain, and they will fight to the death to get it.

Of course, my favorite sequence in the whole movie has nothing to do with any of that. Ingeniously, Peter Jackson tidily closes up the story of Smaug the dragon entirely in a pre-title sequence. Unleashed from his castle toward the city of Laketown at the end of the previous film, Smaug predictably lays waste to the city with just a few swooping passes and a few extended fiery exhales. This was shot thrillingly, and the HFR gave the whole thing the look of a real set, like you might see at Universal Studios. The buildings burning and the people scampering here and there made it seem like a real production, rather than a largely digital creation. And that seemed to intensify the danger significantly. Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) perched atop a flimsy tower, using his son's shoulder to steady the final arrow he has available to shoot at Smaug, gave the movie an immediate emotional intensity that I don't think it ever fully frittered away. Like a really great James Bond pre-credits sequence, it put me in a delirious state of anticipation for the rest of the movie. 

Which proceeds to focus on Smaug's prize ... who has the right to it, and what they will do to get it.

The HFR continued to deliver for me during the politicking leading up to the titular battle -- which includes a great descent-into-madness performance by Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield -- and through the final battle itself. That battle may not compare favorably with the epic battles in either The Two Towers or Return of the King, but it's the type of epic battle we have come to expect from Jackson's Middle Earth movies, and one that was absent from both of the previous Hobbit movies. On this front I welcomed it.  

The final smart decision, though, was to end the movie on the intimate scale of a one-on-one battle between Thorin and Azog, atop breaking ice no less. There's something about the quiet and setting of this battle that reminds me of the climax of Kill Bill Vol. 1. As such, the movie may actually be bookended by my two favorite scenes. 

Look, it may not be a great movie, but it is most assuredly a good movie, and I don't understand the people who think otherwise. Cumulative fatigue, I would guess, and a pre-wired inability to consider this movie on its own terms.

Looking back on all six of Jackson's Middle Earth movies, I note that the two series are kind of an inverse of each other, at least as far as I am concerned. Allow me to explain.

I got off to a rough start back in 2001 with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. I actively did not like it, feeling that it was overlong, that it was overly emotional and that it left off at an unsatisfying point. (Remember, this was back in the days when not a lot of movies were made with an absolute certainty that the sequels would also be made.) Since then, I have watched it again and grown to like it. Conversely, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was my favorite of the new series. I was immediately on board. 

The second movie in both series represented a radical change from my thoughts on the first. The Two Towers was what made me fall in love with The Lord of the Rings, establishing itself as what turned out to be both my favorite of the series, and my favorite overall of Jackson's Tolkien adaptations, I can now say for certain. The Two Towers also made me reconsider the first movie and view it in a more forgiving light. On the other hand, The Desolation of Smaug kind of made me fall out of love with the Hobbit series. I still liked the movie, but I probably give it more of a pass than it deserves because of my lingering affection for the first one.

The third movie in each series is my second favorite in that series. The big difference is how close it is to my favorite. Return of the King is a lot closer in quality to The Two Towers than The Battle of the Five Armies is to An Unexpected Journey, but even just writing about it now, I actually think I like Five Armies even more than I thought I did at the start of this piece.

Here are my rankings:

1) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

2) The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

3) The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

4) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

5) The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

6) The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

I do debate whether second viewings of An Unexpected Journey and The Return of the King would keep that order intact, or whether they would flip-flop. I think I accord An Unexpected Journey this level of respect in part because it was so, well, unexpected. The best picture winner is probably the better movie. So far, though, its daunting length has kept me from rewatching it. In fact, only the first two LOTR movies have gotten second viewings from me.

I titled this post "Completism," but part of me thinks that Jackson is not done with Middle Earth. If there are not other Tolkien stories to adapt (are there?), I wouldn't consider it beyond the realm of possibility for him to just write entirely new material himself. I guess that's kind of what he's been doing in fleshing out this latest trilogy.

But if he wants to use Gandalf, he better start on it soon. Ian McKellen can't keep playing this role forever. 

My verdict on 48 fps, and other Hobbit thoughts

So I did as planned last night: I went to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 48 fps.

I won't say 100% that I loved the technique. I'm still processing whether it looked too fake or too realistic. And whether each of those things might also be good things.

But I did love the movie. In terms of pure, simple enjoyment, I may actually have liked it better than two of the three Lord of the Rings movies.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers will likely be my favorite Tolkien movie no matter what comes with the next two Hobbit movies, but as an isolated adventure, I think it's very possible that I liked The Hobbit better than Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King.

Is that really possible? I'll have to think about it some more.

Of course, to call The Hobbit "isolated" is not accurate in any sense. The movie reminds us a number of times of the previous trilogy, not only with appearances by various familiar characters, but by the fact that the beginning involves the older Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) sitting down to write his memoirs in scenes that also feature Elijah Wood's Frodo. A keener eye might have picked this out, but I couldn't actually tell whether this older Bilbo is writing in a period before the events of the LOTR trilogy, or after.

Neither is it isolated in the sense that it's only the beginning of this new trilogy, and closes with a terrific amount of momentum toward the events of next December's The Desolation of Smaug. Because I was ready for it this time, the thing that initially bothered me about The Fellowship of the Ring (its open-endedness) did not bother me this time around -- it just whetted my appetite for the next film in the series. I've come to quite like Fellowship, but its initial impression on me was somewhat negative -- an impression that was retroactively rehabilitated by how much I loved The Two Towers. And though I also quite like and probably love Return of the King, it's the only one of those movies I haven't seen at least twice, and my lingering thoughts about it have started to focus more on its bloated length and numerous false endings. Still a brilliant film, but a brilliant film with an aftertaste.

Fortunately for me, the aftertaste this morning of The Hobbit is still quite good -- meaning that yes, maybe I really do like it second-best out of the four Jackson-Tolkien movies.

The most amazing thing is that I never felt the movie seemed intentionally elongated by filler in order to reach Jackson's standard epic length. Much has been made (including by me) about how it may have been unwise to stretch a 300-page novel into three movies, but the strains of that don't show in this first film. The pacing is very good -- I never felt it dragging. And the set pieces are simply awe-inspiring.

Another thing that was overturned? My idea that The Hobbit was an adventure without stakes. Having watched it, I'm now very invested in the dwarves' quest to retake the kingdom they lost to the dragon Smaug. It's plenty epic, and I can't wait to see what happens next.

Ah, but what about the 48 fps?

The fact that I haven't been eager to jump right into it should probably tell you two things: 1) I enjoyed the story enough that my impression of the format didn't hinder my appreciation of the movie, and 2) I'm still processing. In fact, am I actually procrastinating within the body of this post? Usually you procrastinate on starting the writing, not within the piece itself.

Okay.

My first reaction was that sinking feeling, that realization that indeed, it looks like I thought it was going to look, which was "not good." Even seeing the MGM lion roaring at the beginning in 48 fps filled me with a sense of wariness about a bad decision that could no longer be reversed.

But as I watched, I got used to it, and started to enjoy the sense of intense realism the format confers. I don't think I'd ever felt more like I was there in Middle Earth than I felt while watching this film. And here's the reason for that: Most cinema is more beautiful than real life. The 24 fps frame rate creates a sense of a moving painting, not quite realistic in one sense, but certainly aesthetically pleasing, which is why everyone loves it. Here, I felt like I was standing in that room with those characters, because they did look grubby and dingy and flawed. They looked tactile, like I could reach out and grab them.

The effect of this is not universally positive. We do go to the movies to see beautiful things, especially in the case of Jackson's inimitable production design. You could say that as much as a film tries to immerse us in its world, we are most comfortable being a little bit at arm's length. Well, 48 fps removes that arm's length. It draws us right in, and confronts us with whether this is really what we want. And some people definitely may not want to be that immersed.

While on the one hand I'm suggesting it's more realistic, there are also times when things look pretty fake. For example, during a couple set pieces where everything moved really quickly, and especially those shot at a great distance form the subject ("helicopter shots" being one of the DP's trademarks), the characters looked like little toy models moving at abnormal speeds. It's easy to see how you could be distracted by this, but I instead decided it was just part of the film's unique look.

I think you just need to be ready for it. You need to be prepared for the fact that the visuals of this movie don't hold your hand and tell you how pretty they are. They're pretty, alright, but the 48 fps technique tends to fixate on what makes them grungy rather than what makes them pretty.

In a weird way, the effect on the CGI creatures is to also make them seem a bit more realistic. If the idea created by The Hobbit is that you are standing there in the same room as a wizard, a Hobbit and a bunch of dwarves, then it's also that you are standing there with a troll, an Orc, and Gollum. And if you decide that the format makes it feel like these are actors on sets, something too realistic in a displeasing way, then it stands to reason that these fantastical creatures are sharing that same set with these actors. Which has the effect of making them seem more like actual elements that might "really exist."

Would I recommend that you go see it that way? I don't know, but that's in part because I don't know who "you" are. But when I got home from the movie, I told my wife that she may not want to see it in 48 fps. It's definitely an acquired taste, and I don't know if everyone will acquire it, at least not in time to have the experience of this particular film salvaged. But one of the reasons I was recommending she not see it that way is because I did like the movie enough not to have her experience of it ruined. I was proud to hear her say that it was going to be 48 fps or bust for her.

Okay, some other thoughts inspired by my viewing of The Hobbit, some of which may contain mild spoilers that I'll try my best to speak of in the broadest and most generic terms:

Every trailer I was trying to avoid seeing 

I had to laugh when I took my seat, because it was just in time to see three trailers that I was trying my best to avoid.

In fact, the three most talked about trailers in the previous couple weeks all appeared to me before The Hobbit, as I should have expected they might: Star Trek Into Darkness, Pacific Rim and Man of Steel.

Because I don't want to already be sick of images from these movies by the time I see them, I didn't go out of my way to find these trailers on the internet. Even when links were posted to online discussion groups I visit, I still didn't follow the links. All in good time, I figured.

Good time arrived last night. Oh well.

At least all three of those films look absolutely terrific.

Blinded by the light

One obstacle I feared I'd have while watching The Hobbit had to do not with the 48 fps, but with my 3D glasses themselves.

Very early on I noticed a small light in the upper right corner of the glasses, which threatened to drive me to distraction. I couldn't figure out the source of this light. It seemed like a reflection of some light source in the theater, but if that were the case, then it would disappear when I angled my head away from that light source. It didn't.

Fortunately, the light either went away or my eyes just got used to it, because pretty early on I stopped noticing it. Or maybe I just got wrapped up in the movie.

One thing I'm now wondering: Do some of these more high-tech 3D glasses actually have a light in them, as part of the ongoing effort to combat complaints that viewers find 3D movies too dark? It would seem foolish to create an artificial internal light source, if it has the side effect of distracting the viewer more than the darkness of the image distracts him/her. Plus, in this case it would be completely useless, because the whole point of 48 fps is to remove the darkness factor that bothers people so much.

I guess I could google it and find out.

Gandalf ex Machina, Deus ex Hawkina

I recently re-watched Adaptation, in which one of screenwriting guru Robert McKee's key pieces of advice to his audience of wannabe screenwriters is to never use a deus ex machina. You know, that moment in a movie when the hero is saved by something entirely external to his journey, that doesn't spring naturally from the conditions that have been put in place. The example in Adaptation itself is when John LaRoche is attacked by the alligator, but the example I always think of is during one of the endings of Return of the King, when Frodo and Sam are saved from certain death in the Mordor lava flow when giant birds fly in to rescue them.

This being Tolkien, I should not have been surprised to see numerous other instances of deus ex machina in this film.

Most of them are carried out by Gandalf. In fact, I counted three and possibly four instances where Gandalf's 11th hour involvement in a particular skirmish was the only thing separating our heroes from defeat. Oddly, though, Gandalf also displays a fair amount of human frailty in these affairs, often urging his compatriots to "Run!!" in no uncertain terms. One wonders why he can't just magic his way out of any situation, but apparently, he can't. Perhaps it has something to do with getting them to fend for themselves.

One other instance, though, involves possibly the very same birds that we saw at the end of Return of the King, which I will call hawks for the purpose of the play on words above. When in doubt, call in the hawks.

And speaking of things that fly ...

Flight of Conchords' Bret McKenzie is in this movie. I didn't note where or when, but I saw his name in the credits.

Not too surprising, since he's a Kiwi and this movie was shot in New Zealand. But I still find it funny.

I just looked it up in Google Images. He's an elf. I guess I didn't recognize him with the long straight hair.

That can't be his real name

And speaking of the end credits, I noticed that the makeup and hair credit went to a guy named Peter Swords King.

Really?

Not really. I just looked him up on IMDB, and he's credited there as Peter King. The "Swords" must have been added as some kind of inside joke. Still, having the name "King" alone makes him a pretty funny fit for this series of films.

The multi-talented Andy Serkis

I may have found Serkis' work as Gollum even more impressive here than in the other films, but in reality, it's probably exactly the same amount of impressive. In all three films he gets incredibly juicy emotions to act out, and this one is no exception.

But that's not what I'm talking about when I say "multi-talented."

Another thing I noticed in the credits: Serkis was also credited as "second unit director," a title I now see he holds for all three films (which makes sense).

I guess if Gollum's only going to be in about 20 minutes of the movie, might as well have Serkis do something else. It's just impressive that he can also do this job effectively.

Okay, I'm going to shut up now

______________

(That blank line represents me saying nothing.)

Forty-eight reasons to see The Hobbit

It seems that nearly everyone has some angle of wariness related to The Hobbit.

A friend of mine phrased one of these angles of wariness very succinctly earlier this week on Facebook:

"Just bought our tickets for The Hobbit. I'm excited to see it (and the other movies), but I'm pretty unconvinced that you need 2 hours and 45 minutes to tell 1/3 of a 300-page novel."

I've also heard that the credits alone run for 16 minutes. So even though I usually like sitting through as many of the credits as time will allow, at least I know I can get out of there in 2:29 for this one, if need be.

However, my own greatest source of wariness about the movie has now become the biggest reason I'm interested in seeing it.

Yep, the infamous 48 frames per second projection rate.

I won't rehash the flogged-nearly-to-death discussion of the strengths (few?) and weaknesses (many?) of this gambit by Peter Jackson, but in case you don't know what I'm talking about at all: Almost every movie you've ever seen was shot at 24 frames per second. With twice as many frames per second, the image is far more crisp and there's less blurring. Most people don't notice the blurring of 24 fps, in part because it's been the standard practice throughout history. But 24 fps is part of the reason why some people don't like 3D -- they find the image darker, and it leaves them feeling queasy. The faster projection rate is supposed to fix those problems, but it has a side effect that some people hate and some people embrace: The images look hyper-real, to the extent that it sometimes makes them look cheap, like they were shot on video, or (as I have often referred to it) belong on some bad BBC show from the 1970s.

I'm wary about having my own experience of The Hobbit ruined if I find this technique distracting, as I always have in the past when my TV has been on a setting that mimics 48 fps (or actually uses 48 fps -- I don't pretend to understand all the technical details). But I've decided that I owe it to myself to see it this way, in 3D, for one simple reason:

How often do you go to the movies and see something new? I'm not talking about new in terms of plot, subject matter or narrative structure -- but something new in terms of technique?

Even if my viewing of The Hobbit is destined to be a failure, I want to expose myself to this new paradigm, which some people have said will be the future of how movies are made, and others say will go the way of the dodo bird once these three movies have come and gone. 

After all, wouldn't you have wanted to go see The Jazz Singer in the theater, if you had been there in 1927 when it came out? Wouldn't you have been so exhilarated by hearing Al Jolson's voice that you would have nearly wept? Or what about nine years before that (I'm just now learning this bit of trivia, mid-way through this paragraph, whose order I am nonetheless not going to restructure to be chronological), when a silent film called Cupid Angling was the first color feature? You could say the same thing about the first animated movie, the first 3D movie, even the first movie where you saw nudity, depending on how far you want to stretch the notion of what constitutes something truly "new." There was even a thing called Smell-O-Vision once. If I'd been around then, I would have been the first one in line. (It would have been the 1960 movie Scent of Mystery, the only film ever to use this obviously unsuccessful and impractical gimmick.)

I'm not saying The Hobbit is going to represent this kind of sea change, but I'm also not saying it isn't. And since all of the techniques listed above predate 1960, that just tells you how rare it is to get something truly "new" -- and therefore, how important it is, as serious film fans, to embrace our opportunities to experience these new things when we do get the chance.

In fact, in trying to find examples from my own life as a film fan, I'm forced to choose viewing experiences that contained far less revolutionary changes in what we experience with films. Unsurprisingly, most relate directly to visual effects. I'm thinking of the T-1000 in Terminator 2, with its unprecedented (to me) use of digital technology. I'm thinking of the first time I saw a Pixar movie, Toy Story; I was so impressed that I saw it again the next day. I'm thinking of the first movie I saw on an IMAX screen. I'm thinking of Avatar, which was clearly an evolutionary step forward in how realistic and immersive 3D can be.

What these viewings all have in common, though, is that the change I was witnessing was undoubtedly a positive thing. Even though Avatar left me a little disappointed overall, that's primarily because I couldn't separate my experience of its visuals from my experience of its story. A movie like The Hobbit threatens to make that separation all the harder to achieve, except this time it would probably the story that's good and the visuals that aren't so. 

Still, I'm not so in love with Middle Earth that I can't take this risk. Because another concern I have about The Hobbit is not just its bloated length, but the fact that it's a prequel to events that I think most people would argue are far more dramatic and have far greater stakes -- if only because there are certain characters you just know will survive. If you think Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf or Gollum might die in these movies, you obviously haven't seen the LOTR trilogy. And there are a half-dozen other characters who appear in these new films who also appear in the trilogy that comes later in Tokien's chronology. (Let's just hope they do a convincing job making the actors look younger, which is already an early problem I've noted with Ian McKellan.) When I watched the Rankin/Bass Hobbit from the 1970s, I always remember thinking it seemed pretty light and goofy -- and that wasn't just because of the animation style. Even back when I was a kid, I sensed the story's lack of dramatic weight. There's a reason Jackson started with Lord of the Rings and not this.

So I'm the perfect candidate to seek out my local 48 fps showing of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I'm not some Tolkien nerd who has only one chance for this film to make its first impression on me, and can't afford to blow it at the risk of my geek soul. And besides, the most interesting outcome for me might be to hate the 48 fps but still like the movie. As much as anything, I'm curious to see if there is a definite correlation between the way the movie looks and the impression it has on me as a piece of narrative art. It would be a similar experiment to making yourself watch Avatar for the first time on an iphone. Okay, better example of a spectacle whose story is actually a success: It would be like making yourself watch Titanic for the first time on an iphone. 

In a way, the verdict is already in on The Hobbit, anyway. Regardless of its fps, it isn't wowing critics in terms of its quality as a film, as it's been conspicuously absent from the year-end awards that Peter Jackson made his bitch the first time around. Most conspicuously, yesterday's Golden Globe nominations didn't feature a single mention of The Hobbit, at least in the major categories I perused. That's ouch-worthy.

But however you choose to consume it, here's hoping that you get something out of The Hobbit that reminds you even in some small way of the original trilogy, which I consider to be one of the great achievements in film history, even though I'm not a Tolkien nerd. We should be glad there's an artist out there with the vision and ambition to give these films such a lavish big-screen realization -- whether he launches a new cinematic paradigm or not.

A thing I'm starting to understand about The Hobbit, and my TV

I've been aware that Peter Jackson was shooting the (formerly two, now three) Hobbit movies at the higher rate of 48 frames per second (twice the normal 24).

Whenever I've heard that mentioned, I've kind of nodded along and thought "I guess I'll see what that looks like when the time comes."

On Wednesday night over at a friend's house, I learned what that looks like in the course of us talking about it. And now I worry I've been seeing what it looks like ever since we got our new TV.

You know how I've had such a hard time (in this post and in this post) discussing what I meant when I said that the picture looks "shitty" on many of our picture settings? I described it as "the Masterpiece Theatre effect." Essentially, this setting on my TV makes things look like they had been shot on home video with poor lighting. Other places I've heard it described as a "1970s soap opera" or "cheap reality TV." It's a picture setting on my TV that I avoid at all costs.

Yeah, that's what 48 FPS looks like.

Uh oh.

There's a reason Jackson's "great new innovation" has been controversial, and so far, poorly received. I didn't know that reason was that it made The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey look like one of the least expensive productions of all time, rather than one of the most. 

The increased frame rate -- which abandons the 24-frame paradigm we have known all our lives -- is supposed to be easier on your eyes, especially in the case of 3D. Less blurring, more clarity. But that also makes it look significantly less like a movie.

The weird thing about this frame rate is that it's a complicated sort of unpleasantness. At the same time that certain aspects of the picture look really crappy -- especially the lighting -- others are undeniably clearer and have higher definition. In fact, sometimes you feel like you are right there in the same room as the actors on the screen.

But that's not what most of us want out of a movie. We don't want to feel like we can reach through our TV screens and touch the actors. We want them to have an incredible sense of realism, sure, but we want that to be filtered through the pleasant sheen of 24 frames per second. It's probably the reason people tend to be so happy with BluRay, as opposed to certain kinds of HD. BluRay takes what you're intended to see it and promotes it to its greatest possible clarity, within the limitations of the way it was shot. That's a good thing. HD takes beautiful people and shows you the blemishes that keep their skin from being as beautiful as you have always perceived it to be. And that is not a good thing -- unless your only desire is to heckle them and take them down a peg.

I don't want my movies taken down a peg. I want them on that pedestal that confers them a certain beauty, even if the story elements they're depicting may be ugly.

I was asked recently in a discussion group on Facebook whether I would see The Hobbit in 48 FPS if given the opportunity.

I now know that the answer is no, and that I'm even worried whether it will look okay when projected at 24 FPS.