And then suddenly I did find Dead Alive

I think I have now made three mentions on this blog how I did not expect to be able to get my hands on Peter Jackson's 1992 film Dead Alive during October to watch as part of horror comedy month, given its total absence from streaming services, rental outlets, and even Internet Archive, the free internet library I have recently discovered where you can find all kinds of lost causes. (My first opportunity to rewatch Dominik Moll's Lemming, a favorite from 2005 that I haven't been able to find anywhere since, will soon be courtesy of Internet Archive.)

But as has happened numerous times before, I forgot to check YouTube. And there it was.

I am not sure how strenuously the lawyers are protecting the copyright of things like Dead Alive. But I wonder if its total absence from everywhere else means that it is somehow in the public domain -- though that would make me think I'd find it everywhere rather than nowhere.

In any case, I did finally harpoon my white whale for October, the movie I felt was most likely to fulfill exactly what I'm going for by watching horror comedies this month.

That assumption could not have been more correct.

Before I get into the discussion of the film proper, I do want to discuss its title. As I was watching and the title Dead Alive flashed up on the screen, I felt certain that this was confirmation of its "true" title. Just now when I checked on Wikipedia, I realized that this was never the proper basis for any confirmation, because it depended on whether an American version was uploaded to YouTube or a Kiwi version. In New Zealand (and presumably everywhere else other than North America), this film is called Braindead, so that's undoubtedly how Jackson thinks of it. Logically, I should do the same.

Why am I not? I guess because it is a movie I have been at least distantly aware of since it first came out, when I was still living in America for another 20 years, and when every reference to it would have been as Dead Alive. It's like how I will always list Natalie Portman's film debut as The Professional even though I know it was called Leon in the director's home country of France. To be clear, if an Australian film were released today and given a new name for the U.S. market, I'd certainly go with the Australian name, because I would have encountered that first. I don't think there can be a hard and fast rule on this, so you just have to go with your gut on a case-by-case basis. And part of it is that I just like the title Dead Alive better.

However, to honor Jackson, I will also include a Braindead poster, then will forever afterward use the title Dead Alive.

Dead Alive starts out fairly tamely, although I should acknowledge that a man's hand and arm do get cut off in the opening scene. The more fascinating thing about this opening scene, if we are considering Jackson's entire career, is that it takes place on Skull Island -- you know, the home of King Kong. Given that this was still deep within Jackson's DIY phase, and only his third feature overall, it's hard to imagine his expensive and lavish King Kong remake was only 13 years off -- not to mention that he'd be making his first Lord of the Rings only nine years later (and starting on it well before that). 

The central affliction in Dead Alive is passed by bites, and indeed a crew from New Zealand is bringing back a rare monkey from this island (not the oversized one who is its most famous occupant) to house in a zoo in Wellington. It's an ugly little bastard called a rat monkey. I didn't get this from the movie itself -- maybe I didn't hear it properly as I was still adjusting to the Kiwi accents -- but Wikipedia tells me that this creature was spawned from "the rape of tree monkeys by plague-carrying rats." I have some questions about the biological logistics of this but let's move on.

Anyway, this awful monkey -- the first great practical effects creature we are introduced to -- is given to grabbing and tearing off the appendages of monkeys in neighboring cages, an activity you'd think would be enough to get him isolated a safe distance from all other creatures if not entirely put down. He gets a bite into the arm of the domineering mother of our main character, Lionel (Timothy Balme), a neurotic man whose father was killed in a drowning incident when he was young. Lionel is in love with a Spanish Romani shopkeeper's daughter, Paquita (Diana Penalver), despite the objections of his smother mother.

It isn't long before she gets sick, before flaps of her skin begin peeling off and before she loses an ear into the soup she's eating one day at lunch. No worries, she just catatonically eats it again, spitting out the pearl earring.

What follows is an increasingly hilarious spreading of a zombie plague that includes all sorts of partial and complete decapitations, exposures of rib cages, vomiting up of guts, sprays of green goo, popping of eyeballs, severing of limbs, extracting of teeth with pliers, halvings of bodies, and funniest of all, a scene of a priest karate kicking a half dozen zombies all around a church cemetery. 

This is just an absolute gore-soaked, viscera-laden joy. The labor of love that is evident in every single frame of Dead Alive makes this, understandably, a favorite of horror fans everywhere. Coming 11 years after Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, this movie pays loving homage to the mother of all horror comedies at every turn. (Well, at least Evil Dead II was clearly defined as horror comedy.) I mention this only because I am hard-wired as a critic to make explicit connections between movies when I write my reviews. Dead Alive is its own thing and only owes its zany, raucous spirt to what Raimi and others put in motion. (Raimi, of course, has his own debts to George Romero.) 

I just looked them up, and Raimi is only two years older than Jackson. What a wee little pup Raimi was when he got started. It seems likely that the title Dead Alive was chosen specifically in the U.S. market to remind us of both Romero and Raimi, and if that's the case and it brought more eyeballs to see the eyeballs that pop out of their sockets in Dead Alive, then all the better.

One thing I love about it, that you don't get from those other two franchises, is the Kiwi sense of humor that courses through this movie. Although I think the scenario would be funny as presented in any language or with any cultural origins, there's something about the New Zealand line deliveries and these characters in general that makes it all the more so. Just imagine Taiki Waitit's sense of humor in a full-on zombie movie and you'll get what I'm talking about. (In fact, I reckon What We Do in the Shadows is kind of his own version of this.)

And the gore -- oh the gore! It's delightful. I don't think I'm one to giving audible reactions to the films I'm watching, but I couldn't get through Dead Alive without laughing and making vocal grimaces ("Ugh! Ohhh! My God!") at the places Jackson gleefully goes in this film. 

Lastly I should mention the one fully practical "human" character in the film, which is a zombie baby that was the result of the posthumous sexual relationship of a zombie nurse and a zombie priest. This is pretty much the movie's signature character, so if you see a single image from Dead Alive it's likely to involve this guy:

I think this might be the evil twin of Kuato in Total Recall.

Dead Alive is the kind of movie where if I knew you'd seen the movie, I'd double the length of this post and keep saying "Remember the part where ________? That was awesome." With credit to Chris Farley.

But since I don't know if you've seen it -- and since I know you can find it on YouTube -- maybe I'll leave it to you to make these wonderfully gruesome discoveries yourself. 

I'm afraid it may be all downhill from here in terms of horror comedy, but I've got one more full weekend to try to top Dead Alive before I probably settle in for some more conventional scares leading up to Halloween. 

New Zealand, the "new" home for horror comedy

For a pretty darn small film industry, New Zealand sure does produce a lot of horror comedy.

Having watched Housebound last night as a themed Friday the 13th viewing, I have now seen two Kiwi horror comedies from 2014 in the past six months. The other of course was What We Do in the Shadows, which I watched on the plane back from the U.S. in November. These might also be the two preeminent horror comedies, period, from 2014, though I'd have to think hard about other contenders before I arrived at that conclusion. (Also, What We Do in the Shadows is really more of a straight comedy with a horror backdrop than a movie that's actually trying to scare you.)

However, calling New Zealand the "new" home for horror comedy is not exactly accurate, either. Kiwi horror comedy dates back to the 1980s and the sensibilities of future auteur Peter Jackson.

Jackson started his career with the horror comedy Bad Taste in 1987, and continued making movies in that vein all the way through The Frighteners in 1996, after which he plunged himself into Middle Earth and other Hollywood blockbusters, and never looked back. Though I understand he is actually going to look back in the next stage of his career.

So horror comedy seems to be in New Zealand's cultural legacy. Jonathan King made the horror comedy Black Sheep in 2006, about a flock of bloodthirsty sheep, and he specifically credited Jackson's early movies as an influence on the film's slapstick style. There have been a few others that seem to fit the bill over the years, but none that I've seen.

Wait a minute, Vance. A handful of movies sprinkled over a country's entire history of making films is not enough to really posit a trend, is it?

Maybe not, but the number of horror comedies relative to the total number of films certainly suggests that Kiwis are predisposed to this type of movie, or at least feel perpetually indebted to Jackson for inspiring them. According to wikipedia's page on films made in New Zealand -- which is by no means exhaustive, since it does not even include Housebound -- only an average of about three movies per year were being made in New Zealand as recently as the turn of the century. Very quaint. And in 2002, one of those three movies was Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which has mostly foreign financing. Only in the past decade has New Zealand beefed itself up to between eight and ten movies per year ... but then as recently as two years ago, only two total films are listed -- and one of them is the second Hobbit film.

So to call New Zealand's film industry "fledgling" would still be quite accurate, which isn't such a surprise for a country of fewer than five million people (compared to Australia's 23 million). I think it's fair to say that horror comedy represents a disproportionate percentage of the country's output.

And they're pretty darn good at it. What We Do in the Shadows was perhaps my favorite comedy of 2014, though that isn't saying a lot as there were few comedies that really impressed me last year. Housebound isn't as consistently funny, though it did make me laugh out loud a half-dozen times. And it made up for that by genuinely scaring me on a couple occasions.

It's probably worth offering you a short synopsis of each to give you that extra little push to go see them. Both have delicious high concepts. What We Do in the Shadows invites a mockumentary crew into the Wellington mansion of a quartet of vampires who live together. They range in age from a sprightly couple hundred years old, and still suave, to an ancient Nosferatu type with gnarled claws and an ability to do little more than hiss. We get interviews with each, and the camera follows them around through their daily lives. It's as delightful and tonally perfect as it sounds. Housebound, on the other hand, takes place in a different type of mansion out in the country. Its protagonist is sent there for house arrest to live with her daffy mother after trying to rob an ATM. Her mother is convinced that the house is haunted, and she starts to believe the same after a series of unexplained events. They can't just leave the house, though -- the convict's ankle bracelet makes sure of that. It's already scheduled for a U.S. remake.

Both are worth your time, especially What We Do in the Shadows. And if you watch, perhaps you will help in some small way to boost New Zealand's meager output from three films per year to four.

And help ensure that there are plenty more great Kiwi horror comedies yet to come.

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.