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.

The 1920s: Puppet emperors, racist talkies and very strong winds

Watching movies from the 1920s has made me realize just how short my attention span really is. In fact it's so short I

As part of my Decades series, in which I examine movies from a particular decade between the 1920s and the 1970s during a particular month, I watched three films from the 1920s during September -- the late 1920s, at that. But I couldn't get through any of them without taking a peek at my laptop -- and two of them were actually really good. (The third one is probably the one that film historians would praise, but I couldn't get into it.)

Looking at your laptop is about the worst thing you can do in a silent film. Since all of the plot information is being communicated visually, you can't just look away and keep listening. It's like trying to watch a foreign movie while you're eating dinner. It just doesn't work. You lose too much information while looking down to make sure your food is securely positioned atop your fork.

But that's a good indication of how much my attention drifted during these movies, and how slow I found their pace to be. I thought I could check an email, play a turn in Lexulous, and still have a pretty good idea what was going on, as long as I kept some of my attention on noticing when the dialogue cards came on the screen, so I'd be sure not to miss any written words. Well, this came back to bite me on the butt on at least one occasion. And without any further ado, let's get to that ...

Storm Over Asia (1928, Vsevolod Pudovkin). Watched: Wednesday, September 8th

Storm Over Asia was on my radar as a film recommended in the massive tome 1,001 Films To See Before You Die. My wife owns a version that I believe is a good ten years old, so it doesn't include the classics from this past decade. But it's a pretty good compendium of what came before. I actually started a project to go through this chronological book and record all the titles in a spreadsheet, to see which ones I had and hadn't seen, and to check them off when I'd seen them. I only got through about 1931, due in part to the fact that this is only about seventh or eighth among my movie projects, let alone other projects. But that meant that Storm Over Asia had entered my awareness, enough for me to throw it on my (now-defunct) Blockbuster queue.

And so when I knew I'd be watching movies from the 1920s, and scanned my queue for ideas, this one came up right away. I was also drawn in by the short length -- it was advertised at only 70 minutes -- as well as the knowledge that Russian cinema from the 1920s is generally considered to be great (the films of Sergei Eisenstein being the most obvious example). As a cherry on top, I loved the director's name: Vsevolod Pudovkin. Fun to say, if I'm even saying it correctly.

It only took about ten minutes for Storm Over Asia to totally alienate me. I started watching it after work on only my second day back following paternity leave, and suffice it to say, it just wasn't the right thing for my brain at that time. I needed something with a lot of laughs or a lot of explosions, and instead I got ... the sociopolitical wranglings of Russians, Mongols and Brits in the 1920s. The story of Storm Over Asia has something to do with a Mongolian fur trader who gets robbed of a fur at a marketplace, fights with a European capitalist and eventually becomes a Soviet partisan. Sometime after that, he's captured by the British, who discover an amulet on him that suggests he's a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. At which point they decide to install him as the puppet emperor for a puppet regime, which doesn't go very well.

However, what I know about Storm Over Asia, I know from wikipedia. When the movie failed to grab me at the start, and I started to wander over to check the baseball scores and other film blogs, I was quickly lost at sea, having missed numerous title cards and (by this point) important plot points. So about halfway through the movie, I read a synopsis on wikipedia and got (somewhat) oriented. But then a terrible thing happened that pretty much destroyed my resolve to do more than half-watch Storm Over Asia. When the story didn't seem to be wrapping up at around the hour mark, I paused the DVD to see that I still had over an hour remaining. That's right, the 70-minute version of Storm Over Asia was just one of its many prints. This print happened to be 130 minutes. Ugh.

To be clear, my negative appraisal of Storm Over Asia has everything to do with my failures as a viewer, both specifically at that time and generally, and not because it's a bad movie. In fact, I'm sure it is a quite good movie. It is certainly grand and ambitious, including breath-taking scenes of battle, and Tibetan ceremonies performed by real Tibetans. And the story, even if stretched out interminably, seems to be somewhat interesting. But my viewing circumstances were all wrong, and I just have to chalk this one up to a loss. I'm not going to sit through it again, so I get credit for watching but not appreciating Storm Over Asia.

The Jazz Singer (1927, Alan Crosland). Watched: Monday, September 13th

I'd say my experience with Storm Over Asia had something to do with my selection of The Jazz Singer as my next movie from the 1920s, except that I think it was already queued up and ready to ship before I watched Pudovkin's movie. However, the possibility of dialogue -- and a definitely shorter running time -- got me excited for The Jazz Singer as a change of pace from what had come before. Besides, the "first talkie" was something I had been meaning to see all my film-loving life.

I put "first talkie" in quotation marks because it is generally accepted that The Jazz Singer is credited with being something it actually isn't. Film scholars talk about how there were numerous previous experiments with synching up dialogue and action in movies, and that The Jazz Singer isn't actually a talkie from start to finish anyway -- it only includes a couple scenes in which the singing is occurring live, and Al Jolson's ad-libbing while singing "Blue Skies" to his character's mother is what we always think of as the first spoken dialogue in film. However, I will say that seeing him speak -- after the film had started out with dialogue cards -- was a rush even 80 years later, as I was easily able to put myself in the shoes of those who had never seen such a thing before. The abrupt return to silence afterward must have been an indelible moment for those audiences -- it was the moment they realized a new era had arrived, and that the reign of the pantomiming silent stars was coming to an end.

Aside from the film's obvious technical achievement, there were a couple other things that struck me:

1) I didn't realize it was such a ripoff of The Simpsons. That's a joke of course, but I had no idea before watching that the Simpsons where Rabbi Krustovsky disowns his son Herschel (otherwise known as Krusty the Clown) was an homage to this movie. Really, I had no idea what The Jazz Singer was about at all, except that it was remade as a Neil Diamond vehicle in the 1970s. So when the rabbi father of Jakie Rabinowitz disowns his jazz singing son, later redubbed Jack Robin, shouting (on a title card) "I HAVE NO SON!", I thought, "Wait a minute ..." and looked it up. It was funny to watch the movie with the Simpsons episode as a reference point, as it made it easier to relate to -- though it wouldn't have been hard to follow in the first place, because the story is simple and deliberate, and is broken up by a bunch of really charming musical numbers.

2) I had forgotten that it was a racially controversial film. In fact, I now realize why I had spent a lot of my life thing that Al Jolson was black: In the film's third act, he performs in blackface. (Not that anyone could really mistake a person in blackface for an actual African American, but the perception stuck with me based on information I mislearned at some point in the past). I'm not sure if blackface was a particularly controversial thing at the time, or whether it has been ascribed these unfortunate negative traits in retrospect, but having grown up as a person who thought that blackface was terribly insensitive, I naturally found these scenes a bit hard to watch. The good news is, there's nothing actually negative about black people in his wearing of the blackface -- my sense is that it's simply his character in the show he's performing, at a time when black performers were obviously not permitted on Broadway. It did make me wonder, though -- why are all the big cinematic firsts (Birth of a Nation being another) tainted by some kind of unfortunate racial politics? On the other hand, this film seemed to be sort of progressive as a mainstream Hollywood film -- not only is the main character Jewish, but he performs a role where he's black.

Overall, I enjoyed the story and found Jolson to be an incredibly charismatic performer -- which many other cinephiles have known for decades. I did take a couple peeks at my laptop, but only because I knew I'd be able to keep up.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928, Charles Reisner). Watched: Tuesday, September 28th

Wanting to keep the good variety of films going, I figured a trip (albeit brief) through the 1920s wouldn't be complete without catching a movie from the great Buster Keaton. I'm a bit more versed on Charlie Chaplin films from the era, and had only seen one Keaton film from start to finish: The General. Yet I had a memory of seeing highlight reels of Keaton's physical pratfalls and other stunts, and wanted to catch one of the films that might have some of the best ones. In fact, I happened across the very one I wanted without actually knowing it was the one I wanted.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. was available for immediate streaming on Netflix, and its name caught my attention for the similarity to the Mickey Mouse cartoon Steamboat Willie. It turns out, Steamboat Willie is, in fact, a sort of parody of Steamboat Bill, Jr. -- meaning that Steamboat Itchy (The Simpsons do like their 1920s parodies, don't they?) was a parody of them both.

However, Steamboat Bill, Jr. did not have as much to do with steamboats as I was expecting. Having seen The General, almost all of which takes place on or around the locomotive in question, I figured this Keaton movie would be intensely steamboat-centric. Not so. In fact, while it starts and finishes on the steamboat owned by the father of Keaton's clownish character (hence the "Jr." in the title), there's a lot in the middle that has little to do with that -- a trip to the haberdashery, a sequence trying to bust his father out of jail, and a crazy windstorm that knocks down nearly every building on the set.

And it was this crazy windstorm that I recognized as making up the majority of the Keaton highlight reel I saw. Even if you haven't seen Steamboat Bill, Jr., you are probably familiar with this sequence as well. Keaton starts in a hospital bed, where he has come after getting a conk on the head while trying to bust his dad out of jail. When the storm hits, it lifts the building from around Keaton, leaving only the beds and the floor boards. Snapping to attention, Keaton proceeds to run from building to building, dodging one building as it falls in front of him, another as it falls behind him, and even one -- and this is the scene I really remember -- as it falls on top of him. As a result of careful measuring and some basic understanding of physics, Keaton doesn't have to move an inch as the entire facade falls around him, because he's standing in the one spot where there's an open window. It seems like a dangerous stunt -- that set had to be heavy -- but they pull it off with what looks like ease. As numerous sets turn into so much crumpled paper around him, Keaton deftly dodges everything, and even does one bit where he's walking against the wind with his body at less than a 45 degree angle from the ground. Still don't know how they did that one.

Anyway, this sequence is hilarious, brilliant and thrilling, and makes up for any slow patches and shortcomings in the rest of the movie. Glad I saw it.

Though, speaking of those slow patches, I did have to watch the jail scene a couple times, because I'd again let my laptop distract me. Maybe I need to make a rule about that.

Okay, what will October have in store?

Let's see ... only three decades left.

And after moving backward in time for the first two months, from the 1970s to the 1960s, now we're moving forward in time, from the 1920s to the 1930s.

All the movies will have dialogue, but will they all hold my attention?

To end at the beginning

I watched my last movie as a Blockbuster Total Access customer last night.

Appropriately enough, it was the first movie where anyone ever spoke a line of dialogue -- or gets credit for being that, anyway.

That's right, after whimpering about the decrease in Blockbuster's services and locations on my blog a half-dozen times earlier in the year, I'm now going out with a bang, as it were -- suddenly, and without any advanced warning. I'm paid up through tomorrow, and I'm on the verge of letting my subscription for online rentals lapse. In fact, I will officially do it at some point during the writing of this post.

The choice of The Jazz Singer as my last movie was not intentional or symbolic. It just so happens that I'm watching movies from the 1920s in September as part of my Decades series, and it happened to be time to watch the movie that gets credit for ushering in the "talkie" era. But in retrospect, there was something appropriate about it.

Appropriate because I have been doing things "the old way" for way too long, and it's time to step into the next generation of film renting. That started about a month ago, when we got our first BluRay player, which, perhaps more relevantly, is also capable of streaming Netflix. Watching streamed movies on my TV has become my immediate preferred method of doing things, and has made the long drives to pick up movies from -- and then return movies to -- Blockbuster locations seem increasingly tedious. I don't know if we would have gotten to this point if I had a Blockbuster on the corner, but it takes me a good 10-15 minutes to reach the closest one now, and that just ain't cutting it.

I had been making noise about quitting Blockbuster for a long time now -- the writing was on the wall. But my wife sensed that I needed a bit of a push out of my comfort zone, so earlier in the summer we discussed that I could use the purchase of the BluRay player as my impetus to finally pull the trigger. That gave me a couple months still to "appreciate" Blockbuster, since we didn't plan to buy the Netflix streamer until just before our child was born.

Because I have appreciated Blockbuster, as strange as that sounds. I know they are a faceless corporation that you are supposed to hate with the kind of vigor reserved for WalMart, but I have never hated Blockbuster that way. Their customer service has always been excellent with me -- I can't say the same for Netflix, when I used to be a customer and when I considered becoming one again -- and I have always enjoyed the benefits that I used to consider them to have over Netflix. Back in the glory days, you used to be able to exchange your on-line rentals at the store and get both an in-store rental, and the next movie in your queue sent to you. Since there were two Blockbusters about equidistantly close from where I lived, this was an option I availed myself of regularly.

Well, first they changed that policy so that you didn't get your next rental through the mail until you returned your in-store rental. Then they closed first one, then the other of those two closest Blockbuster stores. And even after I adjusted to that, I've found that a lot of the titles I'm really interested in renting online have statuses like "Short Wait," "Long Wait," "Very Long Wait" or even the dreaded "Unavailable." As my online queue became strewn with the corpses of interesting movies Blockbuster was never going to be able to ship to me, I realized what the rest of the world realized a long time ago -- Blockbuster, as currently constructed, is an unsupportable business model that may not exist in this form for very much longer.

But because Blockbuster has been so good to me -- never questioning me when I say a movie got lost in the mail, always sending me extra coupons to make good on their mistake, etc. -- I do feel a little bad abandoning them like this. Every customer who drops their service drives one more nail into their coffin.

I know that if a company like America Online still exists, somehow, then Blockbuster will, too. Rationally, I know that the $20-something per month I will no longer be paying them will not be felt, really, at any level of the organization.

But I still feel bad. Because you have to mourn the little changes that come along like this, as they come along. You had to mourn the closing of the music stores, and now you have to mourn the eventual closing of the video rental stores, which is happening sooner rather than later. Kiosks, while very handy, can only do a partial job replacing what video stores, in their prime, could offer us. (And I guess I should pause to say that I'm glad that the smaller video stores, with less overhead, seem like they could still thrive for a little while longer.)

So how do I plan to manage my rentals going forward, without Blockbuster?

Well, I mentioned kiosks in the previous paragraph. Redbox is sure to pick up a bunch of the slack on new releases, movies that may have an initial backlog if you try to rent them through Netflix. And for new new releases -- the ones Blockbuster has been getting up to 28 days before Redbox and Netflix -- I can actually still avail myself of the Blockbuster kiosks, the first one of which I saw in a local Pavilions grocery store the other day. I'm hoping that the kiosks will still get those movies ahead of the competition, so this will give me access to the newest video releases while still letting me demonstrate my remnants of customer loyalty to Blockbuster.

Then we'll be increasing the number of rentals from Netflix we're allowed to have out at any given time. Currently, my wife is on the modest one-disc-at-a-time plan -- the streaming has always been more interesting to her than the physical DVDs (she's so advanced compared to me). I've always been a big proponent of pooling our resources now that we're married, and keenly, she used that argument to get me to drop Blockbuster and take an ownership role in her Netflix queue. In reality, I will probably have the run of that queue, still able to get the rare movies I want to see (a better selection of them than Blockbuster, probably), either because I've heard they're good or because I need to review them. And with acceptance of Netflix comes forgiveness of Netflix, for a customer service blunder that was now so long ago that I won't even bring it up here.

In case I miss renting movies in the original cases they came in, there's always the good old reliable library. And hey, if I'm feeling really nostalgic, I can always walk into a Blockbuster and actually plunk down the ridiculously high rental fee, something on the order of $5. I'll still have my membership card, after all. I'm still a Blockbuster member, they just won't be drawing a regular payment from my credit card, nor get the lion's share of my business.

And I may still use them for another valuable purpose, one that I was worried about losing by dropping Blockbuster: aisle browsing. One of my biggest concerns is that I would lose my ability to browse a large number of unfamiliar titles, which a person can only do effectively in the new release section of a brick-and-mortar video store. But then it hit my like a lightning bolt a couple weeks ago: I can still do that. There's nothing to keep me from walking into a Blockbuster, browsing the hell out of that new release section, jotting down some titles I wasn't familiar with previously, and then walking the hell out.

So this morning I took The Jazz Singer and the first disc of the first season of Party Down, and dropped them in the mailbox on the corner. I wanted to guarantee that I returned them before the 15th, so I don't have to make a partial payment on next month's bill, and that also committed me to being sure I actually pulled the plug on Blockbuster today, so they don't receive them and send me the next movies in my queue. The ceremonious last act will be returning my in-store rental of the execrable Furry Vengeance later today -- and then my books will be square with Blockbuster.

So without any further ado, here I go, pulling up the Blockbuster website, to do the dirty deed.

But first, some printing. Before cutting ties, I had always wanted to print out my queue, so I could recreate as much of it as I wanted on Netflix. Then, while I was at it, I decided to print out my rental history, which goes 200 titles back, getting us back to March of 2009. Yep, I used this thing a lot.

Then, on to the fateful page. I clicked the My Account link, then under the Subscription Plan area, I clicked the Cancel link. Needless to say, they weren't going without a fight. They offered me a number of lower-level plans, some of which came to as little as $4.99 a month. They even offered for me to put my subscription on hold for as long as three months. But I couldn't be swayed by these options. It's like taking off a bandaid -- you just have to rip it off. I moved my mouse to the blue "Please just cancel my subscription" area and clicked.

Then of course had to fill out a survey about why I was leaving. Well, given my fondness for them as a corporate entity, the least I could do was explain my reasoning. And even though I chose "I am trying to cut expenses" as the reason for canceling (and that's legitimate, especially when I discovered yesterday how much my son is costing me in health insurance), I went on to include the following comment:

"The two closest Blockbuster stores to me have closed, and now it's very inconvenient for me to get to the next closest store. I considered the in-store exchange aspect of the subscription to be one of its primary benefits over Netflix, but was no longer making regular use of that after those two stores closed. Plus, I found too many titles on line that were listed as "Long Wait" or "Very Long wait." One way to assist with the inconvenience of getting to the store would be to implement a system where you can return your video to any Blockbuster within a 25-mile radius, or something like that. Being able to rent from one store and return to another would have helped. But, it wouldn't have helped enough. I enjoyed being a Blockbuster customer when it met my needs, and I have always appreciated the high quality of Blockbuster customer service -- thank you. Unfortunately, it's just not meeting my needs the same way it used to."

Probably more than I needed to give them, but hey, like I said, they're alright in my book.

I skipped one more chance to keep my subscription active, and clicked Continue With My Cancellation.

The next page told me the cancellation was successful, and that I actually had until 10/15 to return my videos to avoid being charged for them.

Maybe I'll watch Furry Vengeance ten more times, just to wallow in nostalgia.

Good luck, Blockbuster. Don't go bankrupt on my account.