Readers who can see the future

One of my favorite late-December occurrences is when my Best/Worst of the Year issue of Entertainment Weekly arrives in the mail. This year that day was this past Friday.

I've been reading EW film critics Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwartzbaum for something like 15 years, or however long they've been entrenched at the magazine -- it's possible they were even the magazine's original two film critics. As with any critics, I've agreed and disagreed with both of them over the years. But since I think they both write very well, they're two of my favorite critics to read, regardless of whether our opinions line up. (Since you're never going to agree with everything a critic has to say, the most important thing is that you like how he/she writes -- it's our ability to write that earned most of us our jobs as critics, not our exquisite taste in movies.)

So I practically get heart palpitations when the year-end double issue arrives. I'm just that excited to see which movies they've each named their top ten of the year, not to mention their bottom five.

But as excited as I am, I don't tear right into it. I enjoy the experience of reading these lists so much, I don't want to just ruin it with a quick perusal. I want to have a moment to myself without any interruptions, to take in everything they have to say. Sometimes I even try to cover the opposite side of the page with my hand, so I don't accidentally read the other movies in their top ten (there's a 150-word writeup on each) before it's time to do so naturally.

Anyway, I got that private moment in our hammock yesterday afternoon while my son was taking a nap. (Yep, it was hammock weather where I am -- suck it.) And this year's reading of the lists was as good as ever. I'm expecting to have a lot of crossover with their top tens.

There's plenty of enjoyment to be had in the margins of this spread (which takes up five or six pages) as well -- humorous little asides and other "awards" given out by the two critics. (One example this year: "The Saw VI Enough Already Award," awarded to the Paranormal Activity series.)

This year, they also reserved one whole margin for the readers' picks for the top 10 movies of the year, which are about what you would expect -- with one notable exception. Here, let's see if you can figure out the exception:

1. The Dark Knight Rises
2. The Avengers
3. Argo
4. Skyfall
5. Silver Linings Playbook
6. Lincoln
7. The Hunger Games
8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
9. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
10. Les Miserables

No cheating by looking at the poster art from this post.

It's strange enough that enough readers were able to vote The Hobbit into the top ten in only a few days between the film's release and the deadline (let's say it was Wednesday) for this issue. Especially since some of those who saw it must have disliked either the story itself or the 48 fps projection, reducing some of its likelihood of making the top ten.

Far stranger: That enough readers voted Les Miserables into the top ten when it hasn't even come out yet.

Huh?

Yeah, maybe anywhere from a couple hundred to a thousand of the magazine's readers were lucky enough to attend some special advanced screening in their city. But the number of these advanced screenings would be very small, and again, it would require almost universal acclaim from those readers to even get into the top 20, one would think, let alone the top 10.

Yet I don't think Entertainment Weekly is making these numbers up. Why would they? There would be too great a risk of discovery. It's not like this is the same as Stephen Glass fabricating entire stories in The New Republic, but any journalistic outlet of any repute would want to avoid even a minor scandal along these lines. And say what you will about Entertainment Weekly, but it's one of the most reputable of the magazines that are devoted to the arts and celebrity culture (outside of the terminally high-brow ones, I should say).

If they did fudge the numbers, though, I'd have to think it would be due to the regrettable problem we critics face this time of year: the fact that the calendar says it's time for us to finalze our lists, but we still haven't seen all the movies we think we must see before we can. To address this very problem, I don't finalize my list until the morning the Oscar nominations come out. In the past, that allowed me until late January or even early February to continue watching and fine-tuning. As I've written about numerous times, I have until only January 10th this time around.

It stands to reason that Entertainment Weekly didn't want a definitive list of the readers' choices for best movies of 2012 if three likely favorites -- Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty and the aforementioned Les Miserables -- hadn't even come out yet. There's a decent chance the actual best picture winner will come from this group (ZDT and Les Mis are considered front-runners), so years from now it may look strange if the readers snubbed the eventual winner -- even when you do consider practical realities like publication deadlines. I guess it really depends on how much EW cares about this kind of thing. Realistically, not much.

My wife floated a different idea last night, that readers were voting based on what they expected themselves to like the most. Maybe the readers were doing the work that EW couldn't ethically do, predicting their own tendencies based only on things like trailers and the already-existing buzz. However, that would seem unusually organized on their part -- especially as a strategy that had to be undertaken by multiple voters.

It's also possible EW set up this poll in a fashion they knew was dubious without actually crossing over into unethical. I never saw this online poll, so I have no idea if it was "fill in your own answer" or "select from this list of choices." If the latter, they could have provided Les Mis as an option (even knowing that the movie hadn't been released) in order to get a bunch of yahoos who were excited about it to choose that answer as a gauge of their own excitement. I'd have to think this is most likely the thing that actually happened. But if so, that's problematic in a whole bunch of other ways -- it means that just for the sake of sheer manageability, they would have had to eliminate a number of marginal contenders and necessarily pre-set the parameters for what the final readers' choice list might look like. And besides, if this is what they did, wouldn't they have presented at least Django as an option also? Perhaps theater lovers make up a bigger portion of their readership than those who fetishize violence.

Of course, in an online poll, readers can vote anywhere -- from other parts of the world as well, where the magazine is probably also circulated. But as far as I can tell, unlike with some other prominent recent releases, this movie hasn't opened elsewhere around the world yet. And again, even so, we'd be talking about a very small percentage. 

I suppose what I should really hope is that Les Mis is just so damn great that even the small group of people who have seen it are vocal enough in their support to earn it a legitimate spot on a list like this. I'm enough of a sucker for the theater that I've had my arms wide open to embrace another movie musical ever since Chicago swept me off my feet. However, its 58 Metascore tells me that's probably not the case.

At least I'll definitely see it in time to consider it for my own top 10. The only other time I saw Les Mis was as a 12-year-old child on a family trip to England, where we got tickets in the last row of the theater where it was playing in London's West End. I loved it then when the characters were just specks, so I have to imagine that some of these much talked-about emotions will be stirred up again when Fantine and Cosette are practically in my lap. (I've heard the film features a lot of extreme close-ups.)

Looking forward to making an assessment of its quality that isn't based on crystal balls or time machines.

The language of personal ads

Coming up with movie titles that sound straight out of personal ads is by no means some hallowed Hollywood tradition. In fact, in canvasing my brain on the topic, the only one I could immediately think of was Single White Female -- and in truth, that's just the elongated form of the personal ad notation SWF, which indicates the demographic of the type of roommate the poster is seeking.

Speaking of seeking ...

The year 2012 has featured two such movie titles: Safety Not Guaranteed, which we saw about a month ago, and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, which we watched last night as kind of a belated doomsday theme movie. (The world hadn't ended and it was already December 22nd in many parts of the world, but we thought it was a good theme viewing anyway -- we still had a couple hours of December 21st left here in Los Angeles.)

With Safety Not Guaranteed, the title is literally an extraction from a personal ad. Those three words are the caveat given to the reader should he or she choose to undertake the ad's offer of traveling back in time with the poster. "If you die, it's on you."

With Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, it's only an encapsulation of the film's themes, using the language we usually associate with such ads. "Seek" is just about the most common verb used in personal ads, as in "SWF seeks same." It's interesting, in a way, that normal people can even comprehend these ads, since the fact that they charge by the word requires heavy reliance on shortcuts in logic. It's kind of like reading those ridiculous Variety headlines: "Sticks nix hick pix."

And actually, there's a third example that I haven't seen yet: For a Good Time, Call ... This might be more likely to be scrawled on a bathroom stall wall than appear in the personals, but I'm sure it could appear there too, and I'm sure it originally appeared there before gravitating to this more unsavory medium.

The thing that's weird about this sudden "trend" is that it comes at a time when people don't really use personal ads the way they once did. In fact, you could argue that the target audience of all three films is more accustomed to transacting this type of business on Craigslist, where there's no premium on the words used and the poster can actually type out complete sentences (if they're capable of writing one).

Why, then? Well, it could just be another case of everything that's old being new again. Our reaction to the way technology has taken over our lives is to willfully go back to a time when it hadn't. There's something very quaint about placing a personal add. If they'd shown Mark Duplass actually composing his advert for a daring time-traveling companion, the scene probably would have depicted him hard at work on a clunky old typewriter.

It's appropriate, as well, that the two movies I've seen both deal with a central romantic relationship, even though the thing both titles are overtly requesting is only friendship or partnership. It seems that the most classical way to use a personal ad is to seek (there's that word again) out a love interest. Neither of these scenarios involve that on the surface, though of course that's what materializes.

I just wished I liked either of these movies better.

Both are terrific in concept. The idea of investigating a crackpot who thinks he can travel back in time, in order to write a quirky newspaper piece about him, is rich with potential -- it creates the necessary conflict by having the reporter hold back a key piece of information from the crackpot the whole time she's growing closer and closer to him. And with Seeking, when was the last time you saw someone try to do a romantic comedy that was set during the final weeks of planet Earth? Answer: Never, and I always loving seeing them attempt to do things I've never seen before.  

But the execution is wanting in rather significant ways. The resolution of Safety Not Guaranteed is too much of a departure from the kind of movie it seemed to me they were making, and that narrative gets sidetracked by a B story that's given nearly as much weight as the A story even though it comes out of nowhere and doesn't deserve such emphasis. And with Seeking, the perfect seriocomic tone is established in the first half-hour before being abandoned for a mix of dreary and schmaltzy, and the plot elements become unforgivably slapdash. Plus, the laughs die off a good week before the people do.

So I feel like placing my own personal ad:

"Seeking a good movie inspired by a personal ad."

Maybe For a Good Time, Call ... will respond. 

Barbra vs. Bette

Still alive?

Good. Let's proceed with today's post.

Maybe the truest sign of the apocalypse is that the 2012 Christmas season features a cage match between one-time divas who are at least two decades, and probably more like three decades, past their prime.

This past Wednesday, The Guilt Trip, starring Barbra Streisand, hit theaters. Next Tuesday, Parental Guidance, starring Bette Midler, does the same.

Streisand is 70, Midler 67.

Both movies can probably be described as holiday family comedies, though The Guilt Trip likely skews younger since it features Gen X-friendly Seth Rogen. Meanwhile, Midler's co-star, Billy Crystal, is also in his mid-60s (he's 64), while even Marisa Tomei is nearly 50 (she's 48). Though I guess you could say that Parental Guidance skews really younger, as in to young kids, as well as to those Midler's and Crystal's age. So Parental Guidance -- the fittingly rated Parental Guidance, I should say -- gets the really old and the really young, while The Guilt Trip gets the middle.

Which of the two would I sneak into as the free half of a double feature? The Guilt Trip, but that's because I too am in the middle.

Midler and Streisand aren't just similar by being "women of a certain age." Both have also spent their careers straddling between two worlds, the world of acting and the world of singing. You'd probably say that Midler leans more toward the former while Streisand leans toward the latter. Streisand is almost undoubtedly the more famous and successful for her renowned music career, as she's won numerous awards -- as well as two Oscars in acting. But don't sell Midler short. She's also won awards, been phenomenally successful with her albums and at least been nominated for a couple Oscars, not to mention her status as a mainstay performing for American troops abroad.
 
What's interesting about the timing of these two movies is that they don't just represent the latest in a long, unbroken succession of film appearances by the two actresses. As can be expected for "women of a certain age," they've been winding down in recent years -- either by choice, or more likely, out of necessity. Midler has been working slightly more regularly, though her last "appearance" in a movie was in 2010's Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, where she provided only a voice (though it was the voice of the title character). Her last appearance as a human being was in 2008's The Women, and she'd had only two other film roles before that since the year 2000. Streisand, on the other hand, has had only two film appearances, period, since the 1996 film The Mirror Has Two Faces, and both were in Fockers movies. That pattern suggests that Streisand's retirement from acting may have been more by choice, while Midler may have just been failing to get roles.

So even though the career edge almost certainly goes to Streisand, does that mean The Guilt Trip will fare better than Parental Guidance?

If I had to guess, I would say "probably." Not only has it been marketed more aggressively, at least before the movies I've been seeing, but it seems to have a bit more "edge," which has proven a key ingredient with a moviegoing public that has made such big hits out of The Hangover and Ted. Besides, Parental Guidance also represents the (long-overdue) unearthing of Billy Crystal, who has been doing almost exclusively voice work for the past decade. So it could be seen as an incredibly unhip affair, trying to "make happen" not one but two career comebacks.

Then again, families looking for something they know will appeal to all ages may gravitate toward Guidance, since it features a number of child actors in prominent roles, and seems to be more of a traditional "family comedy." The Guilt Trip is more of a buddy comedy, and its PG-13 rating (plus a prominent scene from the trailer that takes place in a strip club) may mean that parents will keep their younger kids away from it.

What do these two movies represent in the larger scheme? Well, they seem to provide some indication that recent casting trends in Hollywood don't only favor the men. In the last couple years, numerous aging male stars (your Stallones, your Willises, your Schwarzeneggers) have been given a new opportunity to make the kind of movies that made them famous. It's a trend that has dovetailed pretty nicely with the remake trend, as Hollywood has consciously decided to give us another helping of the things we loved 20 years ago. We've responded by buying tickets to those movies, and allowing the cycle to continue.

Now, Midler and Streisand are showing us that the boys aren't the only ones having the fun. Or, they could be showing us that -- if these movies do well. If they don't do well, then it'll just be another case of Hollywood's long-standing gender biases returning to the status quo.

This last makes me think that maybe I should actually try to see one or both of these movies. That in whatever small way, I should try to further the struggle of female actresses everywhere to get their proper respect, not to mention their proper salary. And I can't do that by sneaking into the movie as the free half of a double feature, because that won't contribute to either movie's box office haul.

As much as I'd like to stand up for gender equality in the workplace, I don't know that I'll actually do this. In fact, it's very unlikely that I will. With all the movies I need to see in the next three weeks before I finalize my 2012 rankings, I've got bigger fish to fry.

The best I can hope for is to reverse the order of the free double feature. I can pay for The Guilt Trip or Parental Guidance, then sneak into some other movie that I really need to see. Then again, all those movies I want to see are over two hours long, making them a poor bet for the second movie in a double feature. And with a double feature, you always run the risk of not being able to get in to the second movie, so you have to see the one you really want to see first, the one you know you'll get in to, the one where you know you'll be fully awake.

Darn it, now The Guilt Trip is giving me a guilt trip.

Good luck, Barbra and Bette. I'm rooting for both of you.

Movies the Mayans don't want you to see

This is 40
Jack Reacher
The Impossible
Django Unchained
Les Miserables
Promised Land
Zero Dark Thirty
Gangster Squad
Movie 43
Warm Bodies
A Good Day to Die Hard
Stoker
Oz: The Great and Powerful
The Croods
G.I. Joe: Retaliation
Evil Dead
Oblivion
The Great Gatsby
Star Trek into Darkness
Epic
After Earth
Now You See Me
Man of Steel
Monsters University
World War Z
Kick-Ass 2
The Lone Ranger
Pacific Rim
R.I.P.D.
The Wolverine
Elysium
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
Oldboy
Gravity 
Ender's Game
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Anchorman: The Legend Continues
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Lego: The Motion Picture
Robocop
Noah
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Robopocalypse
How to Train Your Dragon 2
The Hobbit: There and Back Again
X-Men: Days of Future Past
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
The Avengers 2
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
Avatar 2
Avatar 3
Star Wars: Episode VII
Star Wars: Episode VIII
Star Wars: Episode IX

So, let's hope the world doesn't really end tomorrow. 

The return of nap movies

After starting his life as a very poor sleeper, my son (not pictured) has become a model of consistency in the past year or so. In fact, he's so consistent that when he has a night like last night -- when a cold kept him awake and moaning miserably -- we've forgotten any techniques we once knew about how to handle it.

Part of that consistent sleeping means that you can bank on a two-hour nap from him, usually from about 1 until about 3 -- and sometimes he gives us a bonus half-hour.

For most cinephiles, two hours immediate translates into "the length of even a pretty long movie."

In the first half of this consistent year we've enjoyed, we took advantage of his two-hour naps on Saturday and Sunday (the only days I'm there to witness them) in the form of firing up a quick movie on Netflix streaming. Not every weekend and usually not both days, but often enough that I got to expecting it and looking forward to it. Documentaries were the genre of choice by my wife, and in truth, what better time to watch a documentary than in the middle of the afternoon? Evenings should be saved for fiction films, for adventures and romances and other grand spectacles.

But since moving into our new house back in June, the tradition has all but died. I'm not going to point fingers here, but it seems that somebody thinks we should spend all our time working on the house. (I'm kidding -- it's to my great personal shame that I've seen so slow to adopt the responsibilities of a homeowner.) And there are many jobs around the house that simply can't be performed while a child is biting your ankles. Nap time is the perfect time for many such jobs.

Thank goodness for the onset of winter, and the holidays.

As it's gotten cold and rainy, and as the Christmas tree has taken its lovely place in our living room, the need to complete homeowner jobs has waned a bit among my wife's priorities. And this past weekend, nap movies came back with a vengeance -- one on each day. On Saturday we watched The Queen of Versailles, and when there was no suitable documentary on Netflix streaming to watch on Sunday (none that wouldn't depress us further after the shooting on Friday, anyway), we watched the Danish comedy Klown.

The timing of the return of nap movies couldn't be any more perfect, as just this past week I've become aware of the extra urgency in watching 2012 movies before the deadline to finalize my list -- which, as discussed here, is two weeks earlier this year. And part of the return of this tradition can probably be tied to the fact that I told my wife about my earlier list deadline. She's a good sport, and is eager to help me meet my year-end goals by allocating some of our shared TV-watching time to movies on my list.

Since watching these two movies made me think of two different observations to write about each movie, I thought I'd squeeze them all into this post and just be done with them.

Finishing the doco

When I'm watching a documentary that ends up portraying its subjects in a negative light, I sometimes wonder why they even bothered to let the filmmakers finish making their film.

Sure, some documentary subjects are too delusional to realize they are coming off poorly, while others are magnanimous enough not to interfere with a process they agreed to. But neither of these quite seems to describe the Siegels, the former billionaire owners of the world's largest timeshare company, who were building the largest home in America until the financial crisis pulled the rug out from under them and all their assumptions of how the world works.

Yeah, they're a little delusional, as their plans to build a home with 30 bathrooms probably suggests. But she has a degree in engineering (though you wouldn't know it from her current incarnation, seen in the poster above) and he built one of the world's most successful companies from the ground up. So they're not idiots.

Yet as their lives careened further out of control and they became increasingly surly in private moments that they knew were being captured on camera, you have to wonder why they didn't just stop playing nice with the filmmaker. Only in footage at the very end of the movie does David Siegel start to make comments to director Laureen Greenfield asking if we could "wrap this up."

Perhaps not too surprisingly, Siegel finally got wise to how they were going to look in this movie and sued to prevent this movie from being released, as well as Greenfield directly for defamation of character. As with most things in Siegel's life the past few years, he failed.

Although there are some things about this man that come across sympathetically, it's easy not to feel too sad for him that his life got portrayed this way (in other words, truthfully). Not only does he have to answer for the audacity of all the financial excesses in his life, but even while he was building this massive mansion in the Orlando area, he never found the generosity in his heart to send his Filipino nanny back home to see her son. A heartbreaking interview at one point reveals that the woman had not seen her son, now 26, since he was 7. Given her proximity to such unimaginable wealth, that is simply criminal.

And speaking of criminal ... Siegel also takes credit at one point for getting George W. Bush either elected or reelected, or perhaps both. And then admits that he can't elaborate on his role because it "may not have been strictly legal." That may just be the most shocking revelation of the whole film. 

Daddy's movie

Because we also squeezed a couple other things into my son's nap on Saturday, we weren't quite finished with the movie when he woke up. But since he wasn't likely to see anything on screen that was disturbing for a two-year-old, we let him sit with us on the couch for the final 11 minutes of the movie. He needs at least 11 minutes of grogginess after most naps anyway, before he starts tearing around the house again.

When we finished The Queen of Versailles, though, he wasn't finished with it yet.

My son said "I wanna watch Daddy's movie." Meaning the movie we had just finished.

Never mind that The Queen of Versailles should not have held much interest for a two-year-old. The funnier thing to me is that he called it "Daddy's movie." It's unclear how he decided he should associate this movie more with me than with his mother. Especially since I don't sit there and watch my own movies that wouldn't interest him while I'm his sole supervision. (Since that's the kind of thing you might imagine me doing, I thought I should tell you that I don't.)

Anyway, we let him watch the first 15 minutes of the movie again. It was pretty absurd to have my wife and me walking around the house, engaging in little household duties, while my son sat by himself on the couch, watching this movie.

Funny in any language

It's conventional wisdom that humor suffers if the movie is made in a different language than the one the viewer speaks. Which probably explains why action movies and other blockbusters fare better in foreign markets than comedies.

This can be attributed to the fact that cadence and line delivery play a big role in whether something makes us laugh. When we don't know the words being spoken, and we can't easily detect which word is being emphasized, we have only the subtitles to cue us in as to whether something is funny. Never mind the fact that senses of humor vary greatly from country to country, either being fundamentally different or relying on local cultural references that would be lost on a foreign viewer.

So I'm pleased to say that Klown is one of the funniest movies I've seen this year, and probably one of the funniest foreign films I've ever seen.

I'm sure part of that has to do with the physical nature of the comedy. The movie is about two Danish 30-somethings (possibly 40-somethings) who go on a canoeing trip where the horndog of the pair wants to get as much poon as possible, except that circumstances have thrust upon them a 12-year-old boy that the other guy is supposed to be watching. Booty on a canoe trip? Only in Denmark, I guess.

Anyway, the physical humor is indeed hilarious, but more than that, I found myself laughing out loud regularly at simple translations of jokes in the subtitles. For whatever reason, it worked. I'm not saying this has never happened to me before -- I found the French language OSS films starring Jean Dujardin absolutely hilarious -- but I thought it was worth pointing out anyway.

I guess it's such a surprise because the majority of foreign language films that gain traction in the U.S. are not comedies. Because of the sometimes provincial nature of comedy, many of those movies never make it out of their country of origin in the first place.

A Danish Sideways

I mentioned in the previous section that Klown is about two guys who go on a trip where the acquisition of pussy is the primary goal. This was just the first way that the movie started reminding me of Alexander Payne's Sideways, and it never stopped.

In Klown as in Sideways, you've got one handsome committed man (engaged there, married here) who ventures on a week-long trip with his friend, a considerably less attractive male whose prospects are less certain (he's single in Sideways, and here he's at a rocky point in his relationship with his girlfriend). The handsome guy is going to get laid come hell or high water, while the friend is going to reluctantly support him despite his moral misgivings about the whole thing.

In both films, the handsome guy gets involved in a couple outrageous sexual escapades that don't work out well for him, and the other guy has to clean up his mess. In both films, the handsome guy ends up breaking down emotionally near the end as he regrets the decisions he's made and the impact they will have on his significant other if she finds out, realizing only too late in the game that he couldn't live without her.

But here's the really funny similarity: In both movies, the handsome guy gets his nose broken after being hit in the face with a round object by a spurned woman. In Sideways, it's Sandra Oh's motorcycle helmet. Here, it's a round vase.

For the record, the similarities to Sideways don't make me like the film any less, nor do I even accuse the filmmakers of stealing from Payne's classic. And if I did accuse them of stealing, I'd have to throw in The Hangover as well, since this movie also features a hilarious photo montage at the end, showing us some of the outrageous events that had only previously been hinted at.

I guess the humor of Hollywood movies does sometimes translate into other languages.

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.)

Things they can never make movies about

Any time an event of a certain magnitude -- good or bad -- occurs in our world, the clock starts ticking to how soon a movie will be made about it.

When it's an event we're proud of, such as the killing of Osama bin Laden, a movie (Zero Dark Thirty) comes out the very next year. (It's worth noting that ZDT was already being made as a different kind of movie about bin Laden, but real-world events changed its thrust.) When it's something that scars our national psyche forever, such as 9/11, it takes five years (the first 9/11 movies hit theaters in 2006).

Either way, the conventional wisdom is that a movie will materialize sooner or later.

But I don't know if we're ever going to see a movie about the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Simply put, there's too little value -- morally, cinematically, and certainly not for our entertainment -- to be gained from going over these events again.

I was talking with my wife about the events over the weekend, as often as we could bare to talk about them, and I proclaimed that this may be the most morally reprehensible event of my lifetime.

That's obviously an over-simplification on some level, and it ignores the fact that the shooter, whose name I will never contribute to mentioning in print, was very likely disturbed beyond the ability for us to attribute his actions to any moral value judgments he was capable of making. It's also a claim anyone who had family in the World Trade Center might argue with. And that's only staying within the United States, not considering the countless atrocities that have occurred in other countries.

But since I've already brought 9/11 into this discussion, let's go there for a minute. We can (and have) cursed the names of anyone and everyone involved in the planning of that terrorist attack that shook the very filament of our beings. But no member of Al Qaeda could have done what that man did on Friday. No fundamentalist Muslim could have walked up to a room full of 6- and 7-year-olds and systematically killed them. That could just be because it requires a certain brazen "courage," so to speak, to stare in the face of a child and assassinate him/her without blinking. If you want to look at Al Qaeda in the most negative possible light that the organization most certainly deserves, you could say that they were too cowardly to confront their victims face to face -- that they could only kill them through the intermediary of an airplane. It takes absolute disregard for the sanctity and purity of life in its most innocent forms to do what that shooter did on Friday, even if he was nowhere near in his right mind.

And even though 9/11 killed more than 100 times as many people as were killed in Newtown on Friday, I would say that a good 99 percent of them were adults. Yeah, there may have been a daycare at the World Trade Center -- in fact, I think there was. But that accounted for a very small percentage of those who were killed, and you might say those deaths were "unavoidable" for the agenda the terrorist group was trying to carry out. And that's the big difference here as well -- Al Qaeda had an agenda. Whether we agreed with it or not, Al Qaeda had a specific outcome it was trying to achieve and a specific notion of how to achieve it. Their plan targeted adult citizens of a country they considered to be their enemy. There's an odd kind of morality about that when contrasted with what happened on Friday. 

We make movies about tragic events because we think there's something we can learn from them, because we need to be reminded about the importance of not overlooking warnings signs for these tragic events repeating themselves. And for sure, it will always be good to remind ourselves how the failure to control our access to guns, and our failure to have adequate services to help the mentally ill, both played a role in the atrocity carried about by He Who Shall Not Be Named on Friday.

But dramatizing tragic events requires recreating them on the screen in some way, and that is just not a viable option with something like the Sandy Hook shooting. It would go without saying that you could not show actual children on screen being shot. But even introducing us to 20 little kids, with their precious smiles and their boundless energy, and then killing them off-screen, is too much. Even introducing us to one little kid, and then killing him or her off-screen, is too much for us to handle.

Because it requires us to confront the single most disturbing thing about this incident, the thing that can't escape our imaginations no matter how hard we try: the actual moment of their deaths. The actual moment when a small child -- paralyzed by fear, face blurred with tears, crying hysterically -- succumbed to the bullet that ended his or her life. We can't help but think where the bullet entered the child's body, how it must have looked, how it must have been experienced by the other people who witnessed it and survived. And with the number of children who were killed on Friday, at least some of them must have died in gruesome ways, ways that would prevent open caskets at their funerals. If we imagine them all as little angels who died quickly and cleanly from entry wounds that didn't exceed the size of the bullet, we know we are lying to ourselves.

And if we don't introduce these children as characters in this theoretical movie that will never happen, then they really are just faceless victims -- a fate we do not want to bestow on them, no matter what we do. 

For some reason I have always been haunted by the death of Phil Hartman. And the reason is that I can imagine the scene in my head: Hartman pleading to his crazed wife in the moments before she shot him, trying to convince her in any way possible not to do what she was contemplating doing. And failing. And being shot in the face.

I don't imagine other murders like this, often because I don't know the victims of murders as well as I "knew" Hartman. It's easy not to imagine the particulars of many murders, because we don't know the people involved and don't know what they looked like. This is a blessing. If we spent all our time dwelling on the horrible particulars of murders, the horrors of this world would overwhelm us.

But with 20 elementary school children, we don't have to know them or what they looked like to imagine them dying. And there's no way for our minds to engage in our normal coping mechanisms, which tell us that maybe they were bad people who deserved it, or maybe at least they were ugly. No, we know these were innocent, beautiful little children, too young to have sinned, too young to have started to reflect the ugliness of the world in their own faces.

I am so grateful that I will never see this movie.

The sad kitten that is Blockbuster

Note: As I said in yesterday's post, these two were written before I learned about the events in Connecticut Friday morning. Although it felt appropriate to be silent this weekend, to grieve the bottomless grief of this shooting, I have instead decided to publish these posts. Last night when I watched Saturday Night Live, which went on with the show after acknowledging the tragedy only in the form of a youth choir opening the show singing "Silent Night," I realized that the world needs laughter at a time like this. The world needs lightness. The world needs things that do no matter. And though there's a terrible kind of irony in the first two paragraphs in this post, I'm leaving them as first written, because they remind me of a time when sadness didn't have such a terribly specific root cause.

The show must go on.

I may have gotten the saddest email ever from Blockbuster on Friday.

(And when I say something is the "saddest ever," I don't mean that it is sadder than genocide or famine or intolerance or the Chicago Cubs, I just mean "here is a sad thing I want to tell you about.")

The email's title was "Oops! We goofed! Take 50% off Unlimited movies and help clear our conscience."

Seeing that title, I was all ready to leap on that email, figuring it was another gaffe or case of false advertising that just proved yet again how far Blockbuster has fallen.

But when I opened the email, this is what I saw:

Apparently, the way they "goofed" was not doing enough to keep me as a customer.

This sort of crushed me, I must say. It's not like I had to go off and have a moment alone, but something about the face of that kitten -- and Blockbuster's willingness to associate their own desperate corporate image with it -- had exactly the emotional impact on me it was intended to have.

See, I never really wanted to leave Blockbuster. I always liked their customer service. I always liked the rental plans they made available, one of which made it possible to have six movies out at once (three from the store, three through the mail) for a minimal low price, if you played your cards correctly. I always liked that they had brick and mortar stores where I could peruse a wall full of titles, exposing myself to movies I might not otherwise have heard of.

But a couple years back, my wife and I realized that it was stupid that she had a Netflix account and I had a Blockbuster account, and that we really needed only one. This was also about the time that Netflix streaming was really taking off. To this day she cares almost exclusively about the streaming, so my selections can totally dominate the two-disc through-the-mail portion of our plan. What we've done makes sense for us.

Only, it left Blockbuster, a corporate entity I've always felt fondly toward, out in the cold, like a cat whose owners have forgotten to re-admit him from the yard on a frozen winter's night.

The effectiveness of this kitten image on me has something to do with the fact that Blockbuster was always loyal to me, always like an innocent pet who has no idea why you left home and never came back. While Netflix has provided me uneven customer service at best, Blockbuster always immediately sent extra discs if theirs got lost or came damaged, and often gave me a credit for an additional rental as well. There were no questions asked -- unless that question was "Are you fully satisfied with your Blockbuster experience?" And my answer was always "Yes."

And now, like that cat whose owner has disappeared, Blockbuster is starving to death.

I know I write about this every six months or so, as though my own conscience needs expunging. And no matter how many times I write about it, nor how matter how many deals they offer, I'm not going back. The decision for our household has been made, and it's the right one.

But it doesn't mean I'm immune to the suffering of this company, once such a fixture in the way I watched movies. Just as I wouldn't be immune to the suffering of a kitten who didn't have enough to eat.

Too bad they can't score this email with a Sarah McLachlan song, or I'd probably be crying in my beer right now.

Cut off at the knees

Note: I wrote this post, as well as the post for tomorrow, before I heard the news about the unimaginably horrific shooting in Connecticut. As a father and a human being, I find it hard right now to imagine engaging in the kind of triviality that a film blog has the luxury of being. I've decided to go ahead and post these anyway, largely because I have been so prolific lately that I can barely afford to let a day pass, else I won't write down everything I have to say. Inconsequential in the grand scheme of things as the things I have to say about film may be, this is what a writer does: write. While on the one hand that is sort of a selfish decision in the face of this tragedy, I also don't know what purpose is served, exactly, by imposing a silence on myself. However, I did not want you to think these events are not in my heart, tearing me apart, because they are. My defense mechanism has been to escape into the trivial, watching two movies last night and doing everything I can not to spiral downward into the depths of sorrow inspired by this tragic event.

Shocking realization yesterday:

I have two fewer weeks to watch 2012 movies than I had to watch 2011 movies.

And 2010 movies. And 2009 movies. And so on.

As you probably know, I have a tradition that dates back 17 years (you may not know that part) of ranking all the movies I see that were released in a given calendar year. Since you theoretically continue seeing movies from a given calendar year for the rest of your life, you need a cutoff date in order to publish your list of rankings. The cutoff date my friend Don and I (the two of us who unfailingly participate in this tradition) have always used has been the morning the Oscar nominations are announced.

Which is nearly two weeks earlier this year.

Yesterday Don mentioned it casually in an email, not in the form of "Did you hear???" but more like "Since the Oscar nominations are on January 10th this year ..."

January 10th?

I felt an immediate pit in my stomach.

According to a statement by AMPAS back in September (I must have been snoozing), the shift was made "to provide members and the public a longer period of time to see the nominated films." That may be one of the benefits, but I'm betting that the bigger motivator was getting the nominations out there before the Golden Globes air. I've always thought it was strange that we learn both the nominees and the winners of the Golden Globes before the Oscar nominations are even revealed. Well, no more.

It may just be that only the Hollywood Foreign Press, Don and I actually care about this change.

The reason I care is that I have become more and more obsessed in recent years about watching as many of the available movies from that year as possible, both the good and the bad, so that the list I unveil in late January is as definitive as I can reasonably make it. When I look back on [whatever year it is] in the future, I want to know that the movie I crowned as #1 was truly my favorite movie that was released that year. There's always the possibility that I'll see some unheralded underdog five years later and like it better than the #1 I crowned, but at least I know I've given my best effort at being definitive by seeing as wide a swath as possible of the available movies.

When you remove two weeks (actually 12 days, since the nominations will be on a Thursday this year rather than a Tuesday) from that available viewing time, you're talking about eliminating a good 15 movies -- and maybe as many as 20, since that's the time of the year when I really press, when I force my wife to watch movies on nights we wouldn't ordinarily watch them, when I use my other available waking hours, however unlikely, to squeeze in 30 minutes of a movie here and 30 minutes of a movie there.

We could always change the admittedly arbitrary date we use for our cutoff, but have decided this just wouldn't be sporting of us. We have to play it as it lies.

I knew there was little chance that I would beat last year's record total of 121, so I wasn't even going for it. I sit at 84 now, so either way I would have stood a good chance of reaching 100 (which I always think of as a minimum acceptable total) but not much of a chance of reaching 121. The new date doesn't change those odds very much. I can easily watch 16 more movies from 2012 before January 10th.

But it does mean that I'll likely "waste" a lot fewer viewings. And by that I mean I should probably say bye bye to watching the movies I know will be bad.

See, nearly as important as fleshing out the top of my list is fleshing out the bottom. As much as I'm interested in crowning a 2012 champion, I'm also interest in reaching a definitive conclusion about the worst movie of the year. This is why my December and January viewings often alternate between prestige movies and total shlock.

If given the choice, though, I will probably want to concentrate on the good ones, the ones I think actually have some chance of cracking my top 10. And while that's good for me in terms of useful ways to spend my time, it means that my worst movie of the year will probably be a choice I can't really get behind. I won't tell you what's sitting in my bottom spot right now, because that would ruin the fun, but I can tell you that it's not the kind of bad movie that gets my juices flowing with how much I dislike it. If it does end up being the worst, it'll be the worst more by default than by truly earning the title.

All this said, there's a good chance that the earlier deadline will have a positive impact on my well-being. The period between New Year's and the 24th (the nominations date has always been in the early January 20s) always ends up feeling like a terrible grind. In fact, I usually get to the point where my top 10 is pretty solidified, my bottom 10 is pretty solidified, and everything I see has this middling quality that earns it a place somewhere in the 50s or 60s. Even if the movie is better than that or worse than that, I sometimes lose the ability to make those judgments and just see it all as some colorless gruel, neither particularly bad nor particularly good. Rounding out the middle of my list has never been one of my stated goals.

So those last two weeks in particular, the two weeks I will lose this year, usually find me submitting to a rote obedience to my own rules and deadlines, of "playing out the string." It's probably a good thing that I'll have to focus this year on some really solid contenders -- whether they be contenders for my best movie, or contenders for my worst.

And that phase where I work to squeeze in 30 minutes of a movie here and 30 minutes of a movie there? Maybe it'll just come before Christmas, rather than after. Maybe it'll just start this weekend.

I've already finished my Christmas shopping, so I've got that going for me.

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.

Christmas disowned

If you're selling something and there's even the flimsiest way to tie it in to Christmas, wouldn't you take that opportunity?

Not if you're the distributors of the 2005 movie The Family Stone.

More on that in a moment.

Around Christmastime each year, the conversation among film fans inevitably turns to the greatest Christmas movies of all time. Because it's been a notoriously weak genre, I always contend in these discussions that there are exactly three classic Christmas movies: It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story and Elf. I'm sure I'm drastically oversimplifying things (I haven't seen a number of the prominent Christmas movies from the 1940s and 1950s), and you could also argue that It's a Wonderful Life was never intended to be a Christmas movie. But I can never think of another title that I would elevate to this Christmas Valhalla beyond those three.

The discussion does get me thinking about the second-tier Christmas movies, the ones you really like, even love, but are not prominent enough to enter any discussion about the genre's touchstone films. One I might put forward is The Family Stone, Thomas Bezucha's generally unheralded 2005 film, whose all-star cast (seen above) suggests it should have gotten a lot more attention than it did. I really enjoyed this film, though part of that could be because it presents my idealized version of a modern liberal family (dysfunctional though they may be).

So when I saw it on sale last weekend at Target, it seemed a perfect choice for someone on my Christmas list (I'll remain vague who it is, on the off chance they're reading this).

Tuesday night I went to wrap it, and happened to scan the back of the DVD to read the two short paragraphs providing a plot description and evidence of critical praise. They are as follows:

"An incredible all-star cast shines in this deliriously funny comedy that 'balances heart and humor' (Houston Chronicle) with a 'sharp comic edge' (Rolling Stone)! Featuring Sarah Jessica Parker in a Golden Globe-nominated role, The Family Stone is 'engaging, enticing [and] first-rate' (Los Angeles Times)!

Corporate executive Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker) is as uptight and ultra-conservative as her pin-striped designer suit. Her boyfriend Everett Stone's (Dermot Mulroney) family are as relaxed and quirky as their aging New England Colonial. So when Meredith ventures out of Manhattan to meet Everett's clan, it's no wonder her arrival is met with all the enthusiasm of a nasty Nor'easter. But one surprise guest, two shocking romances and several beers later, Meredith's icy exterior begins to thaw ... and she may just melt the hearts of the Family Stone!"

This description makes the movie sound pretty lame, but it's about what I expect from the ad copy on the back of a DVD. These things are always written by people with an excessive fondness for exclamation points.

What's more troubling: No mention of Christmas whatsoever.

And it's not like this movie is only tangentially about Christmas. The whole movie takes place on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, if I remember correctly -- in any case, the action starts no earlier than December 23rd. The whole lumpy Stone clan is gathered for Christmas, their area of Connecticut is blanketed in snow, and logistics related to Christmas comprise much of the action.

Yet Fox, which released The Family Stone, used the back of the DVD to play up a clash between political dispositions, which is really only a minor part of the story. (My wife and I actually went to a special screening of the movie on the Fox lot back when it was released.) Apparently, Fox had no interest whatsoever in any of the fringe benefits of being a Christmas movie.

My conclusion? The decision was made to help immediate DVD sales, since right after its release is when a studio can expect to make the most money on a DVD.

Unlike many Christmas movies, The Family Stone did not wait until the following November to come out on DVD. After a December 16, 2005 theatrical release (which, granted, is already very late in the season for a Christmas movie), the movie hit DVD for the first time the following April 17th. And it's true, at that time, its status as a holiday film would have very little value to the buying public. (Speaking of Elf, I just had an argument with someone yesterday about their decision to watch Elf for the first time in the month of April. When this person didn't end up liking the movie, I argued that she had set herself up to fail.)

While I get why they did it, the problem is, it brands The Family Stone as not a Christmas movie for the rest of its existence, therefore minimizing all potential future holiday sales. Could they really have thought that this movie would fly off the shelves in April of 2006? Wouldn't it have been better to sit on it for another seven months, then try to play up the Christmas angle (which wouldn't even need playing up, since the movie is all about Christmas) and try to establish this as a word-of-mouth favorite? Retailers will always be looking to sell Christmas movies to people each November, so The Family Stone could have been a modest seller for years to come, and maybe even outperformed that modest level if it caught on with people. That's also a time of year when shoppers are not particularly selective about what they buy, as long as they can check someone off their list. You could say that I myself did not buy this movie selectively -- I made the decision to buy it in under a minute. But I was only able to do that because I happened to already know that it was a Christmas movie -- which most people never will. (I know what you're now thinking -- "Vance, was it being marketed alongside other Christmas movies?" I don't think it was -- though its position of prominence probably meant that someone at Target chose to feature it specifically because it takes place at Christmastime.)

You could say they didn't really know what to do with The Family Stone from the start. Here was the original poster for it:

So not only were they not pushing the Christmas angle in the original advertising campaign, they were actually making it seem like some kind of assault on good taste, which it isn't. You could argue that they were trying to appeal to a darker Christmas audience, the kind that had made Bad Santa a modest hit two years earlier. But if that's what they were trying to do, wouldn't they have chosen at least some iconography related to the holiday?

Maybe Fox was just uncomfortable with this movie's politics, and having found themselves unwittingly in bed with a film that turned out differently than they expected, wanted to do what they could to bury it. After all, Bezucha presents Sarah Jessica Parker pretty unsympathetically here. It won't be spoiling much to say that she doesn't finish the movie as a one-dimensional stereotype, but she certainly starts out that way. Plus, the whole thrust of this movie is to sing the praises of the liberal mindset and make conservatives seem stiff and humorless. That couldn't have sat well at Fox corporate.

In this post I've been talking about seeing movies in a context that gets the most out of them, but as I conclude, I'm realizing that we are always setting people up to fail when we buy them Christmas movies for Christmas. I think you'd agree that the best time to see a Christmas movie is in the month leading up to December 25th. But when you buy someone a Christmas movie for Christmas, and they open it on Christmas, Christmas is already "over" for that year. Unless they want to wait until the following Christmas to appreciate their present, they will be watching it at a time when Christmas is no longer an upcoming excitement in their hearts, an event on the horizon symbolizing joy.

So I guess I'm hoping that at least one of the two Christmas movies I'm buying people this year gets watched that night, when the last vestiges of this year's Christmas will still be with them. Considering who I'm buying them for, that seems unlikely at best. But neither can I really suggest that they open the present early, because that ruins the fun of Christmas morning -- while also implying that I expect them to watch it before Christmas, and will be waiting for their full report.

At least The Family Stone should be just as good of a watch in April, according to Fox.

A fondness for inept criminals

Each week on the Filmspotting podcast, the hosts (Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen) end the show with a top five in some category -- top five movies about redemption, top five movies set in Los Angeles, even top five movie scenes involving bicycles. The top five is usually a tie-in to the new movie they're reviewing that week.

I'm always excited for the top five, but rarely satisfied once I've listened to it. The movies I would choose rarely seem to show up on their lists. Which I don't think is any reflection of my taste in movies vs. theirs. It's just an indication of how many movies there are out there to choose from.

This past week was an exception.

I first heard about it from my friend Don, who texted me on Saturday "Listening to this week's Filmspotting as I tend to laundry, and now I know that you like movies with well-done inept criminals."

The tie-in this week was Killing Them Softly, which I was a mere half hour away from seeing at the time I received the text. As soon as I saw the movie, I'd be free to listen to the podcast, which would reveal to me Adam and Josh's top five inept movie criminals.

And Don sure was right.

For starters, they called this alternately the "H.I. McDunnough Memorial List" and the "I'll Be Taking Those Huggies and Whatever Cash You've Got Memorial List." The purpose of "naming" the list is to acknowledge the one choice they consider most obvious, which they would theoretically both pick as their #1 if they didn't exclude it from consideration. Past examples include "The Overlook Hotel Memorial List" for the top five movies about hotels.

Right off the bat I knew they had "gotten" me, since Raising Arizona is currently listed as my #3 movie on Flickchart. Even though I secretly think it may be my favorite movie of all time.

And then:

Josh's top 5:

5. Jasper and Horace, 101 Dalmatians
4. Jacob, A Simple Plan
3. Professor Marcus, The Ladykillers
2. Jerry Lundegaard, Fargo
1. Dignan, Bottle Rocket

Adam's top 5:

5. Sam and Eddie, Safe Men
4. Holland and Pendlebury, The Lavender Hill Mob
3. Virgil Starkwell, Take the Money and Run
2. Ken Pile, A Fish Called Wanda
1. Jerry Lundegaard, Fargo

Of the nine different movies mentioned here (Fargo was mentioned by both), I've seen six. Of those six, four are among my top 300 movies of all time (A Fish Called Wanda, Fargo, A Simple Plan and Bottle Rocket), three in my top 100 (Plan, Fargo and Wanda) and two (Fargo and Wanda) in my top ten.

So yeah, I'd say I was pretty satisfied by this week's top five.

But as these things do, it also got me thinking: Am I drawn to movies about inept criminals?

If you had asked me that question without providing any of the evidence why you were asking, I'd have said "No, I don't think so. No more than anyone else, that's for sure."

But I wonder. Because those aren't the only favorites of mine that feature hapless hoods.

(And watch out for spoilers. If you see a name of a movie you haven't seen in bold, skip on to the next -- I may be spoiling something about it.)

Looking only at my current Flickchart top 20, you could make arguments for the following:

Pulp Fiction (#4). The guys eating their Big Kahuna burgers are pretty inept, considering that they got caught with their pants down, gunned down while eating burgers for breakfast. But then there's also the ineptitude of Vincent Vega blowing off Marvin's head because of a pothole -- this after he and his friend Jules forgot to check the back room for a gunman who should have killed them. And never mind the singular bone-headedness of Butch, whose unusual plan to screw over and subsequently escape the mob involves returning to his house when they're looking for him.

Glengarry Glen Ross (#11). When their priggish boss denies them the new Glengarry leads, Dave and Shelly decide to knock over their own office to steal them, planning to sell them to the competition. That plan is destined to fail in numerous ways, even if you remove the last part about selling the spoils of your theft in the same small industry where you already work -- where the police are most likely to look for it. 

Goodfellas (#12). Although you can't be inept and last in the mafia very long, in the end, everyone has a slip-up that results in their eventual whacking. Particular to this movie, however, most of the crew that pulled off the Lufthansa robbery gets whacked because they can't follow the simple instruction not to spend their newfound wealthy in showy ways that will attract attention.

Run Lola Run (#16). Mani blows an otherwise smooth and simple job to transport a bag of money when he leaves it on the subway, obeying an instinctive reaction to elude a pair of cops who aren't even looking for him. Later he walks into a grocery store to rob it without wearing anything that would conceal his identity. Meanwhile, Lola tries to rob a bank by holding her own father at gunpoint.

Unforgiven (#20). An old gunslinger goes on a mission to claim a bounty on a pair of thugs who beat and cut up a couple of prostitutes, but nearly dies from the flu because he got wet in the rain (and then beaten by the sheriff, but you kind of feel like the rain is what did him in). One of the two thugs is then shot to death on the toilet, a pathetic way to go even if it might not have been helped.

You could even argue that #19 The Shawshank Redemption contains a hapless criminal, because the actual killer of Andy Dufresne's wife boastfully confesses to the crime while in prison.

I guess you could say that almost any movie that has an element of crime in it has someone who isn't that good at it. So I don't want to stretch this too far.

But I can't help but notice all the titles of movies featuring hapless criminals as you continue down my list. Time Bandits (#21) might qualify. The Bicycle Thief (#26) definitely does. Though it does drop off after that. Maybe that's because #27 is Bound, and Bound contains a group of the smartest criminal types you've ever seen in a movie.

What to make of this concentration near the top of my list of movies about backfired criminal exploits?

I don't really know. Though it could mean I have a fascination with the best laid plans gone awry. Or maybe I just like watching people who have truly made a mess, comical or otherwise, of their lives, to remind myself that I needn't get too down on myself just because I don't know where I want to be in my career in ten years.

I'll have to think on it some more.

But this realization does partly explain why I'm so in love with Killing Them Softly, a film I seem to like more than anyone else on the planet other than Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman (who also rhapsodized over it). More than the criminal ineptitude that inspired this week's top five, though, Softly really demonstrates how all crime is destined to have consequences, even if the criminals carry it off with a decent amount of panache.

That and a bunch of stuff about Obama and the financial crisis, but we won't get into that right now.