Tag: lotr

Books and movies on January-February 2025

BarnsLeave a comment

Hi friend,

I’ve been spending most of my time so far this year planning a trip to Japan, tamping down impostor syndrome as I begin a new job, and getting to the end of Dragon Quest XI on the Nintendo Switch. Somehow, a few books and movies have crept under the shutters. May I share them with you?

*

BOOKS

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1954

Back for another crack at LOTR more than twenty years after the first, when film fever was at its height and my attention span absolutely did not stand up to all the songs and poems. Now, I am the right side of 40 and ready to meet Tolkien in his vast and carefully tended garden — because it is a garden, if you pay close attention to the extended descriptions of plant matter. And you should! It’s a quest, it’s an epic war between good and evil, but for me it’s most of all a showcase for the art of description, a ramble through many varied environments all rendered in rich detail: forests, concert halls, craggy peaks, forbidding caves, and enchanted lands of mysterious sprites. Why wouldn’t the world’s forces band together to protect such an array of extraordinary settings from the forces of evil? There are petty squabbles and narrow minds, and we have to make sure that’s as big as our problems ever get. I now plod into book two in full knowledge of all that lies ahead and find myself surprisingly willing to make the journey, just to see it all through the poet’s eyes.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1955

If the first part was gathering a party and exploring the garden, this part is understanding the scale of the threat, the stakes, and seeing exactly how dark and hard-edged things can get. It strikes me that Frodo of the books is much wiser and clearer-headed than Elijah Wood’s wide-eyed interpretation, but it’s been a while since I saw the films; twenty years, in fact. I struggled to push through this one, to be honest. I think the encroaching endless night makes the reader’s journey mirror that of our heroes. Still, Tolkien’s powers of description and world building leave me in awe.

Backyard Campout / Dance Divas (Ella & Olivia #26 and #33)
by Yvette Poshoglian, illustrated by Danielle McDonald, 2020 / 2023

Old mate Yvette has published several dozen books at this point, mostly these single-sitting tales of siblings learning some basic lesson and having fun along the way, so I thought maybe it was a full-time gig… nope. She still holds down a job with the NSW Department of Education. This leads me to consider whether writers should be out in the world by day, honing their observational senses and keeping up with the hopes, cares, and dreams of real people, then going home to reflect that in their writing. More than that, it reminds me (again) that there is nothing keeping me from ‘making the blank page blink’, as Ashleigh Young put it. Anyway: the kids don’t need me to read them stories this basic anymore.

Whetū Toa and the Magician
by Steph Matuku, 2018

Awesome to read my super-Pākeha kids a fun, silly, ambitious yarn with a te ao Māori perspective. I had my doubts but they were hooked from the first chapter and laughed often. It’s pretty anarchic stuff but I sense a broader theme emerging that will no doubt be developed in subsequent books as Whetū explores her powers further.

The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
by Bill Watterson, 1995

I’ve hung out with Calvin and Hobbes many times but never their creator, who has much to say here about the comics industry of the late 80s and early 90s and about his dedication to a particular set of principles. It’s hard to disagree, especially on the point that merchandising can only ever cheapen the original art.

Katherine Carlyle
by Rupert Thomson, 2015

A propulsive and compelling read, though it meanders aimlessly, exists mainly to indulge Thomson’s fantasies of walking away, and ends abruptly and weakly. All this is also true of last year’s ‘How to Make a Bomb’ aka ‘Dartmouth Park’, which is almost the same narrative but from an older man’s perspective rather than a young woman’s. It’s almost impossible to feel sympathy for either protagonist, and the more recent novel at least bears the authenticity of Thomson himself being an older man; but Kit… there’s something fundamental about Kit, namely her existence as an IVF baby and her over-identification with the eight years she spent literally on ice, that I find intriguing. It’s a pity Thomson does little more with it than follow a solipsistic thread when the material could’ve had real thematic weight. Still the master of metaphor and simile, though.

*

MOVIES

PADDINGTON IN PERU
directed by Dougal Wilson, 2024

Forgettable. I appreciated the many nods to Herzog, but I think the magic is gone.

LILO & STITCH
directed by Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois, 2002

This looks and feels absolutely fantastic from the off. Unbelievable that it was made by Disney, the corporate behemoth whose core business is meticulously curated, once-in-a-lifetime tourist experiences based on ruthlessly acquired intellectual property, because this movie has almost total contempt for the gormless tourists wandering around Lilo’s Hawaiian village. There’s the big, sunburnt guy who keeps dropping his ice cream, but pay particular attention to the lobotomised patrons at David’s fire juggling show, especially the guy in sunglasses and a blue singlet, whose open-mouthed grin shows his engagement with local culture and traditions will never go deeper than these two minutes. In time, the most grittily impressive story elements will be swallowed up as too many characters carry out too many chase scenes that go on too long, and another flat turn from Daveigh Chase, who ruined the English dub of Spirited Away, doesn’t help. But here is a family film that renders poverty in surprisingly close detail, even if ‘found family’ is a bit of a lazy solution. Charming, chaotic and deeper than expected.

THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS 2
directed by Chris Renaud, 2019

Kids’ choice for movie night. Cross-cuts across three different storylines featuring all your favourites from the first film (what were they, Mitch? Dave? Scratcher? I didn’t see it tbh) and a few exciting new guys (here comes Cogmonster!). Mostly harmless and bloodless, albeit with some lazily one-note and vindictive villains, adding up to ‘be brave’ and ‘look at the animals do things animals don’t usually do’.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
directed by Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991

Better every time I see it, and the gold standard for anything Disney has produced in my lifetime. These were the days when Disney just tried their hardest to make an animated Broadway musical, with all the creative departments filled by proven stage legends. As a kid I would never have given this the time of day, and while my kids sat through the whole thing, they didn’t especially enjoy it. Maybe lines like “I’m incredibly good at expec-tor-at-ing” and the irredeemably parochial cast of villagers don’t strike you as remarkable until you’re grown up.

DECISION TO LEAVE
directed by Park Chanwook, 2022

Mostly style over substance. I think this about most Korean films and I’m not sure where my prejudice comes from, but look, I tried to describe the plot of this film to my wife and we both started laughing halfway through. The thing about it I can’t shake, and which I think I owe to living in a country where indigeneity and land rights are such a prominent part of our public discourse, is Seo-rae’s (Tang Wei, excellent) identification with the mountain her grandfather left her and the intergenerational scars hinted at by the extreme decisions she makes in this story. In my thinking, Seo-rae’s deepest love is for that mountain, and it’s when her head is turned from it that she truly loses her way.

*

More soon — very soon, in fact —

Love b

The Hobbit: Roll Back The Red Carpet

Barns4 Comments

Today The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has its world premiere in Wellington – or Wellywood, as Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and former Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast wanted us to be known. (I hope you’ll indulge me saying ‘us’ even though I’ve only lived in Wellington for a year. I’ve developed quite an attachment to the city and its people.)

This premiere is quite a big deal, mainly because it is a world premiere and will be attended by the film’s stars. They held the world premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in Wellington as well, and it was quite an occasion – the culmination of “the single biggest phenomenon ever to hit our humble little shores”, according to one TV news reporter in this clip. That was kind of how I felt at the time, too. The Return of the King premiere seemed like a celebration of our capacity as a small country to do big things in a humble way. A couple of weeks later, I was watching ROTK in Auckland’s Lido cinema and marvelling at what they could put on the screen nowadays, let alone the fact that the visual limits of cinema were being extended right here in little old New Zealand, and by New Zealanders.

So now, almost ten years later, we have another world premiere in Wellington as Jackson returns to the wizards and elves he knows best. After I came out of Killing Them Softly last night, I found Courtenay Place closed and the red carpet being rolled out:

Red Carpet | The Hobbit Premiere | Wellington | Courtenay Place

Exciting, huh?

No, not really. To be honest with you, I’ve written The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey off and almost certainly won’t see it in the cinema. The humility and pride of 2003 has been replaced with the political chest-beating and cynicism of 2012. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

At bottom, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit ought to be evaluated as a Peter Jackson film – because that’s what it is, much more than it is a cultural phenomenon or a Key Government policy. On these grounds, to say that I almost certainly won’t see it is kind of crazy. As much as the Lord of the Rings films were glorified time-pass, I actually quite enjoyed them while I was in the cinema. I forgot them all pretty quickly within days and definitely didn’t watch any of the extended editions, but for those 3+ hours each December, I was entertained and got my money’s worth. That’s all you can really ask for at the movies.

I also expected King Kong to be an awful, bombastic double-rehash of a past classic and the excess of the LOTR, but I actually enjoyed it a great deal. It was as big and loud as suspected but contained unexpected emotional depths. (It also contained a scene in which a giant gorilla pile-drives a dinosaur’s jaw into the ground. I mean, come on. Awesome.) Then there was The Adventures of Tintin, officially directed by Steven Spielberg but unofficially co-directed with producer Jackson, which I loved. Very entertaining and true to the spirit of the books. They even managed to improve the storyline – as I’ve written before, Tintin books are surprisingly full of plot holes.

Going back a bit further, I will also happily watch and re-watch The Frighteners, which I think pulls off the comedy-horror tone far better than a lot of people give it credit for. Heavenly Creatures, meanwhile, is an unforgettable piece of work. I saw it with my mother in Te Awamutu and remember that we hardly said a word to each other for about twenty minutes afterwards. It was probably the first time I was stunned into silence by a film, shocked and moved to a degree that I didn’t know what to say. Jackson’s splatter films aren’t really my thing, but they are certainly admirable for their ingenuity. However, Forgotten Silver, a brilliant one-hour TV film from 1995, is Jackson’s finest hour as a filmmaker and one of my all-time favourites.

So, given Jackson’s pedigree – just don’t mention The Lovely Bones – I should be queuing up for a ticket to The Hobbit with the rest of the country. Why, then, am I casting it aside?

For a start, the manner in which the production was kept here by the Key Government seems very morally suspect. New Zealand now has separate union laws regarding film industry employees, and Warner Bros got a tailor-made tax break not offered to other studios. It was a remarkably political play, led not by our Minister for the Arts, Culture and Heritage but by our Prime Minister (who is also our Minister for Tourism), to keep the production here in New Zealand, rather than see it escape to Eastern Europe or wherever.

And with that, the Key Government was all in. Having made some very specific tax concessions, and having rewritten labour laws for the production’s benefit, they needed The Hobbit to reap some tangible rewards for the country so that the people of New Zealand would accept it. As part of the deal with Warner Bros, NZ was given the right to use The Hobbit as a Middle-earth marketing crutch for the NZ tourism industry – but naturally, the Hollywood studio wore the pants in the relationship, not the small country in the South Pacific. Tourism NZ reportedly had to go to Warner Bros to ask about pretty much anything they wanted to do in their Middle-earth campaign.

This is where things start to get a bit messy, and my head starts to hurt. Tourism NZ has been using a similarly morally suspect marketing strategy for some time, based around the inaccurate slogan ‘100% Pure’. For the release of The Hobbit, particularly the period of months either side of its Wellington world premiere and subsequent global release, that slogan has been transmuted to ‘100% Middle-earth’ (also untrue). In turn, our humility has been buried under the language of advertising, pasted on in slick, shallow layers. (Giovanni Tiso has an excellent post up about all this on his blog Bat, Bean, Beam called Leaving Middle-earth, which I highly recommend reading.)

More than anything else, though, I’m just so tired of the endless Middle-earth advertising. It’s everywhere: on lampposts in the streets, in internet banner ads, on TV, and all over Wellington’s buildings. The film, the city, and the country are all being sold in the same way, an unavoidable triple threat birthed from the one fantastic seed that is The Hobbit. Here I thought The Lord of the Rings was in-your-face with its advertising campaign but I swear it wasn’t as pervasive as The Hobbit has been. Worse still, it’ll happen all over again for the next two Decembers as Jackson stretches a 300-page book into three movies.

It’s like a formerly decent TV show has been renewed for another three seasons after jumping the shark – except as Wellingtonians, the Hobbit show is our lives, and there’s nothing we can do to keep the cameras away.

In the film The Corporation, commodities broker Carlton Brown commented that in our world today, only that which is commodified gains meaning. He said this is in relation to environmental conditions, which are not yet capable of being traded on the open market and therefore of little importance to the richest and most powerful people on the planet. This speaks to the overwhelmingly consumer-driven nature of the society we have constructed: anything and everything can be a product, as long as you can get people to buy it.

I’m no less susceptible to commodifying my surroundings than anyone else, but where that commodification is so excessive as to become blatantly intrusive, I instinctively recoil. And The Hobbit, it seems, is very much a commodity in the eyes of the New Zealand Government, to be bought and sold for as long as it is profitable. When the hype dies down and Tourism NZ/the Key Government move on and The Hobbit stops being a commodity, probably several years from now, maybe I’ll be able to enjoy it.