Sunday, January 05, 2014

I'm starting to feel about Peter Jackson the way I feel about George Lucas and Woody Allen. He made a couple of really great movies, but now that he answers to no one, he's become self-indulgent and a bit tedious.

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG has a little bit of a beginning, but ends abruptly -- about where you might put the end of the second act if the three parts of the trilogy were, in fact, one eight hour movie. That seems to be how PJ has conceived of the Hobbit series. He has padded out the book, which was much shorter than LOTR, with the beginnings of an invented love story (no women in the original) and a gratuitous social-justice story, all to make it slosh into movie theatres in three consecutive waves.

I hope someone out there is working on a Phantom Edit.

I had originally heard a rumor that one of the Hobbit movies was going to be a prequel. That could have been challenging. What section of the vast body of Tolkien's Middle Earth history do you pillage? Do you tell how Smaug took over the Lonely Mountain? That's kind of a downer. Or do you tell one of the stories from the Silmarillion, none of which is much fleshed out? There is The Quest of Erebor, Tolkien's posthumously published tale of what went on behind the scenes during Bilbo's adventure; but it's more or less the same story told from another POV.

However I figured if anyone could do it justice, it would be PJ.

The movie isn't so bad. There's a lot of fun stuff. It's just that things go on too long. Chase scenes go on too long. Dialog scenes go on too long. And instead of making one really amazing 150-minute movie, this is the chest and belly of one monstrously long beast.

At a Roman triumph, they sent the famous general down the boulevard on a chariot, and all Rome applauded him. Meanwhile, a slave was put on the chariot to tell him, from time to time, "Remember, you are only human."

Or as Aaron Sorkin put it, "If you're dumb, hire smart people. If you're smart, hire smart people who disagree with you."

(So, what adventure recently blew your socks off?)

3:07 PM

2 Comments:

"The movie isn't so bad. There's a lot of fun stuff. It's just that things go on too long. Chase scenes go on too long. Dialog scenes go on too long."

You could be talking about his remake of King Kong.

The sad thing is that The Hobbit movies are going to make a ton of money and there will be no incentive to rein him in.

By  Arlo, at 10:21 PM  

I'd love to see a phantom edit of Jackson's King Kong, following the Shoedsack/Cooper cut scene for scene... the material's all in there, I reckon, and what a tight and terrific piece of narrative it would make.

By  Stephen Gallagher, at 8:35 PM  

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