Beauty and the Beast (a movie review post)

What I want to do here is to talk about Disney's scheme of remaking their animated hits as live action movies, because, other than Maleficent, it seems rather pointless. However, when the goal is to make money, they are quite nicely fulfilling their point. Beauty and the Beast has already made over $200 million, and it hasn't, at the time of this writing, even been out a week. However, that discussion has nothing to do with the actual movie and should probably be saved for some other time. Or not had at all. Well, I'm sure plenty of other people are having it, so, probably, I will skip it other than to say that I liked the idea of re-telling the stories, as in Maleficent, from some other point of view.

Of course, the problem with talking about this movie, at least for me, is that it's very difficult to do as a thing all on its own without any kind of comparison or consideration of the 1991 animated feature. Probably, that's impossible. Disney's original Beauty was a landmark film and, really, changed animation forever. It was the first animated movie to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy awards and was the cause of the best animated feature category being created. This movie, the remake, despite beautiful animation, can't be said to be anything more than conventional. In fact, my daughter's response to it (and she's the one who wanted to see it) was, "It was all right."

I think I liked it more than she did. But she hasn't seen the original in so long she barely remembers it, and it was never anything to her more than another movie on video. In post-Pixar days, it's difficult for earlier animated movies to hold up. Maybe that's why they need to be remade...

But part of what I liked about it had to do with nostalgia more than any inherent quality in the movie itself. Which is not to say that it's not a good movie. It is. It's a good movie, possibly very good, with some great performances and great music, which goes without saying since much of the music is from the original.

Also, as you could expect from a Disney movie, the cast is great. Emma Watson is charming. Kevin Kline is... well, he's Kevin Kline, so he was great. Dan Stevens looks princely, which, especially for Disney, is appropriate. Luke Evans is incredible and came close to stealing the whole movie. Not quite but close. Ewan McGregor and Ian McKellen are an amazing voice pair. They, also, came close to stealing the show.

Really, though, what it comes down to is this:
If you're a fan of the original because you remember seeing it in the theater when it was first released, you will probably get a big shot of nostalgia from this movie and love it. I'm going to guess that children will really enjoy it, too, but I don't know if it is the kind of movie that will actually compete with animated movies for their attention. For people in between, well, it's probably not going to be anything special. It's good, but it's not going to blow you away or change your life. It's probably worth seeing on the big screen, though.

"Is this a good place to stand?" (a Battle of Five Armies review)

It is not an illegitimate question to ask me why I saw this movie. I've not hid how much I disliked... no, loathed... the other two movies in this godforsaken trilogy that erupted from Peter Jackson's bowels (more on that in a moment), so why would I bother with this one? The answer is actually very simple: I don't earn the right to speak disparagingly about it without having seen it. It's much easier to give examples of why you don't like (hate) something than it is to defend your reasons for why you think you won't like something. There's no good response to, "But you haven't tried it."

As a related example:
My oldest son (both of my boys) detests the Hobbit movies. Not in his exact words, but he described it like this: Imagine the most beautiful bathroom in the world. Gorgeous. Marble and gold and perfumed. And it has a heated golden throne of a toilet. But, when you sit down to take a dump, it is still just a dump, and, specifically, The Battle of Five Armies is a slow motion movie of Peter Jackson on that beautiful, golden toilet in that gilded bathroom, taking a long, excruciating dump.

But he has this friend who is always attacking his position that, compared to the book, the movies are horrible. She loves the movies and thinks they are better than the book. The problem? She hasn't read the book. But she believes that since the movies have made so much money and that she likes them that that is proof enough that the book must really not be that good. And why bother with it, anyway, when she loves the movie so much? [Which goes back to what I said in my review of Desolation about kids not wanting to bother with the book because of the movie.] Her opinion, though, is ill informed and without authority.

So I went to see the movie so that I could have the freedom to talk about how stupid it all is.

And, this time, I'm not even going to mention the deviations from the book; I'm just going to talk about the blatant stupid of the movie. Which started immediately, I might add. There was so much stupid, in fact, that I lost count of the stupid before Smaug was even dead. Let's look at the big two:

1. Bard is left locked in prison as the dragon is attacking. Naturally, he's in a ragestorm trying to break his way out. But it's a good, solid prison, and he's having no luck. But he ends up with a rope that he's able to grapple a boat with. A very slow-moving boat because the boat is loaded down with gold and on the verge of sinking. And let me be clear: This is a boat being paddled by just a couple of dudes. Against all odds (and physics (maybe Peter Jackson has never been in a boat that was still tied to a dock)), rather than the boat stopping, the boat rips the wall out of the prison! Without even slowing down!

And just to continue the stupid of that scene, rather than go out the hole in the wall, Bard suddenly is able to punch a whole in the ceiling and go out that way instead.

2. During the battle, Bard's bow gets broken in half. How is he supposed to shoot the dragon out of the sky with a broken bow? Answer: Jam the two halves of the bow into a crumbling structure (because the dragon smashed it and set it on fire) and proceed to pull the string back as if nothing happened. Oh, except, now, the string is like three times as long and he uses his son to steady the arrow. Which leads me to believe that Jackson has probably never even touched a bow, because what Bard does is the equivalent of trying to shoot down an airplane (that's crawling at you) with one of those toy bows with the suction cup arrows. And, yes, I'm saying this as someone who was at one time into archery and has experience with bows.

The worst part about the movie, though, is that I couldn't wait for Thorin to die. I wanted him to just get it over with. Between all the slow motion talking and the drug hallucinations, I was just through with him. Jackson managed to undermine the entire point of The Hobbit through what he did with Thorin and the Arkenstone. There was no power in Thorin's apology to Bilbo, because there was no understanding on the part of Thorin, just recovery.

Oh, and to go back to mere stupid: Azog blasting through the ice as if he was rocket-powered. Seriously, someone send Peter Jackson back to school so that he can learn things like physics. And to teach him some appreciation of literature. Jackson's Hobbit is the worst piece if fan fiction filth I've ever seen or heard about.
And, yes, that's how I really feel.

You Know You've Made It When...

You know you've made it as an actor when you get turned into a Lego minifigure. I think it used to be when you were turned into any kind of action figure, but, these days, especially after McFarlane Toys came onto the scene in the mid-90s, almost anyone can get turned into an action figure. It ceased to be something difficult to achieve. However, it's still noteworthy to get turned into a minifigure even if minifigures don't look like the actors.

Even more noteworthy? Getting turned into two completely different minifigures. And, yes, okay, this topic completely came out of a conversation with my sons. They have a completely disregard for action figures because, well, all sorts of movies get action figures (or, at least, used to; I suppose that trend has died down somewhat in the last few years), but only the really cool ones get made into Lego.

Of course, this whole conversation started with Harrison Ford.

Star Wars was the first Lego franchise, so you can almost say this all started with him.

That's one of the very first Han Solo minifigures, back when they were still yellow like regular Lego minifigures. Now, they look like this:

And, of course, the second incarnation of Harrison Ford as a minifigure:

There ensued a long "discussion" of what other actors had two different character minifigs. [Don't ask why discussion is in quotes; just accept it.] Here's what we came up with:

Chris Evans:

Johnny Depp:

Samuel Jackson:

Ian McKellen:

Christopher Lee:

Orlando Bloom:

Those are the ones we came up with. Ones that have actual, physical minifigures. There are a few more that have two different characters but one of the minifigures is only in one of the Lego video games.

If you can think of more, let me know!

How To Be... a Knight

The word "knight" conjures up all sorts of images, but I bet the one that charges to the forefront is something like this:

You know, that whole "knight in shining armor" thing. But the ways of becoming a knight have changed through the years.

For instance, it is both easier and harder to become a knight today than it was, say, 1000 years ago. Rather than learning to wear armor and ride a horse and fight with swords (which all sounds rather difficult and time consuming), these days, you only have to make a significant contribution to British society to be knighted. Somehow, the learning to wear armor, ride a horse, and fight with swords sounds easier. And more dangerous.

But, since I know you are all thinking about shining armor and all of that, we'll take about that kind of knight and not Sir Ian McKellen or Dame Maggie Smith.

So what did it take to be a knight all those long years ago? Well, let's look at that on the historical continuum.

The word originates from a word meaning servant, which eventually came to mean a military servant following a king. So, at that time, about 1000 years ago, all you needed to do was pick up your weapon (which probably wasn't a sword) and follow the king or warlord or whomever into battle and you were a knight. Pretty easy. You didn't even have to know how to fight, which was good, because most of those guys weren't actually trained in combat, not like we think of it.

Within a few hundred years, during the Hundred Years' War in fact, the specific sense of the word had changed to mean a mounted heavy cavalryman. These guys did know how to fight and were trained to both wear armor and wield a variety of weapons while mounted, so the meaning of the word had the connotation of a skilled warrior. By about 1300, being a knight was a rank of dignity that was bestowed because of martial prowess. To be a knight was something that was earned, and it wasn't easy. I think this ideal is probably what most people think of when they think of knights, although we weren't really to the "shining armor" part quite yet.

But the word wasn't finished changing...

See, to be a knight you had to have a horse, a warhorse, in fact, that could carry a man in full armor and often wear armor itself. These were not cheap, so, basically, only the wealthy, the landowners, could support owning a warhorse. By 1500, the term had already begun to change to be an honorific for landowners. Yes, they were still required to be able to sit a warhorse if they needed to go to war, but they weren't necessarily good fighters. Actually, it's slightly more complicated than that...

If you had money and owned land and had horses, you could afford to have your sons taught to fight, so it was pretty normal that the wealthy had some fighting skills that placed them above the masses, but they no longer had to demonstrate those skills to be a knight; they just tended to gain the skills by the fact that they were knights. Some of them were very skilled, but, mostly, it was a title of position, not ability. And it was around this time that what we think of as the "knight in shining armor" really came into being, because that was the time period when armor technology really began to take off.

Plate armor as developed in the 1400's.

So there you go, many different ways of being a knight. Of course, you can't really be a knight in shining armor anymore, not in any real sense. However, you can always join the Society for Creative Anachronism to get a taste of what it would have been like.

"All shall love me and despair!" -- The Fellowship Revisited

I got to go out to Skywalker Ranch the other night to watch the newly digitally re-mastered extended cut  of Fellowship of the Ring. This is (sort of) in honor of the Blu-Ray release of the movies. It is, at least, because of the Blu-Ray release. Lord of the Rings was actually long enough ago, at this point, that the movie was filmed on, um, actual film. Being digitally re-mastered is part of the whole Blu-Ray process. Evidently, only a very small pool of people will get to see a theatrical release of the digital version, so I was very glad to get to be a part of that. Of course, The Two Towers and The Return of the King will follow over the next two weeks.

It's actually quite thrilling to see them on the big screen again. And Fellowship is my favorite of the three. In fact, and I know we're in the midst of gushing over Harry Potter at the moment, it may be the best film adaptation of a book ever (sorry, the adaptations of Mr. Potter were, on the whole, merely adequate). The same can't be said for the other two installments, but Fellowship is as close as I've seen with any movie for capturing the essence of the book it came from. [If we include comic books into the mix, I'd have to say that Spider-Man comes pretty darn close, too.]

See, the problem is they're so long. Okay, well, that's not the main problem; the main problem is that we've already seen them. Even though we own the extended cuts, it's hard to just sit down and watch them from beginning to ending without taking breaks. It's like that with, basically, any movie we've already seen, but it's worse with the LotR films. Because they're so long! They need to be long (I like that they're long), but, when you have three kids, no, wait, when you have my daughter, it's fairly impossible to do anything for even half that time without interruption. Last time we put Fellowship in, I think it took us about six hours to watch the whole thing. Six hours! It's really hard to stay immersed in the fantasy when you have to continually feed the human-sized hummingbird that keeps zipping in for food.

But at the theater... at the theater, you are forced to stay immersed. And, of course, my daughter wasn't there, so that made things a lot easier, too. And it was so good to flow back into Tolkien's world. I love the Shire in Fellowship. I don't know that there's anything Jackson could have done to make it more like the world I imagined from the book. And the fact that the stone trolls are there... And I could never believe they didn't include the gift giving scene in the theatrical version, so I love that part in the extended cut. Of course, the real triumph of the films is the casting. Those aren't actors; they are those characters. There is no Ian McKellen, only Gandalf.

I only have one issue with the film version of Fellowship: the Balrog. I can understand why they chose to use a large demon-like creature, and it is very impressive within the confines of the movie. However, the description in the book suggests more a creature of impression rather than substance. A creature of shadow and darkness and fire. And, yes, the Balrog in the movie is exactly that, but, still... Oh, and I'm always unhappy that Glamdring doesn't behave appropriately. Sting glows, yet Glamdring does not. For me, that's a huge oversight.

Seeing the movie, again, reminded me just how long it's been since my last reading of LotR. It's definitely time to do that again. As I've said before, I don't often re-read, but Tolkien is one of those exceptions to that, and it is time. The issue is that, now, I just want to toss aside the books I'm currently reading and pick up Fellowship. I won't do that, but I want to. It may be time for another reading of The Hobbit to my kids, too.