“In emotional genres, you cannot advocate good taste as an argument.”
So sayeth Guillermo del Toro in a New Yorker profile by that name, but I think it has a certain resonance for political blogging as well. I also look forward to del Toro’s The Hobbit:
Del Toro, with his ornate aesthetic, was hardly the obvious choice to follow Jackson, who in his trilogy had placed Tolkien’s mythological characters in realistic landscapes—one worried about Frodo’s furry toes getting frostbite as he trudged through heavy snow. As del Toro put it, Jackson had reconstructed the Battle of Mordor with the same exactitude as the Battle of Gallipoli. Del Toro described his own style as more “operatic.” Speaking of Tolkien, he said, “I never was a mad fan of the ‘Rings’ trilogy.” “The Hobbit,” he said, “is much less black-and-white. The monsters are not just evil. They’re charming, funny, seductive. Smaug is an incredibly smart guy!”
What other stories have we been overlooking in the mad crush of the last few days?
Redshirt
Wait, what? Del Toro is back on The Hobbit? Did I miss something? I thought he backed out and Jackson was going to direct again. Or did I dream all that?
Also, can’t wait for this movie!
Punchy
You just rusty-tromboned Doug’s post!
Violet
Well, there’s the psyops story
Apparently they’re going to investigate it now.
Redshirt
Does Bigfoot ever “bigfoot” him or herself? One wonders…
aimai
I have mixed feelings about this. We just finished re-watching the entire Ring and though I thought lots of the choices that were made were unfortunate it was pretty gorgeous, and let the New Zealand landscape and the fine craftmanship of the various prop divisions speak for themselves. I’m not sure I want the Hobbit to be too cutesy and fantasmagorical. On the other hand? I’ll definitely go see it.
aimai
Trentrunner
Del Toro’s out (and has been for months).
Jackson is back in (after labor strife and ulcer surgery).
Shooting begins March 21.
R-Jud
Mmm. IMDB still says Jackson’s directing.
Royston Vasey
113 confirmed dead in Christchurch. This number will go up.
75% of city back on power
50% of city back on mains water
Not only has this earthquake been terrifying and traumatising for the people of Canterbury, it has also affected our animals. They are scared too.
Hundreds of people and their animals are affected and displaced by the earthquake. It is with this in mind, the SPCA Canterbury has set up the PET EMERGENCY EARTHQUAKE FUND to help people and animals in distress over the coming weeks.
All donations from the PET EMERGENCY EARTHQUAKE FUND go towards the additional costs needed to support the health, welfare and care of the large numbers of affected animals in Canterbury.
Tony in NZ
Mark S.
Did anyone else feel the movies started getting a little tiresome (and stupid) once the big battles started? I think the first one was by far the best movie because it didn’t consist mostly of CGI orcs getting slaughtered by the thousands. You felt more for the characters because they weren’t lost in all the mayhem.
Bob L
“Smaug is an incredibly smart guy!”
I might be wrong but I thought Smaug was based on Ayn Raynd?
Linkmeister
@aimai: But it IS fantasmagorical. It’s a classic Quest story, but it’s not the Heroic variety. I love LOTR as an example of the latter, but The Hobbit is great in a different whimsical way.
Royston Vasey
@Trentrunner: Agreed!
Mr Jackson will be back directing The Hobbit as soon as he is fit and well.
Was front page news here in NZ when he went into hospital.
Del Toro has been off the movie for some time now.
Tony in NZ
Redshirt
@Mark S.: Totally. The big battles have become the weakest parts of the movies for me. They’re all the same: Super scary army of orcs threatens our beleaguered heroes, until at the last moment, something or someone arrives to turn the tide.
I much prefer the smaller encounters, or no fighting at all.
Tom Hilton
Naga happen, as becomes clear later in the article.
On the other hand, I am really hoping they greenlight At the Mountains of Madness. I think del Toro would be perfect for that.
Alexandra
Other Kiwis on Balloon Juice? Outstanding. Miss kumara very much.
Royston Vasey
@Bob L: Could mean Sméagol/Gollum. Or then, maybe not.
jibeaux
I don’t know anything about any of this, but I think William of the Bull is an awesome name and I want to know why we of the more boring Anglo-Saxon heritages can’t have cool names. I’m not counting things like Cooper Throckmorton IV as a cool name.
MikeJ
I never made it all the way through the first movie. Last week when TCM showed the third one I managed to suffer through about 20 minutes.
I really wish they’d find somebody else to direct. Not that I’ll camp out to see The Hobbit in either case, but I would give it a higher likelihood of being a good movie with someone else at the helm.
Violet
Speaking of movies, the Oscars are this Sunday. I don’t think I’ve seen a single movie nominated for Best Film. I might have seen some of the ones nominated for other things.
R-Jud
@Mark S.:
Yeah, I agree. They were pretty spectacular on the big screen, but as someone who re-reads LOTR most years, I was looking at my watch a lot, and wishing they’d stop beating me over the head with the music. Yes, I get it. Frodo and Sam climbing Mount Doom is important. Enough with the pan pipes.
It was also pretty dumb for Jackson to not use Tolkien’s ending for the Two Towers– what a great goddamn cliffhanger. I remember finishing it for the first time late at night as a kid (“Frodo was alive, but taken by the enemy.”) and not being able to sleep or function the next day, because the third book was in my Mom’s room.
I loved the first movie. It was a good adaptation: it used the most filmic bits, and it made them feel very Tolkien-y: a good mix of silly, creepy, and epic. I did wonder why the elves in Lothlorien were stoned all the time, though.
Amir_Khalid
@Redshirt: Yeah, the studio (New Line, IIRC) postponed it again and again — they couldn’t line up the financing — until the shooting schedule began to conflict with work del Toro had lined up for after The Hobbit. Last anyone heard, Peter Jackson was in charge. But let’s hope that three years of del Toro’s preproduction work with Jackson will still be there on the screen.
Chris G
@Mark S.: I thought they were more than a little tiresome (and stupid), full stop.
Bob L
@Royston Vasey: Hey, just found out the Lord of the Rings trilogy is an Libertarian epic next to Atlas Shrugs.
The Volokh Conspiracy explains.
Isn’t it nice how fantasy books provide good models on how to run the real world?
r€nato
OMG OBAMA THE SOSHULIST SEEKRIT MOOSLIM DESTROY’D THE EEKONAMEE!
Highest they’ve been since… Clinton left office.
Tom Hilton
@Tom Hilton: What, no Lovecraft fans here? What is wrong with you people?
Nemo_N
Just saw on CNN “Boeing Wins $35 Billion Contract to Build Air Force Tankers”.
The reporter was gushing about all the jobs this will create (with graphics and all). Wolf Blitzer congratulated Boeing.
And guess what? Not one pip about “austerity” or “government spending”. I wonder why?
Mark S.
@Violet:
The only one I saw was Inception, which was damn good but won’t win.
lou
I thought the scrubbing bubbles of death in the last movie were a bit ridiculous, but I did love the Ride of the Rohirrim. (“Death!”) Tolkien’s description of this scene was thrilling and operatic and Jackson did a good job capturing it.
The Hobbit is definitely different in tone than LOTR and I worry that Jackson will lose that tenor and make it too close to LOTR. The Hobbit was a wry children’s book that Tolkien wrote for his young children. LOTR was an adolescent’s action story he wrote later for them when they were in their teens.
JonathanW
This is why you can’t trust Balloon Juice as a credible source.
Maybe John Cole should see if one of The Atlantic’s poetry fact-checkers is free?
aimai
@R-Jud:
Yes, I agree with all of these criticisms. I really didn’t need to see the endless orc birth scenes, or the grotty battles. In order to put those in they had to cut out the various important, humanizing elements: Sam’s gift from galadriel and the scouring of the shire. I also really disliked the way certain scenes were ‘magicked’ up–like the premature dotage of King Theoden which is “magically” stripped away. In the book its a perfectly explicable case of political poisoning, not magical aging.
aimai
Anne Laurie
@Tom Hilton:
With the Repubs we’ve got running amok, who needs a fictional version of “The Mountains of Madness”?
Elia
God, that Frankenstein sounds so awesome.
Sentient Puddle
@Tom Hilton:
When I first read that, I initially thought that there had been a movie made of that a while back. So I checked and…well, it seems you might get your wish.
trollhattan
This just in, California Republican Party still heavily populated by dipshytes. They’re reaching all the way to Mississippi for their convention dinner speaker.
http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2011/02/haley-barbour-to-speak-at-stat.html
I’m sure he’ll remind California that the Klan jess weren’t that bad, n’ stuff.
Also, too, Mister Warmth–John Bolton. Really guys, you couldn’t get Michael?
trollhattan
@Nemo_N:
Genuinely surprised. After the document switcheroo it looked as though EADS had it all but sewn up.
cleek
the worst part of the LOTR movies are the innumerable shots of Elijah Wood’s gigantic weepy eyes. the second worst part was the weepy chest-heaving bromance between Frodo and Sam. yes, they were close in the book, but i never got the impression that they were aching to fall into a deathless kiss.
R-Jud
@aimai:
I think of all the cuts made, that one would probably have angered Tolkien himself the most. It was a pretty direct comment about what had happened to Birmingham (and Britain generally) following WWI.
Speaking of Birmingham– behind my local pub is a modest two-story house called Fern Cottage. It was the last place Tolkien lived before he was orphaned. I run in the Lickey Woods a lot, and look for Entwives.
trollhattan
@trollhattan:
BTW, as the tanker production is slated for unionized Everett, Wash, this is a fine “screw you” to the alternative of assembling the competing plane in Southern “right-to-work” states.
aimai
@R-Jud:
How very cool.
Agreed, as well, on all the Frodo and Sam hate. Frodo should have been much older, and more staid and worn, not some ephebic weeper. And Sam should have been a skinny little fifteen year old, not a fat surfer dude with an accent. And he *never* should have called him anything but Mr. Frodo. Class issues are totally lost in the movie.
Also, why can’t the elves hire some damned gardeners to sweep up the leaves? Its so untidy. Isn’t there any other way of hammering home the pathetic fallacy than eternal autumn?
aimai
Redshirt
@R-Jud: That’s awesome! “Running with the Ents”. I’m jealous!
trollhattan
Discovery safely in orbit after its final liftoff.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2014315551_apusspaceshuttle.html
elmo
@lou:
“Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.”
One of my favorite passages, and typing it just now is giving me goosebumps. I can quote huge swaths of the book from memory.
Mark S.
Danny Ainge decides to shake up the roster for some reason. If any team should be in a win now mode, it’s the Celtics with their core of thirty-somethings. These are moves that shitty teams make and tell their fans they’re saving cap room for the future.
Mark S.
@aimai:
And why does Elrond spend the will trilogy looking like he’s passing a kidney stone. Does Aragorn really want this guy for a father-in-law?
srv
They’re remaking Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
I’d be upset about it, but the cast is stupendous.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340800/
Colin Firth, Ciarán Hinds, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Gary f’ing Oldman as Smiley.
Thankfully, Cowboy Bebop and GiTS live-actions look to be dying.
elmo
@Mark S.:
Elrond is just pissed that Neo pwned him again.
R-Jud
@Redshirt: The place was for sale shortly after I moved here, and out of curiosity, I looked it up online. I just about fell over when I learned about it.
Mark S.
@Mark S.:
That should be “whole trilogy,” not “will trilogy.” Anytime those edit buttons can come back would be most welcome.
Look! Lord of the Rings rings for sale up at the top!
Polar Bear Squares
Favorite director. Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth were masterpieces.
In the immortal words of Bart Scott … CAN’T WAIT!
elmo
Okay, animal update since this is an Open Thread.
We were supposed to take in a Pyr mom and pups two weeks ago for short-term fostering, but one of the pups is sick and they’ve all been quarantined for a while. In the meantime, though, we agreed to take in a Pyr/Newf mix who was found wandering lost in a snowstorm.
He’s ten months old and weighs about 120 pounds. We’re calling him Leviathan (Levi for short).
So then our local shelter, which is horrible, advertised that it had three Pyr mix babies, 6 weeks old, on their last day. Oh noes! Panic! Run down there and rescue the babies! So now they’re in my kitchen.
But wait. They don’t have puppy breath; they are starting to cut adult teeth; and they are VERY coordinated. They’re not six weeks, they’re twelve to sixteen weeks, and that means they’re NOT PYR MIXES at that size. Oh well, it’s still a good save, and we’ll find them good homes.
Also in the meantime, one of my goats gives birth to twins yesterday.
So that brings us to today. And this ad.
That amount of misery I can’t just ignore. So he’s coming home today too.
srv
Oh, and Martin Freeman is Bilbo, and there’s a rumor Leonard Nimoy will be Smaug!
freelancer
The rifftrax (MST3K for your ipod) for Birdemic is Naow Avalibull!
I know what I’m doing tonight!
srv
Voice that is.
Redshirt
@elmo: Mr. Frodo… we meet at last.
Yeah, tough casting at the time, since the actor still looks like Agent Smith as Elrond.
Tom Hilton
@Sentient Puddle: That article is from last July. As of sometime in January, IIRC (per the New Yorker profile), it still wasn’t definite.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@jibeaux: I have a totally cool name. Opie Jeanne.
Kejia
AL, there’s this little thing called google that you can check before making cultural references. Try typing “del toro hobbit” and the first result says that he quit in May.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/31/director-guillermo-del-to_n_595195.html
By the way, I hear this lady from AK is running for VP in the 2008 election. Care to comment?
Tonal Crow
@Tom Hilton:
That happened on 12/12/2000.
freelancer
Also,
Matt Drudge quotes conspiracy theorist and 9/11 Truther whackaloon Alex Jones, forgets that he disparaged the White House for hiring someone with “past associations to 9/11 Truthers”.
Dickweed.
joe parallax
The publishing event of 2011
Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President by Jack Cashill
Published by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Mary Matalin is editor-in-chief of Threshold Editions
Publisher’s blurb
h/t http://books.simonandschuster.com/Deconstructing-Obama/Jack-Cashill/9781451611113
Origuy
In other movie news, John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War has been picked up by Paramount. It was a great, old-fashioned space opera story, like Heinlein at his best without the libertarian politics.
Tonal Crow
@R-Jud: I agree. They messed up the hobbits’ encounter with Faramir, which was much more convincing — and self-consistent — in the text. I mean, after the Ringwraith saw Frodo holding the Ring on that bridge, why weren’t all Nine of them in close pursuit ever after? Also, it was over the top to have Frodo ordering Sam to go home, and worse to have Sam obey. That just couldn’t happen.
But then, I prefer well-told stories to ever-higher heaps of eye-candy.
freelancer
@freelancer:
FYNoEDIT
Drudge didn’t just quote Jones, Drudge is promoting him, and his goofball radio show.
joe parallax
@joe parallax:
Revision of previous post: Mary Matalin’s name no longer appears on Threshold Editions’ webpage. Nonetheless, shame on Simon and Schuster for getting in bed with the wingnuts.
joe parallax
@freelancer:
Douchebags of a feather stick together.
Southern Beale
I really would hate for this story to get lost in the shuffle because it’s big: Fox’s Roger Ailes told Judith Regan to lie to the feds about Bernie Kerik, and she says she has the tapes to prove it.
I mean … that’s obstruction of justice. That’s jail time. Isn’t it?
Tonal Crow
@Bob L: Volokh is wrong. The Ring was not to be destroyed because it gave the power of just government, it was to be destroyed because the (very great) power it conferred redounded to evil. LoTR had no problem with just government. Indeed, a central thread of the tale concerned the restoration of the Kings’ rule over Gondor and Arnor. And The Scouring of the Shire was all about hobbits restoring their own just self-rule in the Shire. Anyone who reads that as an allegory of dislike for sockialism idiotically equates brutal plutocratic autocracy (Sharkey’s rule) with sockialism. Sharkey was there to brutalize the hobbits for revenge, not to ensure that their (already pretty flat) society cared for its poor.
As for Volokh’s allegorical reading generally, Tolkien strongly disclaimed allegorical content, and expressed dislike for the very concept of allegory, calling it “purposed domination of the [reader by the] author”.
Mark S.
@Southern Beale:
I read that earlier and found it kind of confusing. It isn’t clear if that tape still exists, but if it does, Roger could be in a little hot water. Of course, we’ve got to hedge our bets:
I think they’re a lot easier to make if you have a tape.
Tonal Crow
@Tom Hilton: Lovecraft fan here. I wouldn’t mind adding a subtle allegorical reference about climate change to At the Mountains of Madness. Ya know, Cthulhu’s been sleeping soundly for millenia in Antarctica’s deep cold. But now it’s not quite so cold anymore, and somehow a drop of water occasionally falls upon his/her/its head….
Citizen_X
@Sentient Puddle: YYYEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS!
Seriously: del Toro doing Mountains of Madness? If I had a terminal illness (and I don’t), I would do everything possible just to make to the release of that. Then I could die happy.
If Cameron was directing? Blech. But Cameron producing and del Toro directing? Pure awesome.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“It was also pretty dumb for Jackson to not use Tolkien’s ending for the Two Towers—what a great goddamn cliffhanger.”
Dumb of him not to use the Scouring of the Shire also, missing a key point of Tolkein’s work, that there’s nothing untouched by evil on this world.
Citizen_X
@srv:
Srsly? Then I am required, by the laws of Teh Internets, to post this.
Once you watched that (or as much as you can stand–30 seconds?) then you can watch this–THE greatest thing on the internets…EVAR.
freelancer
John Rogers disagrees. I do too.
Origuy
Tolkien fans; have you seen the fan-created short films The Hunt for Gollum and Born of Hope? Considering that they were made for about $5000 each and the actors were doing it for nothing, they are pretty amazing.
Origuy
Can’t edit my post for some reason. Anyway, Gollum was about £3,000, but Born of Hope (Aragorn’s backstory) was more like £25,000.
befuggled
@Tom Hilton: I’m too jaded and cynical to think any movie made from The Mountains of Madness will be any good. But (assuming it does get made) I’ll go see it and hope to be wrong.
jwb
@Tonal Crow: Here’s Tolkien’s quote on allegory, which is a bit more complicated than a simple dismissal.
S. cerevisiae
Another Lovecraft fan here, looking forward to a big budget movie doing him justice but it won’t be easy. Hoping for the best – the Old Ones should be interesting
Uloborus
Lovecraftwards:
Del Toro is the only current director I know of who I’d put in charge of doing a Lovecraft movie. The man knows creepy imagery and he’s an excellent and restrained storyteller who does not automatically sugarcoat things. He might actually be able to take Lovecraft’s love affair with his monsters and make those monsters as scary as they were meant to be.
cleek
@srv:
good choice, at least visually. not sure i know his work.
it was pretty wild seeing old Bilbo in The Aviator.
Bilbo? i mean Ash, from Alien.
Tonal Crow
@jwb: Na. That’s merely saying that one must perforce use the language of allegory (this from the story means that in the primary world) when interpreting myth, if one wishes to draw real-world lessons from it.
I think the following discussion clarifies things. It’s about allegorical meanings some had claimed to have found in LoTR, and is from the Foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring, Ballantine Ed. 1965, :
mclaren
Scientists just discovered the antihypertrion, the heaviest antimatter particle yet, and the only particle known that contains an antistrange quark.
Tehanu
Just watched the third movie again, and also just re-read the Mythopoeic Society’s collection of essays about Tolkien on film (see http://www.mythsoc.org/). I find I agree with their consensus view: visually the films are marvelous, and there are things as good as or better than the books (e.g., the Gate of Moria, the beacons of Gondor, the fight between Smeagol and Deagol). As far as the ideas/themes, though: a mess, and too many of the changes to make it “more dramatic” actually end up making it very different from Tolkien’s intention. Dropping the Scouring of the Shire is really the worst mistake. And yet I still cried when Sam came home and said, “Well, I’m back.” I guess I’m just grateful the movies are as good as they are.
Paul in KY
@Mark S.: Certainly not the movie Elrond. Whomever played him, he was miscast. Elrond looked a little better than that, IMO.
Paul in KY
@Tonal Crow: Excellent points. Good synopsis of why Volokh is a dipshit here.