The Desolation of Smaug: Hobbit Movie or Metal Album?

Let's get some things out of the way: I am annoyed with people right now who who are either doing one of two things: People who won't shut up about the over-indulgent length of The Hobbit movies and people thinking they're funny because the pronunciation of Smaug is weird. Those dead horses have been beat to dust. Move on.

Maybe it was because I'd been seeing a whole bunch of two-and-a-half hour movies in a row, but An Unexpected Journey was actually one of the breezier experiences I had last winter. Of the brutally long titles I saw at the time, it was easily the most cinematic. For all of Lincoln's accomplishments, it felt like a TV mini-series and Les Miserables was more interested in how much snot was in the acting talent's noses most of the time than the epic feel. Perhaps returning to a cinematic Lord of the Rings experience was a nice visit from an old friend I hadn't seen in awhile, but as much as one can debate how the source material wasn't made for three jumbo-sized movies, I could appreciate a prestige movie that wanted to actually be HUGE.

It has its slow spots for sure and the climactic hullaballoo in the goblin tunnels probably needed to be reeled in a bit because it felt too much like the characters were pinballs bounding about an endless arcade machine, but the movie was fine. Not GREAT, but fine. Young Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and Thorin (Richard Armitage) were more than worthy to take the reigns as lead characters, there was enough done to distinguish the massive amount of dwarves from each other, and the experience didn't feel like it was being weighed down by being "too large."

For the follow-up movie, The Desolation of Smaug, audiences who had a bitter taste in their mouth seem to like this one quite a bit better, but for me, this movie feels more like it was built from a Lord of the Rings "factory," constructing a reliable product based on past success more than any of the other films. It doesn't change it from being a quality product, but Smaug's characters and action certainly have a sense that I've seen most of what it has to offer before.

I think what attracts a more general audience than the first movie is that it's more geared towards the me in middle school who had to read the book to pass English and skipped a lot of the things I deemed "insignificant," like all the songs. Not to say in general people act like they have only a middle school education (Okay, maybe a little), but the first movie wanted to absorb itself in the world, the culture, and the song, and some people just wanted to get on with it. Desolation of Smaug gets the HELL on with it.

 After a brief prologue, we're right in the action as the band of Dwarves and Bilbo are on the run from orcs while on their journey to the Lonely Mountain. With Gandalf (Ian McKellen) given a, "Let's have Gandalf do something else so we don't constantly have the, 'Why doesn't the wizard fix it?' plot hole" task, the group is on their own to make it through a forest of illusions and beyond. The story lines are obstacle courses more often than not. Something is put in their way and they have to figure out a way around it quickly because orcs are chasing them. This usually leads to an action set piece and then sometimes peeks in on Gandalf as he foreshadows the movies we've already seen.

It might be kind of an insult to say that's all the movie is, but if the movie is all business, it does its business well… wait, that didn't come out right. Anyway, if the first Hobbit movie lacked any signature action sequences save the goblin one I said was a little too big for its britches, this one has plenty of them.

 I'm one of those people who feels spoiled when the advertising for the James Bond movies tells you all the action you can expect because I sit there silently knowing what's to come, so I won't say much except that it tries to put ordinary LotR action sequences on steroids. Sometimes it doesn't work and the dwarves who are the underdog heroes come off as superhuman, but there are some glorious moments of creative flair. In a river rapids chase, there's a continuous shot that comes out of nowhere and keeps chugging along with the ridiculously fun charge of a Road Runner cartoon. It's sounds out of place, but it completely works and totally makes the sequence.

Most of the rest is what you've come to expect from a Peter Jackson Tolkien movie. The locations are all the grandest and most spectacular locations EVER (By the way, visit New Zealand when you get the chance). It's almost a shame they waste the forest of illusion so early, as it is something freakishly different and made properly creepy. The actions of the characters are broad, operatic and almost open themselves up to parody (At one point, one of the dwarves in love sees the object of his attraction in a completely over-the-top heavenly glow). Howard Shore's majestic score is the same as it ever was, not adding many new themes to the repertoire.

The same can be said for the characters. There are new ones to be seen, but they feel like copies of ones from its predecessors. Lee Pace is an awesome and underutilized actor in Hollywood (Watch The Fall if you don't believe me), but he seems dutiful as yet another pragmatic elven leader who doesn't want to stick his neck for people not of his own kind. There's another badass woman warrior named Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and the series can't get enough of those, but she kind of comes off as a fan fiction character where someone went, "Oh yeah, well, I'm going to make a female Legolas, but she's going to be so much better! She's going to be like Legolas TIMES TWO!" Stephen Rea does briefly show up as a manipulative leader of a lake town and there are some interesting angles as he tries to be as humorously Machiavellian with his people as possible, but like I said, it's a rather small role.

Even the confrontation with the dragon Smaug seems to be an echo of the scenes with Gollum. While it eventually builds to a wholly satisfying and breathtaking climax, the initial conversation between Bilbo and Smaug made me pine for the conflicted, split-personalitied Andy Serkis character rather than the simple, smooth egotist voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch with extra bass. I know, how else are you supposed to act if you're a goddamn dragon who sleeps in piles of gold? Maybe I've just seen Cumberbatch's brand of villainy too much this year.

To put it simply, Desolation of Smaug is the movie you expect it to be. Maybe too much of the expected. It's still a pretty good movie and I seriously nitpick because it's in such good company, but it was the first time I wondered how much would've been drastically different and new if Hellboy director Guillermo Del Torro had gotten to helm this thing as originally intended. Oh well, you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.

And what do I need? The Desolation of Smaug actors doing a dramatic reading of Leonard Nimoy's "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins."

The Work of Ryutaro Nakamura: The Glue

A few months ago, there was a small note on the passing of anime director Ryutaro Nakamura due to pancreatic cancer. It by far isn't a name that gets as much play even in the anime community and I had to check on the guy's works myself even though he did two series that easily make my top 10, Serial Experiments Lain and Kino's Journey.

I would've discussed his work closer to his death, but I put it off because I realized I had a gaping hole in not watching his series Ghost Hound. It's not really a series you can marathon quickly. Seriously, it's  on Hulu and I DARE you to marathon it. A little to my dismay, Ghost Hound actually adds little to the conversation so it's kind of time wasted, but oh well….

Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, there were a precious few pillars of anime that were holding up the small community of fandom. This was just before the days of bittorrent and WAY before today where you can legally stream even the jankiest of "I want to have sex with my sister" anime. If you were like me and had no idea where to even find anime bootleggers in the middle of someplace like Nebraska, you were kind of at the mercy of the rental shelves in your local comic store, and they had Akira, Dragonball Z, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and some extremely cheap and violent titles that would define the medium to teenage Americans for better or worse. Somewhere in the corner was Serial Experiments Lain, a cult classic of such supreme weirdness that many of its viewers recommended it to other people just so they could have someone else to help figure out what the hell it was they just watched.

Lain is like if David Lynch and David Cronenberg had an insane, Japanese cyberbaby. Obtuse, freaky,  and absolutely fascinating, it is a heavily atmospheric series about the ways the Internet has crashed into the real world. Utilizing pseudoscience, parapsychology, telekinesis, humans meshing with technology, aliens (?), and  two dozen conspiracy theories, Lain came out at just the right time as the Internet was about to explode into this irreplaceable piece of our lives it is today. Not to mention its American popularity was probably bolstered by having one of the greatest anime openings of all time headed by the song "Duvet" actually sung in English by British indie band bôa.  A friend of mine and I were once looking through blankets at a department store, came upon one with the label "Duvet," and simultaneously broke into ♩And you don't seem to understand…♩

Getting into the brass taxes, the series follows a middle school girl named Lain Iwakura whose life is getting a little strange. She hallucinates invisible people walking through the halls, reality occasionally dissolves around her, she seems to be followed by mysterious men in black as she walks home, and most pertinently, an acquaintance has committed suicide and then after her death, sent an e-mail to Lain saying she downloaded her conscious into the Wired (This series' stand-in for the Internet) and that God is there.

Upon receiving the e-mail, Lain gets her father to upgrade her computer in order to plunge into the Wired and see what's going on. She discovers she's an adept computer user and diving through the information, finds a series of bizarre incidents happening in the virtual world that are breaching into the real world. At the same time, a second Lain has begun showing up in the real world. Where the first Lain is quiet, withdrawn, and awkward, the second is brazen, loud, and sociable to the rave culture.

That's about as far I can go without completely getting off topic. We have to steer this back to Ryutaro Nakamura eventually, right? The series has the fingerprints of writer Chiaki J. Konaka. Konaka is a unique writer whose presence can be immediately felt, especially if the project is a collaborative effort. If you're watching an anime series that is straightforward and suddenly becomes ponderous, it's not quite clear what exactly is happening, and there's internal monologue about the nature of life or complex psychological/scientific concepts, it's probably Chiaki Konaka. Or Hideki Anno having another mental breakdown. The look of the series was heavily influenced by artist Yoshitoshi ABe (The capital B is his choice, not my error). ABe's work is very detailed, tends to use a lot of shadows, and is very eye catching, hence why it's all over the DVD covers. Here, you'll see what I mean:

Not bad, right? So, where does Nakamura fit? I find Nakamura tends to be the glue that holds his projects together. Not really an auteur, he seems to more realize the potential of a project and is able to deliver on the potential. If there are things I can attribute to his style, it's the use of overexposed light and uniquely weaving overlaying text into the narrative, but those can be attributed to his collaborators ABe and Konaka, respectively.

The problem with Ghost Hound, one of his last projects, is its lack of distinctiveness. The script once again is by Konaka who mashes in a smorgasbord of topics like out-of-body experiences, psychology, quantum physics, the spiritual world, bio technology, hypnotherapy, and God knows what else into a story of a kid who survived a kidnapping and can now leave his body and see the surprisingly busy spiritual world that exists in his quiet town. For the hodgepodge of topics that went into it, it's surprisingly very coherent, but that sentence describing the plot? That development takes three episodes when it normally takes about one. This is where atmosphere and character is essential, and the artistic direction is too bland to hold the atmosphere aside from the cool jazz opening that has more flavor in the first two minutes than the whole show combined. The characters aren't particular notable, so much so that around 5 or 6 episodes, in order to properly get information across, they have to call in… DOCTOR BOOBS!

Seriously. But still, when it comes to putting together something like Lain, all the credit in the world to Nakamura for being able to take something that has a difficulty rating of about 9.5 and delivering on almost everything. The character Lain sometimes gets lost in the shuffle which takes away some of the emotion of the overall project, but that Lain HAS some seriously heavyweight emotional moments at all with everything that's stuffed into 13 episodes is something of an accomplishment. Throughout the series, Lain develops a friendship with classmate Alice who only knows her as the aloof kid who could use some friends. Their friendship is valuable to Lain, so much so that later when she has more influence over the Wired, she tries to erase the fallout from a terrible choice Alice made, but in trying to help her friend, does more to destroy her emotionally. This dynamic is powerful and vital to anchor the series emotionally in its climax, and that this Nakamura can handle such a small but vital thing while still keeping the big picture in focus in one Lain largest successes.

Switching gears, Ryutaro had another masterpiece that hasn't quite made the impact Lain has, but some of us are working on it. I know anime is weird and foreign to a lot of Americans and there are few titles out there I can just tell everyone to watch right now. Kino's Journey is one of them. You. You right there. Your life would benefit greatly from watching Kino's Journey. It's pretty dang cheaaaaap! The best outcome is your life will change and the worst outcome is you'll find it kind of "meh."

Kino is as straightforward and earthbound as Lain is bizarre. Based on a series of light novels by Keiichi Sigsawa, the series follows the titular character as she travels with her talking motorcycle (Yes, the motorcycle talks! You'll get used to it!) to the various countries of a fantasy world, some pre-industrial and rustic, some with technology beyond what we have today. Each country has a story and Kino spends three days in each to discover it. It's hard to describe without watching it, but my best stab at it is a more down home Twilight Zone. The countries Kino travels to are largely built on one fundamental and the series does its best to turn it on its head, and while not telling you what to think, it emphasizes the importance of thinking about the world you live in.

That's not to say Kino's Journey is just bland nutritional food. Like the best Twilight Zone episodes, each episode is a little puzzle box that is solved bit by bit and fills out the story with characters who both fit into the fantasy world and feel real. Kino is no blank slate for the audience to put themselves in. She has a backstory and a particular attitude and is actually one of the best characters in anime, even if she is mostly a casual observer and only intervenes when she absolutely must (And she must in more ways than she'd like because story conflict has its demands).

While most people can pull the "book was better" route, the TV series makes some changes that actually improve it. For example (And this is a spoiler of the first episode), in "The Country of Shared Pain," the episode revolves around a country that is dying out because the people simultaneously took a drug that made their thoughts visible to each other. The story of the country is distilled by a single man who recounts the how a woman in town realized he was in love with her and how the relationship fell apart because they couldn't hide their thoughts from he each other. He didn't like her gardening, she didn't like his music, the things they hated about each other couldn't be hidden and couldn't be reconciled, and so on and so forth.

The book ends the story with the man begging Kino to stay and Kino simply riding off to her next journey. In the show, as he's begging her to stay, she notices he's planted a rose garden. They have a look that acknowledges what she just noticed, and she moves on. However, not before passing by a house with a rose garden that has the silhouette of a woman who happens to be listening to a record that sounds very similar to the one Kino listened to while talking to the man.

It's an incredibly thoughtful touch and one that shows that entertainment that is smart doesn't always need to take a darker step to be such. Not to say there aren't extremely dark moments in Kino's Journey because there are. It simply embraces all of humanity instead of some it. It lives by its most memorable line: "The world is not beautiful; and that, in a sense, lends it a sort of beauty."

Nakamura handles the story with a very deft and subtle touch. The visuals are not amazing, but their water color sensibilities mix with solid fundamentals to give the feeling of a fanciful and unfamiliar world while keeping it grounded in reality. The narrative is many times straightforward, but its quiet moments are supplemented by times when the screen goes to text with ambient music. Sometimes it's replaying what was previously said, sometimes it's dissecting what was previously said, sometimes it's thinking about what it all means. It never acknowledges whether it's Kino thinking of these things or whether it's this disembodied force or what, but it mimics the way people mull over things in their head when they travel. This makes the show feel like you're taking the journey with Kino.

Yeah, Nakamura doesn't have a signature style or anything that makes a series"Nakamura," but when you've made two of the best examples of your craft and you know what the series that have potential need, does it matter? I'm sad that Nakamura was going to get the Lain band back together to make a series Despera, and because of his health, that never happened. For what we didn't get, we have some fantastic works that I'd like to thank Ryutaro Nakamura for wherever he is, and may he rest in peace.

Spike Lee's Oldboy. Please Hammer, Do Hurt 'em.

So, my entertainment blog took me longer to get jumpstarted than I imagined. It's a long story followed by a long story followed by a long story and I already have a long story in front of me: Talking about Spike Lee's Oldboy.

Somewhere between ten years ago and today, if you were a movie guy like me, eventually someone would come up to you and say, "Dude dude dude, you've got to see this! It's Asian and fucked up… but it's totally AWESOME!" That movie was usually 2003 Korean movie Oldboy (Though I'm sure I can think of about a hundred other things that could fit), and oh, is it ever all these things and more. Director Park Chan-wook's film is a masterpiece of pitch-black revenge that only shows mercy when mercy would be the cruelest thing to deliver. Main actor Choi Min-sik's all-in performance where he even goes as far as to eat a live squid on camera is well worth the watch by itself.

Now, a good amount of us don't really talk about it much except it's about a man who is imprisoned for 15 years and goes on a journey to figure out why, maybe some of us would share a Youtube video of the hammer fight, but being tight-lipped because the movie really is something where you need to EXPERIENCE without anyone getting too far into telling you why. Oh, and we really want to see your The Ring face when it's over. Critics who deride it for being senseless violence and torment at the service of nothing deeper are kind of missing the point. It lives within the minds of the captor and the prisoner;they are both completely unhinged and so is the movie. 

So, naturally, when an American version was announced, the question wasn't *if* they were going to screw it up, but *how many ways* they were going to do it. They seemed to hit two right off the bat when it was announced Steven Spielberg and Will Smith were the director/actor combo. Spielberg can do dark revenge as he's shown with Munich, but nothing like this. Smith can play broken like in I Am Legend, but he also has to be a guy who can disappear for 15-20 years and then show up again and nobody recognizes him. If there's one thing that's almost impossible to do, it's not recognize Will Smith. 

I sat back and waited. I knew they weren't going to be the people who eventually made the movie because it made no sense. Eventually, people came along who did make sense: Spike Lee and Josh Brolin. Spike Lee's filmography is all over the place (From the essential Do the Right Thing to… She Hate Me), but among the people who have the grit and the balls to pull this off, Lee's one of the handful, not to mention Josh Brolin can pull off both a normal guy and a completely consumed instrument bent on revenge. So, I had some hope. I'm also not fundamentally against the aspect of a remake since the Korean Oldboy is a bastardization of a Japanese comic (Not called such because people LIKE it, but yeah, the movie is nothing like its source material).

Then things started happening. After the initial theatrical trailer touting an October release, publicity drifted off. The release date was quietly changed to Thanksgiving weekend (A time I'm sure all of you love your hard-R revenge thrillers), there wasn't even a TV ad of it until two weeks before its release, its release was dropped to 580 theaters, the director and Brolin weren't happy because its initial 3-hour cut was reduced to just under two, an artist who did initial mockups for the poster claims they were rejected and then suddenly used without proper compensation with Spike Lee issuing a curt reply on Twitter. In its opening weekend, the $30-million budgeted movie will struggle to make $2 million of it back. People seemed to want cancer more than they wanted to properly promote and release this movie. Surely a sign it's the biggest disaster of a foreign film being horrifically Americanized since the U.S. version  The Vanishing had the main character rise from his grave, right?

Well… not really( Six paragraphs in and I'm finally talking about the movie! This blog's not called "Too Few Words," is it?). If this movie had been properly promoted and released in a decent slot, it might've made its money back with very little bad blood except for what gets spewed on screen. It wouldn't have had nearly the amount of bad buzz, the controversial aspects would've fallen under the idea of, "There's no such thing as bad publicity," and life would've gone on. Now, is it a worthy re-imagining that can properly stand next to its Korean counterpart? Well… not really.

Spike Lee is working in full Inside Man mode. Spike Lee has his projects he puts his soul into and ones he crafts extremely well because it pays the bills but doesn't put his full heart into it. This is one of the latter. As much as people like touting Inside Man as this underrated classic, it's a pretty good little puzzle box of a heist movie but because of it, it keeps its distance from the characters aside from Clive Owen's thief who seems to be WAY too into how clever he is. However, even Inside Man has the context of how people interact in the melting pot of New York City in a post-9/11 environment. It also has this Bollywood fusion of a song in its opening credits which is so one of my jams. Oldboy is devoid of such context to help fill in the gaps. 

Oldboy is simply the story of an asshole alcoholic ad executive named Joe Doucett (Brolin) who makes life hell for everyone, especially himself. After a particularly bad drunken bender, he wakes in a locked hotel room. He receives daily meals of dumplings, Frosted Flakes (Really, Kellogg's? Product placement in THIS movie?), and vodka while occasionally getting hit with knockout gas so his captors can do anything from shave him to patch him up when he punches a mirror). His only companion is the television in which the often humorous side effects of this seen in the Korean film are missing here. It mostly acts as delivering indications of time passing and plot information, like Joe being framed for the rape and murder of his wife, though there is a particularly vicious moment this movie has over the Korean version where Joe finds out what happens when he tries to befriend a rat to quell his loneliness. 

Twenty years pass and Joe is tossed out into the world in a steamer trunk with cash, clothing, and a smartphone that has wallpaper of his daughter's face and a clock countering down to four days from his release (There's a clear sign of the deep cuts in editing when Joe knows how to slide the touch screen to accept phone calls on his smartphone, but he later doesn't understand why there are no pay phones and Yellow pages anymore). Free of his alcoholism and obsessed with proving his innocence to his daughter, he recruits his best friend Chucky (Michael Imperiori) and a homeless shelter worker Marie (Elizabeth Olsen) who takes pity on him to figure out who did this to him and why. It doesn't talk long for a menacing voice (Sharlto Copley) to start flooding his smartphone and give him a few helpful hints and not-so-helpful taunts.

While Spike Lee may be just doing his job, Josh Brolin brings it. Brolin can't be the same guy as Oh Dae-su from 2003's Oldboy and this movie knows it. Oh Dae-su is a pathetic man before his imprisonment who, despite having a bright and humorous side, is an alcoholic marshmallow of a salaryman. Josh Brolin is a harder slab of beef and when the movie has to show Joe being physical, well, let's just say there are more than a few, "Oh, SNAP!" moments. Sometimes literally. When Oh Dae-su tortures the manager of the "hotel" he was imprisoned in, he's nice enough to pass him off to his gang waiting in the hallway so their boss can get a blood transfusion before Dae-su squares against all 25 of the gang members. Joe is not such a gentleman. He also eats up and spits out any notions of this internal monologue shit.

Doucett's madness is far more internal and compact than Dae-su's insanity where it practically spills out into his face and Brolin infuses the character with the right amount of quiet intensity while still being able to elicit sympathy. The rest of the actors more-or-less get the job done. The only thing is Copley as the mastermind behind Joe's captor lacks a certain amount of threat. The Korean villain is equally effeminate and even wears a sun hat in one of his scenes, but still manages to convincingly keep his former prisoner at bay. Even with the gender-swapped badass bodyguard/sex partner, the American villain lacks a certain amount of bite, like if they'd cast Ralph Fiennes if he hadn't ever played things like a Nazi sniper or Voldemort. In fact, why didn't they get Ralph Fiennes? 

As for the rest of the movie, the word that comes to mind is "professional." It's professionally made and it feels like solid craftsmanship. There's nothing "bad" about it, but the thing is it needs a little more than to be a nicely-constructed cabinet. All of this may be from cutting down Lee's initial version, but it seems to not give much care about mood, which is one of the things the 2003 film excelled at. The Korean Oldboy could ratchet up tension and excitement when it needed to, but it mostly ruminated in the mood of a man who had nothing but long strings of time for years. The editing used a lot of fades and the music even utilized a lazy woodwind instead of something more typical and it worked. It marinates the emotion that adds flavor to it when it becomes serious business. The 2013 version wants to stay on task, it cuts through everything it needs to, and even makes the passage of time seem wonky, especially when Joe is imprisoned. It feels like four years pass like it was four days and there are weird realizations made at what feel like odd times (It's four years in when Joe discovers the hidden camera? Wouldn't he know every inch of that damn room by then?). When Samuel L. Jackson appears to take a Samuel L. Jackson role over 20 years, the only physical thing that changes about him is the color of his mohawk.

There's also that certain Hollywood gloss that gets on a lot of things. Spike Lee replicates the hammer fight from the Korean version in an accelerated version because Joe has leveled up about 10 times higher than Oh Dae-su and has no problem with sending every single gang member to hell, but the hallways feel more like a set and the action more artificial even as it's more brutal. The hole-in-the-wall bar Joe hides out in also is supposed to be this community of regular customers, but nobody notices when the fey British guy and his bodyguard just honker down for however long they've been there in one scene? Are Ron Burgundy's buddies also playing pool slightly offscreen and they haven't noticed that, either?

Maybe, even as someone who can accept the concept of a remake, I'm too close to the other movie. You'd probably need someone who has never heard of the Korean version and is going in knowing nothing to get just the right opinion on how the plot twists worked for them and shocking the surprises were.  It certainly has the guts and gumption of its Korean counterpart-WAY more than even I thought they would do-and they have the ingenuity to change things in meaningful ways and make some moments their own. I dare say the American ending's final shot is pretty much the perfect way to finish this story. Still, that means a lot of the plot is familiar to people like me, so aside from the curveballs Spike Lee throws in with a smile, it's hard to judge plot twists when they've already surprised you.

That said, Spike Lee's Oldboy seems to operate with a safety net, where no matter how shocking and horrific the actions are, there's only so much damage it can do. It's not bad per se, and I'd recommend checking it out if you have the stomach for a hard R violence and psychological damage, but dude dude dude, if you have Netflix, you should totally check out the Korean one right now! It's kind of fucked up and weird, but it's SO awesome!