Peter Jackson's Hobbit Trilogy in Three Words

Overthought

Overwrought


















Overfought

And now, thankfully, it's just over.

Throwing the Penalty Flag on Muppets Most Wanted

I am already on record as being a huge fan of the Muppets, going back to the early days of The Muppet Show. And I wasn’t shy about professing my love for the recent Muppets reboot (2011) starring Jason Segel and Amy Adams, because it resurrected so much of the pure whimsy, joyful exuberance and gently caring spirit of the first and best Muppet film, 1979’s The Muppet Movie.

So how does the new film, Muppets Most Wanted, fare in comparison? Well, let’s just say that it’s a frog of a different color. Not a completely different color. Just a few shades off. After the opening number, MMW never quite rises to the level of its predecessor. It’s not that it can’t quite hit the high notes; it’s more like it’s not clear that they’re trying. Generally speaking though, it does meet the Muppet standard for entertainment value, and that means kids and adults alike will enjoy the film, in their own ways. Grown-ups will guffaw at the moments of parody, the playful pop-culture references and the quick one-liners, while kids will have fun watching the silly and colorful antics of the characters. It may not be the Muppets at their best, but it is them in their most familiar habitat.

One thing I confess I don’t understand about Muppets Most Wanted is the intentional decision by the filmmakers to loosely shadow the storyline of The Great Muppet Caper (1981). In The Muppets, the theme of reviving past greatness by getting the group back together again naturally lent itself to multiple parallels to the original, which was the story of Kermit and how he gathered the group together in the first place. MMW does something similar with its call-back film. Both are predicated on the Muppets venturing overseas and getting entangled in a major heist.

But why? The Muppets had something to say about reinvention and facing the future that actually builds upon the original, but that is not the case for this newest film. Both Muppets Most Wanted and The Great Muppet Caper are varieties of caper film, but there is no necessary link between them. So what’s the point? Why not set off in some new, different direction with MMW? The Great Muppet Caper wasn’t that great to begin with. Why use it as a model? And does this mean the next film is going to be The Muppets Take New Jersey?

Tapping Out: Spinal Tap Turns 30

My career as a movie reviewer began in March, 1984. I had just managed to land the assignment to write a movie review for the next edition of my high school newspaper, “The Brophy Round-Up.” I don’t know how it happened, me only fifteen, still an underclassman. I had only written only one previous piece, a less-than-scintillating profile of Key Club, and now, here I was, getting a crack at the paper’s second-most-coveted gig (just behind music critic). True, being at an all-boys school, I couldn’t count on my status as the school’s official movie reviewer to attract girls, but still, it beat the crap out of covering cross-country racing.

I set out to make a statement with my first review; you know, start things off with a bang. If I knocked this one out of the park, I reasoned, they’d never be able to pry me out of the job. I’d become known as the movie mogul of Brophy College Preparatory. I would go down as the greatest film critic the school had ever seen. And this would be the review that started my inevitable rise to fame.

Brimming with ambition, I scanned the movie section in the New Times during seventh-hour Biology. Only three films were opening that weekend: Repo Man, Against All Odds, and This is Spinal Tap.

The obvious choice would have been Against All Odds, the Jeff Bridges/Rachel Ward flick. I spurned this idea, even though I liked Jeff Bridges in Tron, and really liked Rachel Ward in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, even if she was in black and white the whole time. Odds was a romance, and I knew I needed something more substantial than some piece of romantic fluff to properly begin my conquest. I needed something quirkier, edgier, less mainstream. So instead, when I arrived at the AMC Village Six multiplex that Friday night, I bought a ticket for Footloose.

What? Aren’t quirky, edgy, and less mainstream the first trio of adjectives that pop into your mind when you think of Footloose?

Gettin' Smauggy With It: The Desolation of Smaug

Orcs gettin’ shot

Drilled by elves right on the spot

Chasin’ dwarves without a thought

You know they’re never gettin’ caught.

Like a Shaq free throw shot

This hobbit flick is all for naught

Cuz the action’s overwrought

And it’s fraught with extra plot.

Word.

That’s how I imagine Will Smith might rap-review Peter Jackson’s second film in The Hobbit trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug, if rapping movie reviews was his thing, which it isn’t, and if he shared my cinematic sensibilities, which he probably doesn’t.

Overwrought. That’s the key word I keep coming back to. I could add a few more: ostentatious, histrionic, superfluous, but I don’t know what those words mean. Here’s one I like:

Splurgy. That’s a good word too. This film has a certain enthusiastic spendthriftiness to it. It’s like the working stiff who wins the office pool, and then rushes home and announces, “Gather up the kids, honey. We’re all going to Golden Corral tonight!”

And possibly a severe bowel obstruction.

I suppose this is the kind of thing that can happen when a director as imaginative and ambitious as Mr. Jackson gets too much of everything he wants. As in:

          
Too much creative control
Too much perceived demand for more Middle-Earth movies
Too much money gladly handed over, strings detached
Too much film stock, or hard drive capacity, or whatever medium movies are made with these days.

Yet it’s hard to fault Mr. Jackson entirely for cranking out an overwrought, bloated product. After all, could you blame the proverbial kid in the candy store for eating himself into a blimp if he was given the key to the store with the words, “We’ll see you, oh, I don’t know…Tell you what, why don’t you let us know when you’re ready to come out?”

The man’s only human, and self-restraint is not high on most humans’ list of strong points. Self-restraint is one of those things that sounds good in theory, but in practice, well, check back later. The sample size is too small.

So what do I mean by an overwrought film, exactly? Well the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding in The Desolation of Smaug is the action sequences. So let’s taste the pudding, shall we?

80's Buddy Pictures

We here at thunderstrokes are big believers in the four R's: recycling, reducing, reusing, and repurposing.

As proof, today we are offering a collection of repurposed pictures featuring recycled celebrities, reusing a traditional comedic device known as inappropriate photo captioning, the results of which have been reduced in scale from monumentally hilarious to merely silly.

The following gallery of celebrity buddy photos all hail from the era of Reagan, Frogger, and Gilbert Gottfried, and were borrowed without permission from The Huffington Post, which really wasn't doing anything with them anyway.

So, here you go, a little feature we're calling...Celebr80's

#1:  Betty White and Charlie Sheen

Charlie (to himself):  Betty has no idea what she's in for tonight...
Betty (to herself):  The hell I don't.                                                    

Bullitt Slug Bug

Remember when you were a kid, and you used to play Slug Bug?  You’d be going somewhere in the family car, and you and your siblings or friends would be watching the road like hawks from the back seat.  As soon as you saw a Volkswagen Beetle, you’d lean back and WHAM! let your neighbor have it by punching them in the arm, shoulder, ribs, neck, or wherever you thought you could inflict the most damage (aside from the obvious).  In our family’s version of Slug Bug, if the person made a sound while being hit, you got to hit them again.  I don’t know how many times we’d start a game of Slug Bug, and some time later I would find myself waking up in the waiting room of the local hospital.  Man, little sisters can be vicious.

I don’t know why, but for some reason Slug Bug only worked when you were in a car.  Inside a car, belting someone for being the first to see a Beetle was fine; outside a car, it was considered assault and battery.  I think even the hospital workers understood this.  When they found out that I had been beaten unconscious in the back seat during a game of Slug Bug, they’d just nod knowingly and tear up the child abuse reporting form they were filling out.

Remember how prolific the VW Bug used to be?  Yet, despite the German zest for the, shall we say…autocratic, they were never considered the king of the road.  Despite their lineage, Beetles just weren’t big enough, intimidating enough, or all-around serious enough for that.  No, the Beetle was all about mob rule, but of a decidedly friendly sort.  As a kid, peering out the car window at a cluster of Beetles surrounding you was like being licked to death by a dog; that is, provided there was no one wailing on you mercilessly at the time. 

In 1977 Volkswagen stopped selling Beetles in the U.S., and I think the game of Slug Bug gradually went dormant as the vehicles that once swarmed America’s streets, parking lots, and highways slowly dwindled.  Or maybe I just grew out of it.  Hard to know for sure.

Of course, Volkswagen revived the Beetle in the late 90’s, and several years ago, my daughter introduced me to a game she learned from some of her school friends called Buggy Punch.  She patiently explained the rules in the car one day, after suddenly exclaiming “Buggy Punch!” and hitting me on the back of my head.  I listened as though it were all new to me, while simultaneously fighting off panic-filled flashbacks to my childhood.

Lola Versus

The two-line TV onscreen description summarized the film something like this:  a twenty-nine year-old woman gets dumped three weeks before her wedding and then struggles to find love and happiness.  I didn’t watch the film because of the blurb.  I watched because of the title. 

Now that I’ve watched, I’m depressed.     

Lola Versus happens to be the first two words from the title of one of my favorite all-time albums, Lola Versus Powerman and the Money-go-round, Part One, from my all-time favorite band, The Kinks.  I would call it an iconic album, but the fact that so few people seem aware of its importance (existence?) kind of argues against the useful definition of the term. 

My love for The Kinks is such that even the merest suggestion of something connected to them brings me running.  My loyalty to The Kinks means I sometimes end up enduring things I wouldn’t otherwise endure.

Remember the movie Club Paradise?  Of course you don’t; no one does.  It came out in 1986, and starred Robin Williams, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Jimmy Cliff, and, if you can believe it, Peter O’Toole.  In the commercials for the film, they used the Kinks’ song “Apeman,” also from the album Lola Versus Powerman etc., etc.  That was enough for me.  Elizabeth and I went to see it the summer we started dating.     

Club Paradise put me in a difficult spot.  For years afterward I defended the film, insisting that it was “okay,” or “so-so.”  But it wasn’t.  It was dreadful.  Only I couldn’t bring myself to admit it, because they had been kind enough to feature “Apeman” prominently in the film.  With my twisted sense of fealty, I felt like I owed Club Paradise something because they had publicly acknowledged the greatness of my favorite band.

Here's the trailer for Club Paradise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Ud2UJCv4s (go ahead; it's worth it just to see Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy dressed in their 80's dweebish best)

Twerking Hitler

You may have seen the secret photo session pictures released this week of Hitler shortly after his release from prison (Mein Kampf, anyone?) in 1925, according to this story in The Huffington Post.

After seeing the photos, I'm kind of relieved that he was using that time to perfect his Angry Aryan impersonation. I was really worried they'd turn out to be boudoir shots. 

At any rate, as I was scanning through the photos, I couldn't help thinking about how silly he looked in them, practicing these exaggerated, almost vaudevillian poses.  I blame Mel Brooks for my failure to be properly impressed; he pretty much single-handedly destroyed any chance for me of taking Adolf seriously.  Don't get me wrong; I completely understand what a dangerous, hate-mongering fascist he was, and how much power and appeal his ideas continue to have amongst the feeble-minded and helplessly fear-mad in our world.  It's just that after you've seen The Producers and laughed uncontrollably throughout "Springtime for Hitler," and watched Dick Shawn's character, LSD (Lorenzo St. DuBois, if you must), brilliantly deflate Der Fuhrer without even realizing it, there's only so much respect you can hope to muster for a man who insisted on wearing a toothbrush moustache.   

As I scrolled through the pictures, one after another I had these completely ridiculous and equally incongruous captions pop into my head, imagining the things Hitler might be saying or thinking.   

Critics may accuse me of beating a dead horse, but I know better.  This horse isn't dead, really; it's more like undead, and as the current popularity of zombies extensively illustrates, there are no limitations on the type or frequency of beatings that can be visited upon the undead...

In that spirit, then, I humbly offer the following:

"This twerking thing is harder than it looks..."

Ray Harryhausen remembered

Let’s take a few moments to mark the passing of Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion animation, who died on May 7^th at the age of 92.  Ray was best known for creating movie monsters.  Not the kind that could be played by a guy in a rubber suit with a face buried under twelve layers of spirit gum, but mythical, sometimes grotesque, sometimes majestic, largely nonhuman ones.  

To do this he created highly detailed miniature models, which he would pose and then photograph one frame at a time, twenty-four different times in order to produce one second of film.  If my math is correct (always a dicey proposition), a five-minute scene would require somewhere on the order of 7,200 separate ‘shots,’ with each shot usually requiring multiple minute adjustments to the model (or models). 

And somehow, the man lived to be 92.  He must have possessed the patience of Job, along with the gumption of a sea barnacle.

The resulting animation was then typically incorporated as seamlessly as possible into the live action of the film, so that it appeared that some gargantuan reptile or sea monster was sharing the screen with Jason and the Argonauts, or battling Sinbad and his crew, or conquering San Francisco, or stomping on Rome, or whatever the case may be. 

If you go back and look at his work, what becomes obvious is his attention to detail and stubborn commitment to producing the best results possible.  This wasn’t the kind of guy who was content to glue bits of latex to a lizard and call it a Dimetrodon. 

Emphatically not an example of Ray Harryhausen's skill

Yet, although I’ve always had great respect for Harryhausen’s work, I can’t say I’ve always been a huge fan of it.  I think that’s due to timing more than anything.  My first movie experience was Star Wars, and the problem with that is the film’s special effects were so spectacularly effective that it rendered the inherently unbelievable perfectly believable (at least to my nine-year-old mind).  Star Wars created an artificial reality so unhindered by the obvious presence of a magician’s hand that my imagination was completely immersed into it, and the resulting experience was absolutely thrilling.  Once that happened, once I had the realization that such a thing was even possible, well, there was no going back, no settling for less. 

And, unfortunately, Ray’s stop-motion animation, while it was performed at the highest possible level, could never quite clear that final barrier to believability.  His creations, as careful and nuanced and detailed as they were, always struck me as what might happen if Dr. Frankenstein, after his first giddy taste of success, went on a resurrection spree and brought an entire menagerie of prehistoric monsters and mythical beasts back to life.  Plodding, stone-footed cadences; each creature a staircase series of frozen motions, the perpetually nagging sense of knowing that you were watching an inanimate object imitating a living thing; those are the unfortunate constraints placed on Ray’s work. 

None of which was really his fault, though; he was simply bumping up against the ceiling of the technology that existed at the time.  To his tremendous credit, he pushed the process of stop-motion to its absolute limits, and extracted from it a certain kind of effectiveness which no one else could quite match as successfully. 

Besides, anyone with an understanding of the tedious, precise, unforgiving nature of the work involved in model animation (setting aside the vast array of additional problems introduced by blending animation with live action) has to admire what he was able to accomplish.  I acquired my keen sense of appreciation by making several stop-motion films as a kid.  With Rob, my friend and partner in crime, we learned two great lessons from these experiences.  One was that making stop-motion movies was easy; the second was that making stop-motion movies that weren’t hopelessly cheesy was next to impossible. 

Polishing our Wings

By all accounts, Wings was a huge success when it opened in 1927.  The silent film set during WWI wowed audiences and critics alike, and went on to garner the first Academy Award for Best Picture, the only silent film to win until 2012’s The Artist.* 

*The Artist is a silent film, despite that one scene at the end, and no matter what purists and nitpickers have to say about it.  

With that kind of success, you would think more people would be familiar with it, and that it would have some sort of lasting legacy.  But something happened to Wings over the last eight decades.  It’s gotten lost.  These days, it rarely shows up on anyone’s list of great movies, and doesn’t seem to rate much discussion even amongst hardcore fans of silent films (now there’s a group you don’t want to run into in a dark alley).   

I used to pore over the lists of Oscar-winning movies, looking at the titles and imagining what they were about.  As a thirteen-year-old kid, I set a goal to learn about and see every movie that won the Best Picture Oscar, a goal that would officially be declared dead only in 1998, when The Great Atrocity occurred, and the Academy awarded Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love over both Saving Private Ryan and Life is Beautiful.  But Wings was always an enigma.  The books about the movie industry and filmmaking that I got from the library offered little enlightenment, other than mentioning its historic role as winner of the first Oscar for Best Picture.  Duh.  In college I took some film analysis classes, but Wings was not one of the movies we dissected, or even obliquely discussed.  It was as though the film was no more than vapor, a see-through ghost, a spirit that everyone seemed to know was there but that no one seemed particularly inspired to acknowledge.   

A pretty sad thing to be, if you’re a movie that was once loved, I would think. 

Fortunately, Paramount Pictures released a fully restored version of the film in commemoration of its 100^th year as a film studio last year.  And TCM, serendipitously for me, included it in their annual “31 Days of Oscar” movie cavalcade in February, finally affording me the opportunity to see this elusive film. 

Thank you, TCM.  My life-debt to you is increased yet again.  I know I’m late on my payments.  Please don’t refer me to the life-debt collection agency, and please don’t send someone to repossess me.  My wife would be so disappointed to come home one day and discover I’ve been repossessed.

Anyway, here’s the thumbnail sketch of the movie:

It starts with two young men who are rivals for the affections of the same girl.  Jack (Buddy Rogers) is clever, daring and poor, while Dave (Richard Arlen) is reserved, smoldering and rich.  I’ll leave it to your imagination to decide whom Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston) prefers.   Meanwhile, Mary (Clara Bow) is totally enamored with Jack.  Beyond their petty little problems, however, World War I is raging, and although these youthful dreamers don’t know it yet, America is just about to send four million lover-boys into no-man’s land.

Are you Serious? Real Genius and me.

Sometimes, a movie just happens to come along at the right time in a person’s life.  It may not be a great movie per se, one that is received with critical acclaim or crowned by popular sovereignty.  It just happens to be the right movie for you, seen at the right time in your life for its message to hit you where you live, and change you in some perhaps small, yet substantial way.

Films like this are somehow able to tell you things about yourself that your family and friends don’t see, or can’t see, or don’t want to say, or can’t say.  These films help you recognize or realize something that you yourself may have been blind to, or unwilling to acknowledge before. 

I think that ability art has to communicate with our secret selves is one of its great functions, and the beauty of it is that it doesn’t have to be great art to have a great impact on the right person.  For a movie, maybe it’s just one in every showing, or every other showing, or every ten showings.  But for the person who is impacted, what difference does that make?

We tend to embrace the movies that help us see things in a different way, help us change and grow.  We invite these special films in amongst the collected assortment of relics that constitute our most private selves, and that’s where they tend to abide.  They become our friends.  We still laugh at all their jokes, long after they have lost their spontaneity and their ability to surprise.  Their well-worn gags still delight us, not in spite of, but because of their familiarity.  We overlook their flaws, and overemphasize their strengths, at least in contrast to the opinions of others.  Just as with true friends, we cannot be purely objective when it comes to them.  We have too much history together, and there is too much emotional attachment.  It doesn’t matter that critics trashed it (none of them to your face, mind you), or that it didn’t get a great meta-score on RottenTomatoes.com, or that your other friends look at you like you’re completely nuts when you tell them you love this film.  None of that matters.  Just as with a true friend, you don’t expect the rest of the world to see what you see, as much as you might wish they did.  The fact is you are bonded, friends for life, blood brothers. 

Real Genius is that kind of film for me.

For a long time growing up, I didn’t take life seriously at all.  I didn’t work hard.  I saw the essential folly, or thought I did, of any one individual who tried to do anything more than laugh at the fundamental absurdity of life.  I was a natural existentialist, long before Camus and Sartre meant anything to me beyond being simply funny-sounding words.

Abrams To Fly Falcon

There’s a bug in our house.  Maria got sick on Saturday.  She’s slowly recovering, but Elizabeth came down with it today. Between the two of them, it means my writing time today is constrained to three-to-five minute intervals between rinsing out the throw-up bowl, and administering to Maria’s many random whims.  I suppose I could use that time to wonder how long it will take for me to catch it, but I'd rather write. (excuse me; I hear retching)

There’s no chance of getting any serious writing done, so today I thought I’d take on something easy, and respond to the news that J.J. Abrams has been designated to direct Star Wars Episode VII. 

Not that it matters to anyone else, but I’m not sure I like this pick. Yes, I know he can handle big budget, special-effects-laden franchise films, but I have to say, I haven’t been overly impressed with the films he’s directed.  (excuse me)

Okay, after almost three hours of vomiting, Elizabeth appears to be resting. Not that anyone needed to know that. 

As I was saying, not a huge fan of J.J. Abrams as a director.  I think I saw Mission Impossible III, but I can’t remember with certainty.  Since I’m not sure if I saw it, I should reserve comment, although if I did actually see it, the fact it was that forgettable would be a verdict in itself.

On surer footing, I did see the Star Trek reboot from 2009.  As any tbf of the blog knows, I’ve always been more Star Wars nut than Trekkie (it’s got its own category on thunderstrokes, fer cryin’ out loud).  But I’ve always respected Star Trek for its intelligence and integrity.  Consequently, the most recent film presented a big setback for me.  While the film looked great, and the movie as a whole wasn’t bad, there was something inherently intolerable about eradicating the past (no, I guess it was the future) lives of Kirk, Spock and company in order to justify wiping the slate clean and taking the characters in a new direction at a younger age.  In my opinion, that’s just cheating.

The Big Year

More elusive than a great spotted woodpecker.  Harder to locate than a pink-footed goose.  More difficult to spot than a snowy owl.   

Is anybody getting these references?

For the last fourteen months, I have been diligently trying to pin down and watch this movie The Big Year. 

And yes I get the irony.  It took me more than a year to see a film called The Big Year.  Har har.

The film is about an annual competition amongst bird watchers.  I like birds.  I don’t stalk them or anything, but I am often distracted by them when driving, and I often sit around and wonder what it would be like to be a bird, or wonder where I would fit in the social hierarchy at the bird feeder, that sort of thing.  I also like the three lead actors in the film:  Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson.   

I wanted to see The Big Year when it first came out, but I missed its theatrical release.  Why?  For one, there are few things in life I do quickly, unless it’s driving home after hearing that one of our bathroom pipes burst, as happened last weekend due to our recent cold snap.  For another, I am the father of two young children, and therefore a Very Busy Man.  This means that it typically takes me a month or more of advance planning to get to a movie these days, even one I’ve actually set my mind on seeing.  This is why I tend to see and write mostly about blockbusters; they’re the only ones that can handle my requisite lead time.  The Big Year was not a blockbuster.

Having missed my opportunity, I intended to take up in hot pursuit of the film once it was released on DVD.  However, unlike ultra-ambitious bird-spotting champion Kenny Bostick in the movie, I constrained myself to using only using the most ethical and legitimate methods, which for me includes Netflix’s streaming service, Redbox, and the local library – but not paying more than a buck fifty, or poaching the movie illegally online.  I struck out repeatedly with all three of my sources, and was just about ready to acknowledge that I would probably have to wait for it to pop up somewhere on regular cable. 

The problem with watching a movie you haven’t seen before on regular cable (excluding Turner Classic Movies, thank God), is that you just don’t know how it’s been edited.  They always throw that disclaimer up on the screen before the film: “Edited for content, and to run in the time allowed.”  With that kind of a free hand, almost anything could be cut in order to make sure they get the right number of Geico commercials in.  And since you have no way of knowing exactly what’s been taken out, you can’t help but feel like you’re watching an incomplete movie.  It doesn’t matter what they actually do with the film; they could show the whole thing in its entirety.  They could unbleep the curse words, and unblur the T&A, but I would still feel wrong about watching it, all because of that stupid disclaimer. 

Are we there yet? Thoughts on Jackson's The Hobbit

Not much has been said about The Lord of the Rings here on the blog, the movies or the books.  The last of the movies came out long before I started thunderstrokes, and although I’ve managed to work in a few scattered references here and there along the way, they are in no way sufficient to indicate the depth of admiration I have for them, the movies and the books.

I am an unabashed fan of Peter Jackson’s trilogy of movies.  Jackson did a better job of bringing Middle-earth to life, and of telling the story of Frodo and Sam, Aragorn, Gandalf and company, than I would have believed possible.  The narrative was clear and compelling, the characters bold and nuanced, and the tale’s majestic scale and scope effectively replicated.  Best of all, Jackson found a way to consistently give satisfactory visual form to Tolkien’s unbounded imaginings. 

Frodo as the book, and Sam as the movies.

Yet for me, the films cannot begin to rival the books.  At their best, Jackson’s movies play Sam to Tolkien’s Frodo, faithful and loyal followers to the hilt, but always subservient, always ancillary to the one charged with carrying out the original task.  As Frodo would be the first to tell you, though, that is something special in itself, and renders the films deserving of all the bountiful praise they have received.   

I think I can honestly say no book, or series of books, has had the cumulative emotional impact on me that The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) has.  Oh, all right, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did, but in a different way, for a different reason, which I will hopefully find the words to explain someday.  I was fifteen, or sixteen, or maybe even seventeen when I discovered Tolkien’s magic place.  By the time I finished reading LOTR, I was so completely and hopelessly attached to the characters, so utterly rooted to their world, my mind could not accept the fact that I was now being deprived of their continuing company.  My forced departure from Middle-Earth was physically painful; I felt as though I were being punished unjustly for no crime greater than finishing the story.  I grieved the sudden absence of Frodo’s band of noble heroes from my life like the death of a good friend.  I was heartsick for weeks, suffering from intense feelings of separation and loneliness.  I have no doubt that I would have been labeled as clinically depressed during that time, had anyone stopped to check. 

Use the Mouse, Luke - Things You Didn't Know About the Disney-Star Wars Deal

In the aftermath of last week’s movie industry bombshell in which Disney announced it had reached an agreement to purchase Lucasfilm, George Lucas was asked why he decided to sell the company he founded over 40 years ago, the company which is the home base for all things Star Wars.  “I felt that it was my responsibility to make a decision that would be in the best interest of the shareholders of Lucasfilm,” he replied.  When questioned further, specifically about the fact that Lucasfilm has exactly one shareholder – who happens to be George Lucas – Mr. Lucas stated, “That’s what made it so easy to figure out what our best interest was.” 

Asked if he felt the 4.05 billion selling price was fair, Mr. Lucas is said to have removed his solid-gold loafers to shake out a small nugget, adjusted his top hat, squinted through his monocle, and said, “Look, Disney just acquired an entire universe.  On a square-footage basis alone, any real estate agent in the world would tell you that Disney got a steal.” 

During another interview, he was asked when he first began to seriously consider the idea of selling Lucasfilm.  Mr. Lucas replied, “I can tell you exactly when it was.  Bobby [Robert Iger, President of Disney] and I had just sat down to lunch, and he started using the ‘b’ word.  As in ‘billions.’  Before that, I wasn’t thinking about it at all.  In fact, I was thinking about whether to order the manicotti, or the veal scallopini.  I went with the veal.  It was okay.”

In a thunderstrokes exclusive, we found a source close to the Lucas-Disney negotiations who was able to corroborate Lucas’ version of events.  Matt Gary is a waiter, Star Wars fanatic and aspiring screenwriter who traded tables with another server in the hopes of pitching a concept for a web-based Star Wars series to the movie mogul.  He recounts for us exactly what happened on that fateful day.  “He did.  He absolutely did.  He had the veal, even though I told him that the manicotti was the specialty of the house.  But when a man like George Lucas says he wants the veal, you bring him the veal, you know?” 

On the subject of the blockbuster deal, Mr. Gary said, “Well, Mr. Iger said something like, ‘We want to buy Lucasfilm from you, George.  What’s it going to take?’ and George said, ‘hrmf falrefa,’ or something like that; it was hard to tell because he had just taken a hefty bite of his walnut salad with raspberry vinaigrette – a salad I recommended, by the way – and then he held his finger up, and then he finished chewing, and then he swallowed, and then he took a drink of water, and then he cleared his throat, and then he dabbed his mouth with a napkin, and then he said, ‘I’m not selling Lucasfilm, Bob, but thanks for the interest.’ I remember that part very distinctly because he still had a little dressing in his beard, and it was kind of glinting in the light.  Anyway, then Bob – I mean Mr. Iger – says, ‘How’s four billion sound to you, George?’ and George kind of chokes on his focaccia – not eyes bugging out, falling backwards, clutching his throat kind of choking; it was just your regular kind, a lot of coughing and huffing and wheezing – and then he spits the bread out.  I was ready though, man, I was ready.  It would have been a pleasure to perform the Heimlich on that man.  Anyways, George gets his voice back and says, ‘Four billion?  For four billion, I’d sell my company, my name, and my private parking space at the Denver mint.  For four billion, you can have my body when I die.  You can take all the brain tissue samples you want, and dump the rest of me in the freezer with Walt.  I’ll even throw in my dogs and all my Linda Ronstadt records. That was billion with a ‘b,’ right?’”

Don Bluth and The Front Row Theatre

The man met us on the porch in front of his house.  He was lanky, compact; his thin silver hair skimming far above a vast expanse of forehead, a matching silver moustache lying pencil-straight across his upper lip, and clear blue eyes that regarded us warmly as we advanced up the gravel driveway.  His face broke into a broad, embracing smile.  Somehow, it was the smile that convinced me that I knew who he was, for we had never met before.  As Elizabeth and I reached the landing, I leaned forward eagerly and extended my hand.  “You must be Don Bluth,” I said, smiling myself.  We shook hands.  “Yes, that’s me,” he said, nodding as if sheepishly admitting his culpability in doing a good deed.  Then he ushered us into his house. 

Just like that, I had met one of the great artists and most respected names in the history of animated movies. 

Two weeks before, I had no idea he even lived in the Valley, let alone was opening his home on a regular basis to complete strangers.  What an act of faith, I thought as we stood in the entry hall, next to a temporarily abandoned table.  After welcoming us, Mr. Bluth asked us to wait in the foyer while he attended to some last-minute details.  A woman soon stepped out from behind a curtained archway, and pleasantly welcomed us again.  She asked us for our names, checking them against a list, while a tall man who appeared at almost the same time affably accepted our $40 donation, and handed us two folded pieces of paper in return.  The pleasant woman then guided us through the hall to the living room, and delivered us to our seats.

We had arrived at The Front Row Theatre. 

The Front Row Theatre is an aptly named place.  The seating consists of one full row of chairs which corrals, on three sides, a very modest, two-tiered stage in the center of the room.  There is a partial second row of chairs, except on one side of the room where a wet bar has been converted into an audio/visual control booth.  There are about forty seats altogether.  We were sitting in the front row, seats 4 and 5, just to the left of center.  The edge of the stage was not three feet away. 

The show that night was “Barefoot in the Park,” the Neil Simon comedy about two young newlyweds, Paul and Corie, who move into their first place together in NYC, only to discover that the differences between them are underscored and exacerbated by the challenging conditions of the apartment they find themselves in.  Much conflict and comedy ensue before a happy ending.  The 1967 movie, with Robert Redford as Paul and Jane Fonda as Corie, has long been one of Elizabeth’s favorites.  It’s a movie she introduced me to when we were dating twenty-however-many years ago. 

Primarily for this reason, I wanted our destination to be a surprise for Elizabeth.  Leaving the house, all she had known about the night ahead of her was that I was taking her “to a show.”  When we pulled into a residential neighborhood off of Shea Boulevard in Scottsdale filled with capacious, stately homes on large, professionally landscaped lots, she was instantly suspicious.  “Where are you going?” she kept repeating.  “We don’t know anyone who lives in this area.”  When we pulled up in front of Mr. Bluth’s house, she was tilting dangerously toward ill-humor.  “Who lives here?  I thought you said you were taking me to a show.”  Then she noticed the cars parked along the street and in the driveway, and gave me a barely restrained glare.  “Who’s house is this?  Are we crashing someone’s party?” I feigned as much stupidity as I dared for as long as I dared, but was finally forced to confess that ‘the show’ we had to come to see was going to take place inside this particular house.  It was the only way I could get her to leave the car.

Phoenix Comicon 2012

Phoenix hosted the annual Comicon convention downtown over Memorial Day weekend.  Comicon, for the uninitiated, is far more than a celebration of comic books and comic book characters.  It is a weekend-long, wide-ranging paean to pop culture:  movies and television, games and books; anything with an emphasis on the futuristic and/or the fantastic.       

Conventions of any kind aren’t really my thing, just like parades, or high school rallies, or really anything where large masses of people tend to concentrate into a relatively small area.  Generally, people make me anxious, so it only follows that more people = more anxious.   I have this fear that everyone I’ve ever wronged will somehow be in the same place at the same time, and that one person will recognize me, which will start an ugly chain reaction that ends with me at the bottom of a very large dogpile, helplessly suffering an endless combination of noogies, atomic wedgies, and worst of all, angry tickling. 

But this year I learned that the actor who played the role of Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Jeremy Bulloch, would be attending.  Mr. Bulloch was the man inside the armor.  Yes, another actor supplied Fett’s voice; but as any true fan of Star Wars knows, the real acting, and the ultimate effectiveness of the character, came from Bulloch’s physical performance (besides, the character didn’t have more than five lines of dialogue between the two films combined!). 

Anyway, his presence at the convention, combined with the fact that I coincidentally had written a popular blog post tribute to the galaxy’s most notorious bounty hunter, was enough to convince me to brave this peculiar gauntlet for the first time.  I made up a hundred copies of “The Ballad of Boba Fett” on some nice paper stock to take with me.  Wouldn’t it be awesome, I thought, to have Boba Fett himself sign a copy of my poem, and maybe the three of us (me, Mr. Bulloch, and my poem) take a picture together that I could place triumphantly on the blog as a symbol of my success.  Exactly what the success was supposed to be, I’m not too sure; let’s say it was working up the courage to go to comicon, the nerve to find Mr. Bulloch and get his autograph and picture, and then the perseverance to survive whatever might happen after that.  At the same time, I also figured I could pass out copies of the poem to anyone who seemed they might be receptive (minimally that would include anyone dressed up in Mandalorian armor, and I was surprised at how many of those there were).

Mandalorian armor represent!  This photo comes from
the blog Lightning Octopus.  If you want to see some great
photos from Phx Comicon 2012 (far better than mine),
check it out! 

We went on Sunday afternoon, the last day of the show.  I took my older daughter Jessica with me for a certain measure of protection, and moral support, and possibly because I thought she might enjoy the spectacle.  Four blocks from the convention center, we began to see individuals with green and blue hair, wings, silver body paint, and/or horns, as well as a small delegation of the living dead.  Once inside, it was as if we had been transported to an alternative universe ruled by extreme genre confusion.  Sci-fi meets horror meets fantasy meets anime.  Sometimes literally, as when a stormtrooper, a gore-dripping zombie, a mechanical-faced cowboy, and a masked, purple-haired butterfly all collided because none of them could see where they were going. 

Fear the R.O.U.S!

For those of you who continue to refuse to believe in the existence of ROUS’s, I would like to draw your attention to a little article that appeared in the New York Times several weeks ago.  For your benefit, it has been reprinted here in its entirety.  If you don’t take the threat of ROUS’s seriously now, you will by the time you finish reading this post.

New York Times

May 6, 2012

Betty Conklin – staff reporter                       

Public safety officials have issued a preliminary report stating that the death of a Waldorf Astoria hotel bellhop was ‘most likely’ the result of an ROUS (Rodent Of Unusual Size) attack.  Stephen ‘Kip’ Stevens, a bellhop for the venerable Manhattan landmark, was on duty when he disappeared around 1:32 a.m on April 20^th.  He had last been seen unloading the luggage of a Mr. Atagatawa, a visiting pharmaceutical representative from Bellevue, Washington, from a Super Shuttle van next to the hotel’s Lexington Ave entrance.  Neither he nor Mr. Atagatawa’s bags ever made it to his room.   According to John Riordan, chief of hotel security, Mr. Stevens, a Waldorf employee of eleven years, was first suspected of absconding with Mr. Atagatawa’s luggage and was reported to the police Friday evening after an exhaustive search of the hotel premises.  Six days later, however, Mr. Stevens’ remains were located behind an isolated outcropping in Central Park, along with the luggage and abandoned luggage cart.  Mr. Stevens’ body showed ‘significant evidence of being gnawed to death,’ according to Sergeant O’Hurlahy, the lead investigator from the city’s elite Bizarre and Occasionally Silly Crimes unit.  According to Sgt. O’Hurlahy, “At this time, we believe the attacker was most likely an ROUS.  We are currently working with the Museum of Natural History, which, fortunately, has one of the few ROUS skeletons in existence, for confirmation based on the size and severity of the many incisor marks present on the victim’s person.”  Mr. Carvato, director of the rodent department at the Museum of Natural History, confirmed that the museum is working on a “gruesome, but fascinating” investigation, but would offer no further details.  When asked to explain the presence of the luggage and luggage cart more than a mile from the hotel, Sgt. O’Hurlahy responded that “one of the bags had been ripped open.  In our interview with Mr. Atagatawa, he described having placed two large summer sausages in the bag in question, which were gone when the bags were located.  We can only surmise that the perpetrator of this crime, whoever or whatever it was, somehow detected the sausages and removed them.”  Nothing else was reported missing from the victim’s luggage, which included “some gold jewelry and a dozen iPad knockoffs.”  Neither police nor Mr. Atagatawa would comment further on the sausages, except to say “they came from a specialty cheese and sausage shop in Nasonville, Wisconsin, and [Mr. Atagatawa] was extremely distraught by their loss.”  If authenticated, Mr. Stevens’ death would be the seventh this year to be attributed to an ROUS, placing it 48^th in causes of death in the city, just behind non-vehicular jogging fatalities, and just ahead of mattress suffocation.

'The Avengers' Dialogues

Saw the big blockbuster movie last week.  Those of you who read Avengers Assemble!  know the anxious excitement with which I was anticipating this film (by the way, for those of you playing along at home, it took 8 days to get to the theater, which, in parent time, is the equivalent of a single person missing the midnight premiere but making it to the 10 a.m. show the next morning).  You may be wondering if and how much I liked the movie.  However, those of you who are tbf’s of the blog know that I have little interest in writing straight-on movie reviews.   

The laws of physics and bloggers alike tell us that when two immovable objects meet, something’s gotta give.

I wanted to capture my thoughts and observations about the film while they’re still fresh; you know, give a first blush reaction while I’m still blushing, as it were.  It also has to do with the fact that I have a notoriously defective memory, plagued as it is by a constant crawl of oblique thoughts and completely unpredictable flights of fancy.  But how to do it, that is the question…

Hmmm, here’s an idea.  Let’s treat this as though you and I just went to the movie together (Harkins Theatres, of course), and now we’ve arrived at Culver’s for a double-cheese ButterBurger and a concrete mixer, ensuring us plenty of time to hash out our reactions as well as draw curious looks from the restaurant’s patrons who can’t help but notice the two crazies in the booth who are way too excited about something.  For those of you out there unfamiliar with Harkins and/or Culver’s, feel free to substitute your own favorite movie theater and burger/shake joint, although, in all honesty, it’s just not going to be the same. 

The Avengers Dialogues

SPOILER ALERT:  THIS IS A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE MOVIE.  IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT YET, AND WISH TO RETAIN YOUR AVENGERS VIRGINITY, STOP READING NOW.

Avengers Assemble!

The Avengers is coming out this Friday, and I have to admit, I’m more than a little geeked out about it. 

For those of you living off the pop culture grid, there has been a spate of recent superhero movies focusing on individual Marvel comic book characters Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America.  These films established the origins of each character while simultaneously injecting a shadowy, overarching plot line that will serve to bring them all together in the culminating film in this series.  The Avengers is that film. 

I’m not one of those people who will camp out to see the first show at midnight on Thursday, and I’m not one of those people who would willingly sit through the five preceding Marvel movies consecutively as a warm-up for The Avengers, as some theatres are doing.  In fact, I’ll probably wait a week or two to see it (okay, I’ll be lucky if I make it a week), just to prove to myself that I am in firmly in control of my geekitude (geekiness?  geekosity?). 

Considering that I am a forty-four-year-old man with two young daughters, the fact that I’m excited at all about this latest superhero movie is probably reason enough for concern, especially amongst the hardcore realists with whom I have been known to associate.  It’s a superhero flick.  It’s shallow, adolescent, male fantasy wish fulfillment.  What’s wrong with you?  I sidestep the question, because I don’t know how to answer it.

Yes, I know it’s foolish to let my inner geek’s enthusiasm get the better of me.  I completely understand that it’s entirely possible, even likely, that The Avengers won’t live up to my expectations.  By now I should know; I’ve been through this so many times before.  My better judgment says the rational approach is to go in expecting two hours of light escapist fare, like any other summer fluff film.  But I can’t.  I want, I truly want, The Avengers to be a great movie.  I’ve waited a lifetime for something like this.  It’s difficult to suppress the giddy rush of anticipation, even though I know I shouldn’t pin my hopes to a film genre that has been so consistently disappointing. 

You see, there have been a lot of bad superhero movies made over my lifetime.  In fact, in all the years I’ve spent watching these kinds of films, I can say that there are only about five or six that I truly love out of the many dozens Hollywood’s cranked outoHoilaa.  The rest have been decent at best, or far more commonly, alright, or just okay.  The worst – well, the worst have been a lot like being dragged naked down a gravel road for an hour, then forced to sit in a lemon juice dunk tank on Cy Young reunion night at Cooperstown.  You think I’m exaggerating? I’ve got the scars, and the lingering aversion to lemon juice, to prove it.  Yes, the last four decades have been nothing if not unnecessarily cruel to the superhero movie enthusiast.