I'm still skeptical about the whole thing, but if Peter Jackson isn't directing, the choice of Guillermo Del Toro makes me cautiously optimistic. Not because I've loved everything he's done, but because his best work suggests that like Jackson, he has precisely the sort of flair for the tactile, the organic, and the grotesque that you need to make a fantasy world like Middle-Earth feel physically real. This is a place where a great many recent fantasy films fall short: The magic of the digital age lets filmmakers summon up fantastic landscapes at will, but too often - I'm thinking of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Golden Compass, and the Star Wars prequels, among others - the results have a glossy, unrealistic sheen to them, with too little of the gritty, bloody, fleshly reality that the best supernatural tales have always partaken of, whether on the screen or on the page. This was something that Jackson, with his background in gross-out horror, always seemed to understand, and the LOTR trilogy was vastly better for it; based on Del Toro's work to date - and the fact that he'll be warming up for his foray in Tolkien with an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation - I'd expect The Hobbit to do Jackson one better on this count, at least.
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Hope For The Hobbit
30 Jan 2008 04:27 pm
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Comments (14)
Apparently, you must be heavyset and have a beard and glasses in order to be considered as a director for a Tolkien film - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0868219/.
This is good news. One might note, however, that Tolkien's books do not have excessive amounts of the "blood, sweat, and tears" that you describe, Mr. Douthat, in them. In transfer to a visual medium, though, who knows - if they are in keeping with the Tolkien undercurrent, then the grittiness you consider might serve...
Man, I hope someone finally makes a decent Lovecraft movie and At the Mountains of Madness is the perfect story to use. As for Tolkien, I always preferred the stuff from The Silmarillion, etc. to The Hobbit, but a movie about those days would be pretty impossible to make. Oh well, I have still have a little imagination left in me, but nothing beats those days in high school reading the LOTR and the Silmarillion and dreaming away. Ahhh.
Ross, et al. -- If you haven't seen Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, Netflix it now. It's got all the qualities you're talking about. I'm not a Del Toro fanboy by any means, but I'm giddy about Mountains of Madness. I frankly don't know how anyone could make that movie (even with serious revisions), but I'm glad to know someone of Del Toro's pedigree is trying.
Actually I am rooting for Curon.
Del Toro's Hellboy made me vomit as a movie (I have never read the comic).
Yeah, Pan's Labyrinth was amazing. IMDB on "Braindead": "The plot synopsis is empty."
About right.
On its merits, "Pan's Labrynth" was a fine movie (and I liked Hellboy), but I went in expecting a fantasy movie with a wartime backdrop and instead got a partisan left Spanish Civil War movie with a fantasy backdrop, which was not what I was in the mood to see at that time.
> "a partisan left Spanish Civil War movie with a fantasy backdrop"
Indeed. Col Vidal was a nasty thug, but I had seen "The Lives of Others" just before "Pan's" and that kept me thinking: Well, yes, but what if those brave partisans in the forest had defeated Vidal in 1941? Would that have ended the killing or torture of Spaniards by uniformed thugs?
I went in expecting a fantasy movie with a wartime backdrop and instead got a partisan left Spanish Civil War movie with a fantasy backdrop
Dude, have you not read Jonah Goldberg's book? The fascists were the leftists!
In all seriousness, though, Pan's Labyrinth sucked monkey scrot.
Ah, yes, Jonah's book... Two belated thoughts.
[1] To Goldberg's critics on the Left who say "Doesn't matter what HG Wells said! It's by definition impossible for liberals to be fascist!", I offer this soundbite from one even greater than Wells:
"Of course, such a regime will be Fascism. It will not be the same as the fascism Franco would impose, it will even be better than Franco’s fascism to the extent of being worth fighting for, but it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will be called something different."
- George Orwell, "Spilling the Spanish Beans" (1937) http://tinyurl.com/2tp793.
[2] To Goldberg's supporters on the Right who see "liberal fascism" lurking in every tax increase or spotted-owl protection order, I ask why they don't point to a particular, indisputably fascist, policy ordered by a particular, indisputably liberal, US President: http://tinyurl.com/2t8djf.
The answer, I suspect, is that substantial quarters of the Right have been happy to pick up the policy concerned long after liberals have abandoned any defence of it: http://tinyurl.com/2qeqfo.
Mr. Blaine,
Did you read the quote? He also said that Azaña's Liberal-Communist regime would be _better than Franco's fascism_ and would be _worth fighting for_. In that same essay (I think) he argues that 'Fascism and capitalist 'democracy' are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.'
Indeed, since you appear to be an Orwell aficionado, I'm sure that you are aware that as fiercely critical as he was of Bolshevism, and even of Trotskyism and even other forms of authoritarian government of the left or right, he remained a socialist till the end of his life, and maintained that 1) as bad as the Bolsheviks were, they had been better than their White opponents in 1920 and were better than their Fascist opponents in 1940 2) Fascism was ultimately, _in practice_ a movement of the rich and powerful to preserve their privileges, and was therefore the natural home of Western capitalists, and 3) ultimately the only hope for humanity lay in a classless society.
I think I would agree on those three points, although I wish that the Russian civil war had been won by the Socialist-Revolutionaries and not by the Bolsheviks. I'm not sure you would agree on any of them, would you? And yes, I think Spain would probably have been a better place had those hapless partisans won the war, and had Christians in Spain and abroad made the decision to Christianize Spanish Socialism rather than to fight it with blood and fire... but we''ll never know for sure, will we, because they were all killed.
Hector, I'm not using "fascist" as a synonym simply for "worst regime ever", and nor was Orwell. Instead, just above the sentences I quoted, he explains that he thinks what makes even an "anti-Fascist" Liberal/ Communist regime itself "fascist" would be its suppressing of its opponents' views. So, he says (and I paraphrase loosely), even though you're fighting out-and-out, Level 10 capital-F fascists, that won't immunise you from becoming a minor-league, Level 3 fascist yourself. Watch what you are doing and becoming. Your side may need correcting, even if it worth fighting for, but never stop monitoring it, and never start completely dismissing every criticism made by your opponents just because they're a "right-wing noise machine" (okay, not his original words but he did say "A thing may be true even if Lord [some right-wing Tory peer] says it is true". This matches closely with his message in Animal Farm.
The fact you are fighting Hitler doesn't whitewash Dresden, just as fact you are fighting Saddam doesn't whitewash Abu Ghraib.
Nor (Goldberg would say) does the fact you are fighting homophobic home-schooling creationists, nor the fact that YOU MARCHED AT SELMA!!!! four decades ago, mean that extremism in the defence of liberalism and tolerance can never be a vice.
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I was excited when I heard about this. I think he's perfect, if Jackson doesn't want to do it.
Posted by Freddie | January 30, 2008 3:46 PM