An Unexpected Blu-ray

Comics, poetry, fiction and three bad films.

I’ve been reading a sketchbook facsimile called Satiro Plastic: Drawings by Gary Panter. Not as engaging as most of Panter’s great cartoon work but does contain an interesting set of drawings made from the rooftop of his Brooklyn building as he watched and documented the burning and collapsing of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11.

I’ve also been trying to get through a tiresome and irritating e. e. cummings book called 95 poems (this and Satiro Plastic were both pulled down from the shelves of the house where I’m staying).

Daily progress through my found collection of Seventies Doonesbury strips and my steadfast campaign across the pages of Anna Karenina are proceeding apace. I’m really loving the Tolstoy novel, finding it interesting how the narrative has blossomed into being, among many other rhings, about the conflict the headstrong yet vulnerable Anna experiences in trying to remain a defiant part of the baroquely moralistic high society of 1870s Russia while enduring the judgment of those who find it indecent for her to have openly taken up and procreated with Vronsky while still married to Karenin. Interesting story and characters, beautifully crafted from sentence to sentence and chapter to chapter. I know the train tracks Tolstoy is laying down for these characters are leading over a moral precipice and I’m fascinated to see how he’s gonna get them there.

In a box on the street I found pristine Blu-ray copies of the first two films in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. I watched them and subsequently tracked down on a streaming platform the final film in the series, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.

I’ve been putting off watching these Hobbit films for years and have always heard bad things. I’m not particularly devoted to J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, though I do plan to eventually get around to finally reading the last installment in his The Lord of the Rings trilogy, a paperback copy of which I found several months ago in a Little Free Library. I am a great admirer of Jackson’s earlier The Lord of the Rings films as well as some of his other work; from my personal experience I have found watching and rewatching Jackson’s film adaptations of Tolkien’s work to be more rewarding than actually reading Tolkien’s work itself. (I’m sure that take is bound to piss some people off but it’s just one man’s opinion.)

Over this decade of not watching Jackson’s Hobbit films I’d read a lot about his production woes and strange miscalculations (or were they imposed imperatives?) like shooting at an unconventional and weird-looking frame rate and succumbing to the grating 3D film hysteria that was sweeping the film industry around 2012 when An Unexpected Journey was released. All of that ill will and difficulty shows up on the screen, but what is odd is that conventional elements that Jackson and company carried off so brilliantly in the Lord of the Rings films also seem slapdash and unconvincing in this subsequent trilogy: costumes, makeup, props, sets, writing, casting, performances and so on largely feel as strained and tired as the overconfident CGI components and disquieting video game-like look that suffuses all three Hobbit pictures.

These movies are a drag, especially in contrast with Jackson’s fine The Lord of the Rings films. After I finish Anna Karenina and some other books, I’m going to read the Tolkien paperback I found and then will consider myself as caught up on the Tolkien/Jackson legendarium as I ever care to be. (I’ll see how I hold up when that new television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power comes out, but in any case I don’t write about television in this newsletter.) I dig Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films, particularly the longer, richer and grander Extended Editions, enough to know that I’ll continue to revisit them over the years, but I’ll never sit through one of these depressingly, boringly, saddeningly lacklustre and misguided Hobbit films again.