News
We’re headed into the holidays, obviously. Posting will be lighter than usual, though something or t’other will probably go up most days. In any case, have a happy season of happiness!
On HU
Featured Archive Post: me on Jack Cole’s pin-up art.
Vom Marlowe on the Inspector Lewis television cozies.
Bert Stabler on the radical feminism of St. Paul.
Subdee on Yamagishi Ryouko’s gender-bending Hatshepsut.
My nine-year-old provides a searing cultural critique of Brave and Django, Unchained.
I talk about how Bart Beaty’s ideas are my ideas, and comics scholars vs. comics bloggers. Beaty freaks out in comments, more or less confirming my thesis.
Alex Buchet on how the King drew Mickey, and other Kirby oddities.
Kim Thompson in comments on the rationale behind Fanta’s recent Kurtzman reissues.
I have some comments on the genocide against the orcs.
Domingos Isabelinho on the Brussels court and Tintin in the Congo.
Jog with the only epic contrarian Bollywood essay you’ll need this holiday season.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I have a piece on Peter Jackson’s violent betrayal of Tolkien. I think this is now close to the most read thing I’ve ever written.
Also at the Atlantic, they let me write about Quentin Tarnatino’s great Jackie Brown and masculinity.
At Splice I talk about Tokien’s Hobbit and children’s lit vs. epic fantasy.
Also at Splice, I explain why I am not metal enough for Velnias.
And finally I contributed to Splice’s poll of best albums of the year.
Other Links
C.T. May on Sean Howe’s history of Marvel Comics.
Brian Cremins on Captain Marvel, gender, and department stores.
Qiana Whitted on Delany and comics definitions.
Bart Beaty interviewed at the Comics Grid.
This Week’s Reading
For a review I finished the first 50 Shades of Grey; only two more to go, god help me. Finished Alasdair MacIntyre’s “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” by skipping over most of the incredibly detailed discussions of historical philosophical traditions and going straight to the ranting about how liberalism abstracts ideas from their philosophical traditions. Read John Christopher’s excellent “The Long Winter”. Started for review “The River of No Return,” by Bee Ridgway, aka Bethany Schneider, a dear friend I went to Oberlin with many, many moons ago.
I don’t think I can properly express my enthusiasm about the prospects of a review of 50 Shades by Noah. I only read the first one. I couldn’t make it through the first page of the second. I’m dying to hear what you think.
I’m about halfway through Lord of the Rings, so your post about the violence in Tolkien was timely. I’ve always had this image of The Two Towers as the “boring” one of the three parts, but I’m actually enjoying it quite a bit.
Also rereading Ware’s Building Stories, which is turning out more depressive/pessimistic than I remember from my first reading. Maybe it’s just the parts I read first this time in comparison to the parts I read last last time.
Conseula, I actually begged my editor to let me stop after the first one, because it is just that eye-gougingly bad. She said I had to read them all, though, so I’m going to at least try to skim the next two. But…yeah, it’s pretty rough. I think E.L. James may actually be as bad a writer as John Grisham, who was my former standard for absolutely unreadably offensively atrocious prose.
Did you see the Hobbit movie in 48FPS? And, if so, is it as horrendous as people say? (It comes out here in a few days, and I’m morbidly looking forward to seeing just how bad it looks)
This week, I read this year’s Love and Rockets, and finished the 1939-1940 Krazy Kat Sundays, Spacehawk and the 1947-1948 IDW Dick Tracy reprint.
I saw it in 3D…I thought it looked okay, fwiw.
The 3D version is the 48FPS-HFR version. The complaints are overstated. In the first place, most 3D movies aren’t worth the extra price. So it was shit to begin with. Secondly, seeing the original LOTR in (mere) high def home video already recreates the bad experience some critics are complaining about. Same with the recently released Universal Monsters Blu Ray pack.
The LOTR movie series is dumbed down family entertainment on the level of Star Wars, so I don’t get why people are complaining about it looking fake.
I don’t actually agree with that. Just re-saw the first LOTR, and I think it holds up quite well. It doesn’t follow Tolkien precisely, but I think it’s a good cinematic take on his worldview and ideas. Bilbo’s struggles with the ring, for just one example, are really very well done — far more affecting and thoughtful than anything in Star Wars, surely.
The Hobbit film is a mess though.
I’ve gone in the opposite direction. The more times I watch the LOTR movies, the more I dislike them – especially the centerpiece action sequences.
But I will give you that the LOTR series is probably better than the Star Wars series. But the latter was going for nostalgic matinee nonsense so I judge it less harsly
I’m with you, Suat. I much prefer the Hobbit, part 1 to any of the Trilogy. But Fellowship is definitely my favorite of the Trilogy. People’s complaints about the HFR are purely associative personal problems that they can’t get over. It’s like complaining about every 35 mm print you see reminding you of American Ninja. I thought the film looked great, certainly the best CGI spectacle I’ve seen and the 3 hours allowed for a lot of non-action bits, storytelling, conversations, smoking and eating. 3D is a shit deal, but it looked better with the HFR. And if 8 hours is too long for The Hobbit, then critics must really hate Satantango, which is an even shorter book. The additional narrative bits actually fleshed out the book more, made Gandalf feel less like a deus ex machina and at least a few of the dwarves felt more like characters.
I don’t think you’re with Suat if you think the Hobbit is an improvement? I mean, maybe I’m wrong, but I’d be pretty thoroughly shocked if Suat thought the Hobbit film was anything other than complete shit.
Yeah, I didn’t mean that he liked the movie as much as I did, but I was thinking that he thought it an improvement over the trilogy. I really had a blast at the thing. I’m opposite everyone these days. Django Unchained is the worst movie Tarantino’s done: is for once morally problematic, doesn’t look all that great, falls pretty flat in a lot of its humor and characterization, but look at all the rave reviews.
I’m looking forward to seeing Django Unchained still. But…I’ve seen a lot of kind of mixed reviews. I don’t think there’s an overwhelmingly positive critical consensus or anything.
I was going by its high rating over at metacritic.
has anyone here seen any 3D films that were worth it? I thought Wim Wender’s dance movie Pina was, but that’s it for me.
http://jenniferarmintrout.blogspot.com/search/label/Throwing Shades – is all I have to say.
I’ve been reading children’s books to make sure they are safe to gift to my younger cousins. This one about a boy and his pen pal in Afghanistan is pretty good. This other one about turning eleven and discovering you have magic powers (no not Susan Cooper) is not bad either, though the magic might mean it’s out of bounds – sadly, or this would be a lot easier for me.
Yeah, Jones, I love Piranha 3D!
I haven’t read Fifty Shades, either, but I’m generally too busy writing the smut to read it these days. Also, I’m very picky about my porn prose. Fandom has spoiled me. Should you need something well-written to cleanse your palette, say the word and specify the fandom and I’ll see what I can do. Also, a couple buddies and I are doing some self-pubbed Kindle stuff under pseudonyms and making some good pocket money.
I’m taking my mom to see the Hobbit this holiday. It’s a family tradition to see a movie and I took her to see all three LOTR movies. (She usually doesn’t care for violence, outside tragedy/historical/classic lit stuff.)
I don’t think we’ll see the 3d (she’s never cared for that), but I’m trying to figure out whether to buy tickets to the regular speed or the faster one. Does anyone have thoughts as to which is better? Does it make much difference?
“has anyone here seen any 3D films that were worth it? I thought Wim Wender’s dance movie Pina was, but that’s it for me.”
Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” is supposed to be good, but I haven’t seen it myself.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I talk about how Bart Beaty’s ideas are my ideas…Beaty freaks out in comments, more or less confirming my thesis.
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Ah, the same ol’ same ol’… Just don’t try that kind of tactic against Harlan Ellison!
Re 3-D, the jungle scenes in “Avatar’ were nicely immersive thanks to that technology.
The only movie I’ve seen in 3-D was Avatar, because someone told me that without the 3-D it was just another bad SF movie, but with the 3-D it was a remarkable demonstration of current technical possibilities for the medium. I thought it used 3-D well to show the richness of the film’s invented ecoscape; as a visual poem about the protean lushness of nature, bits were brilliant. But I felt queasy through much of it, and I don’t know how much of that was 3-D and how much was Avatar generally sucking.
We walked into Hobbit about half an hour late due to bad planning. We got there just in time to see the flashback about Boss Dwarf’s seeing his dad get killed by the Boss Monster; when Boss Dwarf did an unironic slo-mo NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOO I knew I should have gotten drunk first. The rest of the film felt like an anthology of expensive fantasy shorts, some remarkable, others dire. And I completely agree with Noah’s take on the violence undermining the whimsy of the original story. Also, seeing the Elves be jerks and the gang escape on barrels down the river would have been way more fun that 20 minutes of Elven C-Span, no matter how many Great Actors it had. Also, however much of a treasure Ian McKellen may be, he had to animate so much Tinseltown heart-tugging Twinkle-in-Eye kitsch that I felt as bad for him as I do for an orchestra forced to saw its way through Jingle Bell Rock to pay the bills. Anyway, if Gandalf had been Santa and the dwarves had been Workshop Elves,Hobbit couldn’t have been a stickier fruitcake of a Christmas movie.
I’m about to finish The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, which would make a terrific movie with the right director, who probably doesn’t exist, and starting Howard Hampton’s Manny Farber audition Born in Flames, which offers, among other things, a devastating rebuke of Kill Bill and Sin City in the introduction. (It also may have set off my blovating about Hobbit.)
(BTW Noah, I quit fecesbook for a year for New Years Resolution purposes, so don’t think I defriended you or anything. Now I’m on Google+, which is quieter.)
Heh…I use twitter much more than facebook, I have to admit. One social media platform is about all I can really handle….
Is the “Gollum” character more or less annoying than the previous movies? I couldn’t stand him before, and when you couple that with the standard shitty cinema sound systems….
For what it’s worth, the consensus in critiques I’ve read is that Gollum’s scenes are a highpoint of “The Hobbit.”
And he’s a great character, splendidly acted by Andy Serkis.