Splatter: on FILM

Think what you will about Peter Jackson and the Hobbitization of our current Middle Earth. He has Tolkeinized, making the author a current household name. His final final installment is so very…full. Mr. Jackson has been carrying the Ring for quite a while now, and all viewers, no matter how devout, can see that it’s begun to overtake him. It’s become a bit too precious to him and he…how can I say it delicately?…he Jar Jar’d the last Hobbit. It hasn’t been so terribly long since Hobbit the 2nd, and I kept wondering why Gandalf was caged like he was in Rings and how he got  there and when the eagles would show up to save him. How much did we miss that there was suddenly “real love” between the dwarf and Kate from Lost? Why is Bilbo never hungry? And why didn’t we “desolate” Smaug in the 2nd by that title rather than pick up with the grimacing dragonslaying  dad in prison and the town on fire. In the last year, I’ve had time to forgive Benedict Cumberbach. Sure, he played a mean Kahn, but he did win the 2nd world war with his math skills. Wait…

Despite the anticlimactic opener and Jackson’s forgivable faux pas(s), the wonderment and fantasy remained. The harmony of nature- it’s beasts of the realm and the dominion of Elves and Dwarves and Men. All rage and thirst and crave. All wield and sway and fight with proper swagger. All align forces to dispell and dissuade the Orc evils and their foes.

One of my students recently told me he has trouble ending his stories. My mother can never wait out the suspense; she reads the endings first. All stories must come to an end. And, Peter Jackson is a man who loves endings and resolve so much that he often offers twelve or more. You will feel the need to dust off the old LOTR extended editions.

Stories like Tolkein’s Hobbit allow each of us to become a dragonslayer in our own right. I want to live a good story and write stories with worthy endings. I like to think that all endings deserve the poetic excitement that Peter Jackson is so very famous for. If you saw the others, you must finish the saga which Jackson attempted to wrap up with a bow of Elvish rope carried atop a reindeer steed…just in time for Christmas.