Bored of the Rings

I laid money at the hairy feet of Peter Jackson last week, paying to see The Hobbit's final installment on the big screen.  I don't regret the cost of my admission.  $8.50 is a perfectly reasonable price to spend for a night with friends.  But I'm no fan of Middle Earth, as you'll see in this reposting from 2010.

Hatchets in the Dark (B+)

Holy crap. Turns out Chris Evans can act.  He can hold his own against Tilda Swinton and John Freaking Hurt.  "Captain America" proves himself an actor who balances brutal action with believable character discovery in Snowpiercer.

A train endlessly circles the ice-encased earth.  Aboard the thousand carriages of this ark-on-rails, humanity's remnant survives.  The population is harshly striated, class determined by one's distance from the locomotive.  Evans leads the latest revolt, taking Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, and Kang-ho Song along in a quest for the holy engine.

The Scariest Comedy Ever (A)

Harold Lloyd, the most popular comic of the silent age, in Safety Last.

If you don’t know silent comedy, then maybe you’ve only heard of Charlie Chaplin.  If you took a Film Appreciation course in college, you might also know Buster Keaton.  But when Safety Last was released in 1923, Harold Lloyd was by far a bigger star than either of his better-remembered competitors. 

Lloyd’s masterwork follows a Midwestern rube to bustling Los Angeles.  He promises to send for his naïve fiancée when he makes good.  But he can’t afford married life on the hourly wage of a dry goods clerk.  When his manager offers $1000 to anyone who can dramatically increase the store’s visibility, Lloyd concocts a public event with his roommate, a “human fly” known for scaling skyscrapers.  Only the roommate never quite does his share of the climbing, leaving Lloyd to navigate twelve stories of obstacles without a net.

If It Bleeds, It Leads (A)

Jake Gyllenhaal as video mercenary Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler.

One of my dearest grad school professors came to academia from the news desk of an Alabama TV station.  She wrote her dissertation on the relationship between morbidity and ratings, observing a significant increase in the coverage of violent crime and trauma during the ratings sweeps of February and November.  TV ad rates for the rest of the year are determined by the audience measurement snapshots taken during these periods. 

The pressure on local news programs is enormous.  Their ads typically account for more local revenue than any other programs a station carries.  Thus, low ratings frequently motivate personnel changes.  Anchors, reporters, news directors — they all live and die by the ratings book.  So the connection of ratings and revenue to the “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” headline is intensely personal.  You want to keep your job?  Deliver eyeballs.  Make people watch.

The Edge of Not As Bad As It Could Have Been (B+)

At least your bad days only happen once.


"Not as bad as I expected," seems to be a recurring theme of response to Edge of Tomorrow. Because I don't have money to throw away on intentionally disappointing films, I generally don't buy tickets to movies I expect will be bad (live Rifftrax events being an important exception to the rule).

Based on word of mouth or trusted critics, I decide whether to see a movie (1) in a first-run, 3-D, IMAX theater after a steak, (2) in a $5 second-run house with a box of smuggled Junior Mints, (3) on a scratched DVD borrowed from the library, or (4) interrupted by commercials on broadcast TV. Okay, I employ other nuanced tiers of discernment, but you appreciate the gist of the economic scale.