Friends from College

 Stayed Friday night at Philip and Emma's house and we went out for pizza with Anabel.  Anabel (PPE) and Emma (English) were my year, Philip (PPE) the year after.  Last seen in 2019

 

Museums etc.

 When in London, you have to check out some of the museums.  But I picked the wrong day: not only was it bakingly hot, it was the day of the year when all the schools in England (or so it seemed) take school trips to the museums, so the place was teeming with young hooligans all in variations on school uniforms.  I gave up on the Natural History Museum quickly, but the V&A was much less crowded.

 

 

Marks and Spencer

 This is what English people take for granted (the bounty on display at the M&S on Kensington High Street)

 

To England!

 I flew from Flint around 6 in the evening (the flight was late getting to Chicago and I had to sprint faster than I've run in years to make my flight to London, that was departing at 8:15 Chicago time) and arrived in London before 10 AM.  I wandered around until it was decent and then I turned up at Dinah's house in Kensal Rise.  And here we are.

The view out of my room at  the top of the house.

Film reviews: The Hobbit Trilogy (2012-14)

 

We watched these back-to-back-to-back, so I'm going to lump them all together.  I'm also not going to try to summarize the story but just make comments about things that stood out to me and places the films diverged from the book. (As I type this, I am sitting in Flint's deserted airport waiting for a flight to Chicago which will then take me to London.  So what else am I going to do?) I remember going to see the first of these, it must have been back in 2012 when it was released, and it was at the height of the 3D boom, so we all had to wear those silly glasses.  I say "we," because it was me, Thomas, Thomas's friend Sofi from Valley School (and this was well post Valley School, so this was probably a "let's try to stay in touch" thing in part organized by the other party, Sofi's mother Susan.  My abiding memory is that Thomas refused to wear the glasses, so sat there for well over two hours staring at what must have been a horribly blurry screen.  That was early-teen Thomas for you!  I also remember not thinking much of the film: it seemed rather cheap and gaudy (a failure of the book is that there are too many dwarves (13!) and they are given hardly any distinguishing features, except that Bombur is The Fat One and Thorin is the boss.  (Balin's chief claim to fame comes in Lord of the Rings, where he turns out to have made a failed go of re-claiming Moria, but I don't remember him distinguishing himself (same goes for Gloin, whose child is Gimli, I believe).  Peter Jackson and co. made an effort to rectify this by giving them different outfits, 

different British regional accents (some Scottish, some Yorkshire, etc.) and different hairstyles, some of which are truly ludicrous) but perhaps that was a side-effect of the 3D, because I didn't get that impression on this watch through.  I also objected to the fact that (a) they'd padded the story out (how else could one book that's shorter than any of the three volumes of LotR become a trilogy of equal length?) but (b) they'd cut Beorn.  Turns out they just shifted his location in the story and he shows up in the middle film, but still.  I must be mellowing (and not as precious about The Word of Tolkien as some members of my family (not to mention my friend John from college, who actually shows up as a talking head on one of the DVDs of the LotR trilogy because he wrote a book about Tolkein) because I really didn't mind some of the alterations this time around, as they sort of made sense and in some cases shored up plot holes.  And usually, when they did make alterations, they made sure to make them tie in with The Canon (so, for example, when giant worm-like things show up in the Battle of the Five Armies and are referred to as "were-worms" (at this point I literally said aloud "Oh, come on!" and funnily enough, Billy Connolly (playing Dain of the Iron Hills) said exactly that one second later) I googled it and apparently there is a one sentence reference to were-worms in the Hobbit (a throwaway line about Bilbo imagining going off to the desert and encountering them).  Peter Jackson used that as an excuse to have them burrow tunnels so that an Orc army can appear on the battlefield in front of the Lonely Mountain without anyone seeing them coming.  (Just saw two flashes of lightning outside.  Hope this storm ends before my flight...)

So I can forgive some additions, including even adding a female forest-elf Tauriel 

who falls for Killi (who gets to be an implausibly sexy young dwarf.  He's still a good head shorter than her, so it's hard to take their love talks seriously as she has to crane her neck to look down at him), because, let's face it, there's a paucity of female roles in Tolkein.  (Oh, Galadriel makes an appearance in this one as well, as they flesh out the part where Gandalf vanishes to fight "The Necromancer" in Mirkwood and have him do it with Eldrond, Galadriel and even Saruman (Christopher Lee must have died just after the film came out), 

whose downfall is predicted as he goes off to confront Sauron in Mordor, where he vanishes off to after being zapped by Galadriel.  Oh yes, they leave it no doubt that The Necromancer is Sauron.  (Two more flashes of lightning.  This is getting tiresome.)  They also have Radagast the Brown play a fairly substantial role (even being the one leading the Eagles in the Battle of the Five Armies (aren't they one of the armies?  They never actually count them, which is confusing for a film actually called that)), and while I'm fond of Sylvester McCoy who plays him, he rather plays up his comic aspect (he actually has a streak of birdshit in his hair, and rides a sled pulled by rabbits) which is a bit un-wizardly.  But there are some changes they make that are a bit baffling.  Several times they diminish Bilbo's role in the whole adventure.  For example, as I remember it, Bilbo does not get captured by the Trolls, and keeps saying tricky things from the shadows as the dwarves struggle in bags that the Trolls put them in, until daylight comes.  Here, Bilbo is captured and while he does help a little, Gandalf comes along and splits a big rock allowing sunlight to fall on the Trolls.  Then later, in the lonely mountain, instead of Bilbo being the only one that goes in and encounters Smaug, they have all the dwarves go in after him and they have a massive pitched battle with Smaug that culminates in dousing him in gold.  (And, another complaint, after this he just suddenly up and decides he's going to go off and set far to Lake Town leaving all the dwarves in his lair!  Why would he do that?  It makes much more sense in the book where (a) he doesn't know about the dwarves, and (b) because he thinks the thief must have come from there.)  Of course this is part of the need to overegg the pudding to pad out the running time.  It is true that there are a lot of little events in the book, so that while it's shorter than one volume of LotR, a lot more events are crammed in, there's still only really enough for two films.  And that brings my main complaint.  I remember going to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the cinema, and there's a moment when Indy and co. are in a mining car hurtling down tracks in a mine, when they come to a part where the track has been ripped up.  The mining car leaps in the air... sails about 50 feet... and lands exactly on the tracks on the other side.  There was a collective groan of incredulity (the equivalent of shouting "come on!") in the whole theater.  But we forgave the film because it didn't overdo it.  We allowed the film one impossibility, much as you allow a friend to embellish a story a little bit so long as they don't go Full Baron Munchausen.  Well, Jackson goes Full Baron Munchausen and then some.  Every single set piece has about 4 or 5 moments that are at least as ludicrous as the leaping mine car.  Dwarves fall about the height of the Empire State Building in a 3-story stack of wood and survive.  Dwarves hop between rock giants as they battle in the mountains without a scratch (and certainly without falling to their doom).  Dwarves run into hundreds of orcs or goblins and emerge without a scratch.  (In fact, I remember the end body count of the book being pretty grim - at least half the company of 13 get killed, whereas here, it's just three (one, of course, being sexy Killi to teach Tauriel the pain of loving a mortal).)  It undercuts the stakes.

Positives: there's at least one excellent set piece in each film.  The first one has Gollum and the riddles in the dark, and it's effectively creepy.  The second one has Bilbo creeping around Smaug.  (Further complaint: Bilbo takes off the ring, so of course Smaug can see him!  

Why would you do that?  In the book Bilbo is wearing it constantly, whereas here he hardly uses it.  The best rationalization I can give for this foolhardy behavior is that wearing it is painful, which is sort of a ret-con from Frodo's experience in LotR.  They have the same "swirling shadows" effect that they used in that early trilogy for when the ring is being used, so there's that.  And I do approve of one more change: it's only when he has the ring on that Bilbo can understand the spiders' speech.  In The Hobbit (the book) just about every animal can either speak or understand speech, whereas that goes away in LotR (contrast the spiders of Mirkwood (a chatty bunch) with the silent, alien Shelob, much more effectively scary) and Jackson has more-or-less sided with LotR here.  (One more animal-related complaint, again sidelining Bilbo: as I recall, Bard only knows about the missing scale on Smaug's belly because Bilbo sends a thrush (the same one from the instructions on the map) to tell him.  Here Bard just sees it.  And, annoyingly, he doesn't shoot Smaug as he's flying overhead (when you'd SEE his belly) - he shoots him as Smaug is more or less crawling towards him, having a conversation.  Why not shoot him in the eye in that situation?  But maybe the change is because you can't have talking birds?  The eagles don't speak, either.  

The last movie is pretty much just constant battle and it's just an inferior version of the battles from the second two films in the LotR trilogy.  They also have Thorin have a rivalry that runs throughout all three films (sometimes unnecessarily - they're added to the barrel scene when the dwarves escape the wood elves) with a huge pale Orc called Splorg or something 

(they've tangled before and Thorin cut his hand off - in fact, that's when Thorin acquired the name "Oakenshield" because he grabbed a chunk of oak on the battlefield to use as a shield - one of several occasions when Jackson gets a bit clever-clever filling in backstory that didn't need filling in) and the culminating battle between the two is pretty cool as it takes place on a frozen lake.  But there's also a leaping mine cart moment there when Splorg seems dead and is floating under the ice only to stab Thorin through the foot and burst back out again.  (Oh, talking of leaping minecart moments: they actually had them in the LotR trilogies, of course, only they were all given to Legolas.  He was allowed one ridiculous laws-of-physics-denying moment in each film and it was okay because there were no others.  Well he's back in these films (apparently he's the son of the king of the wood elves and pines for Tauriel - he also insults a picture Gloin has of his son, which is an in-joke given his relationship with Gimli in LotR) because evidently Jackson felt he had to cram as many familiar faces as possible in the Hobbit films to get LotR fans to love them.  In this he failed: LotR fans all sneered at The Hobbit, but, as with the late 90s Star Wars trilogy which was reviled at the time by those who remember the originals, it is beloved by people who saw it first because they were kids at the time.  Anyway, Legolas gets a leaping minecart moment where he literally runs on blocks of stones as they are falling, like Mario in a video game.  And in general, in a lot of the busier scenes, like the dwarves' escape from the goblins in their mountain lair (ooh: side comment - it was lovely to hear Barry Humphries as the voice of the Goblin king, who had a very upsetting giant wattle), the film just looked like a video game, which took one out of the moment.

Still: Thorin's arc is tragic and Jackson didn't fuck that up.  And there's enough familiar actors having fun (Humphries, Connolly, McCoy, McKellen and Stephen Fry as the gloriously oily Master of Lake Town (with a unibrowed Wormtongue of his own called Alfrid 

who became comic relief, but the repeated trust that major characters still put in him when he was patently untrustworthy was frustrating) for example that the films are overall enjoyable, and certainly marvels of set design and special effects.  Somebody should edit them down into two films, though. 

Film reviews: Troll (2022) and Trollhunter (2010)

 

One of these is suddenly enormously popular on Netflix, while the other is a film that we've seen before and we re-watched to see if our memory of it being much better than the popular one was correct (it was).

Anyway, we watched Troll first.  That one, as the name implies, features just one troll, but to make up for it, it's massive.  Basically this is a Nordic Godzilla movie.  

The main protagonist is the woman in the center of the picture who is a paleontologist (she's interrupted in the middle of an important fossil find when the government send a helicopter to get her after a bizarre incident in a tunnel-blasting event) whom we first see as a child being told about troll lore while climbing in the mountains by her father (her mother is already dead, of course) who seems to believe this stuff.  20 years later, when the film takes place, they are estranged, but of course she has to bring him in, despite the fact that in the intervening years his troll obsessions have got him committed and now he's basically a hermit living in a hut in the middle of nowhere.  

(Both of these movies could have been - and may have been - sponsored by the Norwegian tourist board because of the breathtaking shots of scenery each features.)  Anyhoo, some nasty road-builder types practically taunt the environmentalist protesters as they explode a big hole in the side of a mountain, but when they go in to look at what they've done something essentially collapses the tunnel on their heads.  Then later there are what look like giant footprints leading away from the scene.  (In general, this film strains credulity by having a Godzilla-sized creature roaming around without anybody noticing, at least for the first part of the film.)  This one features a high-tech warroom featuring the government (female prime minister, naturally) discussing what to do about this, and it is to that that our heroine is brought.  The prime minister seems to have two advisers - the Pakistani-looking one seen on the left of the poster, who is a good guy, a fan of Star Trek (we see him exchanging "live long and prosper" hand signs with a nerdy female computer expert, who is in the outer office of wherever this meeting takes place - probably under another mountain) and another who is a warmonger who keeps wanting to nuke everything (there's always one).  Anyway, there's sort of a frisson between our heroine and an apparently quite decent army guy (Kris) - you can tell he's decent because he's best buddies with another soldier who is black and Muslim and eventually, after some very small cat and very large mouse-ing the last act of the film is the giant troll heading for the royal palace in Oslo for reasons that are revealed when our heroes pay it a visit.  

In general, this is essentially about as scary as one of the goofier Godzilla movies, with only really one moment of human consumption, and then the guy deserved it because he was Christian.  It's kind of amusing how in both of these films it's assumed that obviously hardly anyone is Christian, and that Trolls have every right to hate Christians because essentially they ruined Norway for the trolls - white settlers to the troll native Americans, if you will.

That theme is used to much greater effect in the much scarier (although, we're talking more Tremors than Alien here) Trollhunter, which is, apart from possibly the special effects for the giant troll, in every way superior.  It's much better scripted, better acted (or at least, more believably so) and has non-stop tension, and more varieties of troll than you can shake a stick at.  It is also that riskiest of ventures, the "found footage" (you know, Blair Witch Project, [REC] etc.) film, complete with a faux explanation of how the footage you're about to see was delivered anonymously at the start.  We're dropped right in it without explanation as three college kids (described as "teenagers" in the ending title announcement that bookends the film but looking early 20s at least) - Thomas, who is on camera, Joanna who holds the boom mike, and Halle, whom we don't see for ages because he's the cameraman - seem to be stalking a mysterious man who is currently staying in a caravan (that reeks of some indefinable smell) at a caravan park but goes out all night in his battered Land Rover (that shows up one morning with what looks like giant claw marks in its side).  This, of course, is the mysterious Trollhunter - Hans.  

The kids try to talk to him and get the brush-off so they tail him, even going so far as to get on a car ferry with him.  Eventually they follow him out one night down a winding country road and into the woods, where they see weird lights flashing and then he comes running out of the woods yelling "TROLL!" and something large chases them and even bites Thomas.  When they get back to their car they find that it has been turned on its side, covered in slime and the tires completely removed (flashback to when they've seen Hans leave a tire under a bridge for unknown reasons).  Hans has to ferry them away in his car (after tending to Thomas's wound) and finally makes the decision to let them in on his secret (because he's tired and near retirement) - he's a government employee whose job it is to dispose of rogue trolls who stray off their territory and make a nuisance of themselves.  He's the only one, but he has many contacts, including the mysterious Finn, who is not happy about Hans fraternizing with a camera crew, and whom we've already seen talking to local reporters over the body of a dead bear that he claims is responsible for the recent deaths of some German tourists (and whom we later see buying the corpse of another bear - to his annoyance, it's a Russian one) off some cheerful Poles to plant as a scapegoat for what we know are troll attacks.  There's also a much more sympathetic female vet, who asks for a blood sample (that costs a lot in bruises for the indomitable Hans to collect) to see why so many trolls are currently acting so strangely (spoiler: they've got rabies - bad news for anyone they've bitten) and who seems genuinely to care for the taciturn Hans.  As I said, everyone in this film is great, but Hans especially.  It takes a lot to make a character like his to be completely believable but he really does it.  The "kids" are great, too, including Malica (another of Norway's large Muslim population) the replacement camera operator they have to get after something nasty happens to Halle (if I say "serves him right" you'll probably guess what made the trolls zero in on him), although she doesn't get much to do.  As I said, there's a refreshing variety of trolls, and although some of them look silly (the first of them has three heads 

and calls to mind the three-headed giant knight in Holy Grail, and all of them have fairly ridiculous snouts) you do get a palpable sense of malice and menace off them.  Unlike in Troll, although Hans regrets some of the culling he's been called on to do, these are not beings with any semblance of rational thought, they are simply a Norway-specific variety of mammal, that just happens to explode (if young) or turn to stone (if old) 

when exposed to ultra violet.  Oh, and they love to chew on tires.  And Christians.  By my count we encounter 4 different kinds of troll, ending up with the truly giant one of the poster 

as the climax of the film (just before Finn tries to chase down the increasingly feverish Thomas to get the video tape off him and the footage ends and we get an announcement that the "teenagers" have vanished and the government is shtum - well, apart from a humorous on-camera slip by the (real) prime minister (to do with the fake pylons that are actually there as an electrified fence to keep the big trolls in their territory) which makes Finn, sitting next to him, wince).

Anyway, I would recommend Troll for somebody who wants to ease a child into more horrific fare (like Gremlins) and Trollhunter for the grown ups after that child has gone to bed. 

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Meanwhile, back in Flint: