The Great Eye is Frustrated

Well, it took about a week, but I was finally able to squeeze The Two Towers out of HBOMax. There have been thunderstorms around here lately and I think it interferes with my internet, which is wifi from a box. Yet, all my other streaming services worked well enough. Even The Criterion Channel worked fine if I set the quality to 520. But when I got halfway through The Two Towers: Extended Edition, the part where the wargs attack, the player stuttered and finally froze up completely. Over the next few days, I tried to pick it back up but could only get two or three minutes at a time. Last night it finally let me watch the rest but, sadly, the spell was kind of broken. The emotional impact of a film is of course modified by whether or not you watch it piecemeal. Not always in a bad way--I like to prolong the experience of some movies by splitting them into episodes. Oddly enough, as long as they are and kind of episodic, the Lord of the Rings movies are not among those I like to split up. Peter Jackson's filmmaking style is so much about flow from one scene to the next that breaking them up feels wrong.

So I enjoyed the first half of the film much more, being able to get swept up in Jackson's pacing and arrangement of scenes. The casting continued to be spot on. Brad Dourif as Wormtongue is a great example of an actor elevating the material. He doesn't hold back on the delivery, even making little hissing sounds. Yet he suggests depth and complexity not present in the dialogue that helps make him captivating. The screenplay gets some credit, giving some dialogue of Gandalf's from the book to Wormtongue so he can have a moment of genuine insight into Eowyn (Miranda Otto). The dialogue is still beautiful but now it also helps establish his threat and his humanity.

Andy Serkis makes Gollum age very well. The cgi has started to look dated though these movies never did have the most seamless computer effects. But it's the authenticity of emotion that matters and Serkis does it. I only wish Elijah Wood and Sean Astin's performances had aged as well as everyone else's. But most of the time they're good enough.

Even a lot of changes Jackson's team made that I don't like I can still understand. Like the scene where Sam cooks the rabbits. There's no way the film could do something like the version of that scene in the book, which is about the wonder of Sam creating something like the feel of Bag End right there on the edge of Mordor, just with his cooking and ordering Gollum about like a servant. There are other changes I've come to sorely lament.

It's easy to see why they did what they did with the Ents. To give Merry (Domanic Monahan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) something to do, to add dramatic tension to the end of the movie. These things are nice in the short term but the logical integrity of the book's version makes it something you can contemplate on its own terms years later. When I watch the movie now, I just think, "How did Treebeard, a shepherd of the forest, not know Saruman (Christopher Lee) was cutting down Fangorn? How did none of the other Ents know?"

The Arwen (Liv Tyler) scenes have a beautiful tone and I love the fact that they gave Hugo Weaving the text about Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) from the end. Arwen's inner conflict over her devotion to Aragorn doesn't feel explored well enough for it to be introduced at all, though.

I do like the Ents unleashing the river on Isengard as an action sequence more than the Helm's Deep battle which feels oddly stagebound. It has too much artificial lighting. The night battle sequences on Game of Thrones definitely did it better, though, since everyone complained about it, it may not set a new standard, sadly enough.

Generally, The Two Towers is not as good as The Fellowship of the Ring, though maybe I'd feel differently if it'd streamed properly. Even if I could afford to keep HBOMax, I'm not sure if I would. Maybe after a few years when they've ironed out their technical problems and I've become a trillionaire.

Another Streaming Labyrinth

So, trying to make the most of the HBOMax subscription I plan to have for only a month, I've been searching for other things to watch. I'm finding the selection pretty disappointing. I had the impression they had rights to most Warner Brothers films but they have almost nothing from the golden age, none of the strings of movies from their famous contract players. No Errol Flynn movies, no Bette Davis movies. Only one James Cagney movie, Public Enemy, and only three Humphrey Bogart movies--The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of Sierra Madre, and Casablanca. On the other hand, their search algorithm is so bad, maybe I'm just not seeing a bunch of movies that are actually on the service. If you do a search for "anime" the first thing to come up is A Time to Kill with Matthew McConaughey, and number two is Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Does it think I'm trying to search for "animosity"? I'm sure lots of people are signing into their HBOMax accounts, hankering specifically for movies about animosity.

I have to scroll way down to the bottom before I see some bona fide anime, a random episode of the old Rurouni Kenshin anime, not even the first episode, but episode 53. Before that there's episodes of Ben10 and South Park and even a Doctor Who Christmas special.

By the way, I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent here. I'm noticing studios are more and more trying to claim the "anime" moniker for American animation series. Why not? You may ask. "Anime" is a French word meaning animation. In fact, here in Japan, the translation for "animation" is often simply "anime". I hear junior high school students talk about Disney anime films like Cinderella and Shirayuki Hime (Snow White). Similarly, "manga" is presented even by the English text books as a direct translation of "comics".

I was kind of mindlessly going along with it until I was sitting with the kyudo sensei in the club dojo and he flatly said, no, manga is not comics. They're two different things. And, duh, of course they are. You go into any American bookstore and they're in two different sections. Manga has a specific style that's different from the more general appellation "comics". Under comics you can find American, British, French, Italian, German publications, etc. Manga is typically smaller, typically black and white. The artwork focuses more on closeups and full body shots, particularly nowadays--there are fewer panels per page and not nearly as much dialogue. And, in Japan, manga is a whole lot cheaper, particularly used manga. People take much better care of their books in Japan so I can go into a used bookshop, easily find a title I want, and buy a nice thick manga for 100 yen (about a dollar) that looks like new. That's one reason manga is thriving in Japan while comics in the U.S. is riding a death spiral.

And anime is different, too. Calling an American production "anime", even if it employs Japanese animators, even if it employs an anime studio, is generally not accurate. For one thing, anime typical starts with the animation and the voice actors record their dialogue to the video, whereas American studios do it the other way around. This accounts for a lot of underlying stylistic difference it's difficult to otherwise put your finger on. But true anime also differs in other respects--there's more emphasis on design and dialogue, less emphasis on movement and continuous action. There's more importance generally placed on beauty in anime series.

Anyway. It's not the same thing.

So, one thing HBOMax definitely has going for it are some big fantasy properties. They have the Harry Potter movies and the Lord of the Rings movies. They also have Labyrinth, and that's what I ended up watching a couple nights ago.

I hadn't watched it since a few years before David Bowie died in 2016. I'd been meaning to but the last time I'd watched it had been disappointing. This time was much better, I don't know why; my mood or the place I'm at in my life. I think it makes a difference for me that I'm looking at it through the eyes of a junior high school teacher. I so want to show this movie to the art club students.

I know they'd totally dig the Brian Froud designs and I think I'd be doing them a big favour introducing them to David Bowie this way.

Last time I wrote a blog entry on Labyrinth--all the way back in 2009--I focused on the sexual chemistry between Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) and Jareth (Bowie) and lamented how boring Sarah is. I completely disagree with that assessment now because I see Jareth and everything as manifestations of Sarah's imagination. Her "you have no power over me" line is much better thought of as directed at herself and it's certainly a worthy lesson for teenagers needing to learn self-control. Jareth is Sarah's idealised man--we see she has a statue of him on her dresser. She's a Jareth otaku. So it makes sense she can't manage to look anything more than blankly stunned in the dance sequence.

If you look at a kid's face while they're watching a favourite movie, that's generally the expression you see. Learning to have expressive expressions is a part of maturation. We think of people who show their emotions very clearly as being like an open book but most of the time expressions are an effort of will designed to communicate something or conceal something else. The real "open books" are people who aren't usually very expressive at all. That's one of the reasons people tend to underestimate the job actors do.

Bowie sure seems to be having a lot of fun in this movie. And I love how full it is, all the various different kinds of puppets and monsters. Movies where the filmmakers make this kind of effort are all too rare.