SELF-PROMOTION: Mel Gibson -- he may be a goy, but he's no Goya. Or so I argue in my Reason review of The Passion of the Christ.

posted by Jesse 8:37 PM

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ALFRED HITCHCOCK ON ROMANCE:

I was on the train going from Boulogne to Paris and we were moving slowly through the small town of Etaples. It was on a Sunday afternoon. As we were passing a large, red brick factory, I saw a young couple against the wall. The boy was urinating against the wall and the girl never let go of his arm. She'd look down at what he was doing, then look at the scenery around them, then back again at the boy. I felt this was true love at work.

(from Hitchcock/Truffaut, p. 262)

posted by Jesse 10:24 AM

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MANY HAPPY RETURNS: I'm probably the last American to see The Return of the King. The other people in the theater sure seemed to have watched it already, which is presumably why they spent the time talking to each other instead. Ordinarily that sort of thing bothers me, but this time their voices kept me awake during the dull stretches, like the scene where someone was going on about the genealogy of some sword or, more generally, the entire final 30 or 40 minutes of the picture.

But I enjoyed myself, mostly; this is surely the best of Peter Jackson's three Tolkien movies. It has suspense and horror, lively battle scenes, and, at times, a genuine sense of grandeur, as opposed to the boring high-fantasy pomposity that bogged down so much of the last two installments. But just before the hobbits destroy the ring -- I trust I'm not giving anything away when I mention that the hobbits finally destroy the ring, since anyone who didn't know that already won't understand what "the hobbits destroy the ring" means anyway -- our feet start to sink in the mire. There's an interminable speech to some troops, and an interminable speech about carrying burdens, and much noisy, "soaring," "inspiring" music; and then, when they finally do get rid of the damn ring, the movie still keeps dragging on and on.

Now, the book goes on a while after the climax too, but that's because events are actually happening in it. In fact, that's when we get to the best part of the trilogy: when the hobbits come home to the Shire and discover it's been turned into an industrial police state. But Jackson, heretofore unable to remove virtually anything from his source material, has for some reason excised this episode. Instead he gives us one false ending after another, several of them set in a Shire that's all blarney and no texture. (The Shire was the most interesting part of Tolkien's Middle Earth; it's the least interesting part of Jackson's.)

Other criticisms? Like the first two films, The Return of the King is cursed with bland heroes. Elijah Woods' Frodo remains a boring bundle of emo, and Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn seems concerned mostly with his ability to walk while looking manly. Much better is Andy Serkis as Gollum; and Jackson has the good sense to frame his story so that Serkis, not Wood, emerges as the protagonist. But by the time all those endings have played out you'll be lucky if you even remember Gollum was in the movie.

But why carp? Lord knows there's a lot worse out there. A week ago, for instance, I finally got to see the much-praised 1945 short The House I Live In, in which a young Frank Sinatra stumbles on a bunch of kids about to beat up a Jew and lectures them on tolerance. We need to get past our petty bigotries and work together, he says, and then he illustrates the point with a tale about a Christian soldier and a Jewish soldier who team up to kill -- this is a quote -- "the Japs." He caps his case by singing Abel Meeropol's ode to American diversity, "The House I Live In," but leaves out the verse preaching brotherhood between blacks and whites.

Naturally, the film won a Special Oscar for advancing the cause of tolerance.

posted by Jesse 9:43 PM

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MOVE ON, BIG RIVER, MOVE ON: MoveOn.org, which spent the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl crying censorship because CBS wouldn't run one of its ads, is being awfully cagy about the calls for government censorship that have come in the Super Bowl's wake. Here's an excerpt from an e-mail to the MoveOn list today:

Let's make sure Congress knows that holding an indecency inquiry doesn't get them off the hook -- that they have the power and the responsibility to roll back the FCC's [media concentration] rule change....If you're concerned about indecency, the solution doesn't lie in censorship or insignificant fines imposed on media giants. Indecency is one symptom of media ownership concentrated in too few hands with no local control.

At the root of the problem is the fact that a few big companies can decide what we watch. You don't have a choice whether or not to watch a Super Bowl heavy on the sexual innuendo -- CBS has a monopoly on the show. And new FCC rules allow CBS and other conglomerates to get even bigger.

So does MoveOn really believe that breaking up media empires means the NFL will decide to contract with more than one TV network to cover the game? And do they actually think we have no choice whether to watch a halftime show?

At least they conceded, albeit weakly, that trying to censor "indecency" is a bad idea. Some self-proclaimed civil libertarians won't even go that far, as I noted yesterday in a column for Reason.

posted by Jesse 3:55 PM

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YES, BUT...: If you really want to piss off some sports fans, show them Heidi's nipple.

posted by Jesse 2:09 PM

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