Next week will see the release of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and will mark the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth hours of Peter Jackson’s adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books released in theaters. I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy even though it became more about spectacle than story by the third film. But the Hobbit movies have left me utterly cold. As soon as I heard Jackson was splitting Tolkien’s modestly-sized novel into two and then three three-hour long films, I saw the whole project as a silly attempt to regain former glory. Jackson went from being an Academy Award winning genius with The Return of the King to making films that just wouldn’t catch at the box office. It seemed he became so enamored with the vast technology at his command with his special effects company WETA that he forgot about story, character, and heart. This resulted in The Lovely Bones and the woefully misguided King Kong. Ever want to see a flirty ice skating sequence with a woman and a giant monster gorilla? Nobody did.
Anyway, The Battle of
the Five Armies will undoubtedly feature epic battle scenes, epic monsters,
epic everything except emotional involvement from me.
If you are like me and aren’t feeling Peter Jackson’s
current incarnation as a classier Michael Bay, I recommend a couple of his other
films you might want to try this holiday season. They’ll cleanse your palate of
Bilbo and Bard and Thorin and help you see Jackson in a new light.
A movie like 1996 ‘s horror comedy The Frighteners is more suited to Halloween than Christmas, but
people who like scary movies generally like them year round. The film stars
Michael J. Fox in his last big screen role before returning to TV. He plays
Frank Bannister, a man with the ability to see and communicate with
ghosts. He and some harmless ghostly
friends use his ability to possess and then quote unquote exorcise people’s
houses. No one gets hurt, Bannister make a little money, everyone is happy. The
problems begin when a not-so-friendly ghost who looks suspiciously like the
Grim Reaper begins murdering people around town, and only Frank knows what’s
going on.
The film is funny and spooky and effectively uses CGi
special effects to enhance the story, not dominate it. The Frighteners is a movie you finish feeling unexpectedly
satisfied, rather than sadly deflated.
The other Jackson film I highly recommend is hard to track down
but well worth the effort. 1995’s Forgotten
Silver is a documentary Jackson made for New Zealand television about the
forgotten filmmaker, Colin McKenzie. It features Jackson himself uncovering a
trove of McKenzie’s movies from the early days of film. The documentary
carefully lays out how McKenzie pioneered the use of close-ups, tracking shots,
sound, and color years before Hollywood would successfully attempt any of those
things. McKenzie was a visionary who disappeared into the New Zealand forests,
emerging a year later, having constructed a giant set in the woods where he
would film a massive Biblical epic. The documentary features interviews with
directors, producers, and film historians who all comment on McKenzie’s
importance in the world of filmmaking.
The best part? It’s totally made up. There is no Colin
McKenzie and nearly every single thing in the film is fiction. Jackson uses his
own love of film history and his technical skill to recreate silent films, war
footage, historical photos, and props, and make it all seem completely
believable. If you have a film buff on your gift list this holiday, you can’t
go wrong with Forgotten Silver. It’s
basically a giant, winking love letter to movie making.
Peter Jackson is a talented filmmaker who has overseen some
of the most ambitious and lucrative films in history. This holiday, try seeing
a couple of the films that got him that job in the first place.
This review originally appeared on Q90.1. For more information, visit www.deltabroadcasting.org.
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