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Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen a number of articles in places like Time Magazine about how popular culture is abandoning science fiction for fantasy, usually tying it into either pessimism about technology and the future (“Where’s my flying car!”) or nostalgia in a post-9/11 world. They generally cite the enormous success of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings as compared to, say, Star Trek: Nemesis.

Bull.

You want to know why fantasy is doing so well these days? Someone finally made some fantasy films that were good. What did we have before? Dungeons and Dragons. Krull. Sure, there were a few bright spots like The Princess Bride, but if you look at the IMDB’s Top 10 rated fantasy films there’s not one between 1980 and 2000 – and that includes The Empire Strikes Back and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

And somehow all of these articles ignore the box-office success of Spider-Man and Attack of the Clones. Somehow I expect The Matrix Reloaded is going to do just fine, despite the supposed failure of sci-fi.

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I had a slightly jarring experience on my way back from lunch today which provides a perfect introduction to something I had already planned on writing. I absent-mindedly tuned my car radio to a station that until this week had been an English-language rock station and was briefly surprised to hear a commercial in Spanish. I then tuned to a Spanish-language rock station, and was surprised to hear a song in English. (It was by Shakira, who usually sings in Spanish – and IMO, her Spanish work has been considerably better than the English songs she’s released so far.)

This week’s passing of Cool 94.3 marks the fourth time in just three years that I’ve lost a station from my radio presets. It’s becoming harder and harder to turn on the radio and hear music I like without sitting through too much that I don’t.

Musically I’m down to Star 98.7, which suffers from the binge-and-purge method of playlist scheduling (play the hell out of a song until the audience is sick of it) and an increasing shift toward personalities over music. I can’t hear any music during my morning commute because they run the extremely annoying Jamie and Danny show, and during my evening commute Ryan Seacrest spends more time talking than playing music. To make matters worse, Continue reading →

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The Santa Ana winds are back. I spent a considerable amount of time last night wondering just how strong the glass is in our windows, particularly the big sliding door onto the balcony. We had several brief power outages, the first just long enough for us to head for the flashlights and convince us to not turn the computers back on, the rest lasting only a few seconds each, but plenty long enough to set all the digital clocks blinking again. Three cheers for battery backup in alarm clocks.

The drive to work was… interesting. First we saw one of the apartment complex’s flags had been knocked over, the pole sheared off at the base. Then there was the cop directing everyone away from a nearby street (we couldn’t see anything down there, but we figured maybe a tree had fallen across the road or something). Then there were huge fallen eucalyptus branches by the side of the road, and a number of young trees that had pulled their stakes down with them as they went. At one point traffic slowed to a crawl, until we passed several police cars, a fire engine, an ambulance, and a four-car accident in which a smaller car had hit an SUV from behind, actually pushing the front end underneath the SUV. (And just yesterday we’d been talking about the dangers being in a small car in a collision with an SUV.) After I dropped Katie off, I had to avoid a large tree limb that had fallen into the right lane.

On the other hand, I think all the tumbleweeds went last November.

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OK, first I’d like to stress that I did like most of The Two Towers the first time through. It was mainly the non-ending that bugged the heck out of me, and that was the impression I was left with leaving the theater.

I can say now that not only does the movie hold up to a second viewing, it was actually more enjoyable this time around. Perhaps because I knew where it was stopping, it didn’t bother me so much that it stopped there.

One review I read lamented not seeing the developing friendship between Gimli and Legolas. That puzzled me, since I saw it even during my first viewing of the film. From Legolas ready to defend Gimli to Eomer, to their camaraderie during the battle: Legolas offering to get Gimli a box to stand on (and Gimli smiling at the joke instead of growling), their competition over who can kill more orcs, etc. Actually, that competition was one of my favorite character bits from the battle, and I was glad to see it make it to the screen.

Most of the story changes didn’t bother me much. Continue reading →

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A few months ago I read an article about filmmaking which talked about why the ending of a film is so important: it’s not just that the audiences want to see it come out a certain way, but the ending is the last impression the audience is left with. A film can be fantastic all the way through and then fall on its face at the end, and that’s the impression people will be left with.

Now I loved The Fellowship of the Ring, both the theatrical release and the special edition. I enjoyed most of The Two Towers. But the ending fell flat on its face. Helm’s deep simply stopped, and the Frodo/Sam story did nothing more than present a vague threat from Gollum.

Imagine if The Empire Strikes Back had ended not with Luke getting his replacement hand and Lando and Chewbacca heading off to rescue Han, but had instead ended with the escape from Cloud City. That’s what this felt like.

Visually, the film is amazing. The effects, the scenery, the sets, costumes and battle sequences are stunning. The acting, like last time, is excellent. And yet between the jumbled editing and the lack of an ending, the film is far less satisfying than the previous one.

I’m left with two conclusions: either New Line Cinema stepped in to “protect the franchise” instead of trusting the people who got the first one right, or they had a harder time cutting it down to three hours and made poorer choices.

At this point I’m going to bring up some specifics. Continue reading →