Back in 1998, my Tolkien-aficionado college friends Dan and Jon directed me to Harry Knowles' website, Ain't It Cool News. Some upstart Aussie director named Peter Jackson was to film a definitive movie series drawn from the Lord of the Rings trilogy; yes, it was going to take place in the roughs of New Zealand and involve hundreds and hundreds of extras; no, hobbits and dwarves would not be portrayed by midgets, no offense to Warwick Davis; yes, all three movies would be filmed at the same time, so crew and cast were expected to set aside the next two years of their life; no, Jackson refused to bow to Hollywood's Attention Deficit Disorder and try to cram several thousand pages of fantasy masterpiece into about 125 pages of script:
The plan was, we tried to convince Harvey to do three movies, because there's three books and that seemed like the obvious thing. But Harvey didn't want to do it, there was too big a risk, so we agreed to do two films. Like split the story in half. We worked on that for about 18 months, wrote scripts to get up to it. Then as the scripts were being written and being finished, the budgeting was able to begin, because you can't really budget without a script.So they got very nervous and very worried about the size of the project. Their solution was to reduce it down to one movie. I said, "Does that mean we shoot the first part, release it, and then if it's successful we get to do the second?" And Harvey said, "No, no," he didn't want that, he just wanted it all squashed into one film. So they gave us sort of this guide that they had one of their staff members do, about how you compress Lord of the Rings into one film. And they only wanted a two-hour-long film, one two-hour-long film. And they gave us this appalling list of cuts that we had to make, in combining things, losing characters, and losing stuff. The Mines of Moria wasn't going to exist. They said we could just cut to a scene afterwards where the characters talked about going through the Mines of Moria and how bad it was. They said, "That'll save all that."
They had all these ideas, anyway, and we just said, "No, no, no, we don't want to do that."
Jackson was serious (honestly, the closest analogy I can think of is five additional minutes of script in Return of the Jedi discussing what happened in an omitted The Empire Strikes Back, i.e., "Han in carbon-freeze? What a shame. And there was this guy named Yoda. Wow."). A determined, well-financed project directed by a fan of the books - who wouldn't be curious? News of casting had trickled down to the public by autumn of 1998 - and much of it was on Ain't It Cool News.
I'll admit that comic books have never really appealed to me - I don't know why, but they don't - nor do I have much patience for most film criticism, amateur or technically professional. And Ain't It Cool specializes in reviews about comic book-derived cinema for interested parties to squabble over. So Mr. Knowles' website, a staple at the time for my friends, fell out of my regular webpage rounds once I'd read all the relevant information. I came back a few times every several months or so after Lord of the Rings news reservoirs had filled up with the natural accumulation of leaks and press releases; and every now and then I'll check the website for a rumor or something eye-catching. I try to stick to news; each one of the ten or so reviews I've read over five years has been taken with a brine pit of salt. Harry, you should know, is a critic who declared Star Wars: Episode II out in front for Best of Series.
His latest, a review of The Matrix: Revolutions pinged James Lileks' relativist radar pretty loudly - which is why, if a silly chic-nihilist essay can draw the wrath of the most wicked Fisk in the Midwest, one does well to stay out of art critiques when intellectually unarmed.
Lileks himself watched the sci-farce flick and, expecting an albatross, enjoyed it for what it was. Me? One of my favorite movies is Wesley Snipes' stillborn dreamchild, Blade. I first saw it in the spring of 1999, a Saturday evening at the student union. If I'd first seen the movie on television, I wouldn't have gone through more than half of it. But my friends and I were giddy that night, and within five minutes we were giving Blade the MST3K treatment for the entire theater. We had 'em in stitches. And the experience went beyond. Humor that wasn't part of the movie before I watched it is now inseparable from it, and I'm more than happy to sit down whenever it's on - even though I only laugh out loud when Snipes delivers his timeless wisdom on the Sisyphean folly of inclined ice-skating.
Sometimes a mediocre movie is just a mediocre movie; and according to Lileks, worth at least five dollars this time around.