The Hobbit: Unexpected Journey – what went wrong

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

With each release of Hobbit-related movies, director Jackson shows just how little he understands of the Hobbit mythology, insisting on turning classic fantasy into trashy sword and sorcery.

Although financially very successful, the Lord of the Rings sequence worked for the most part because Jackson stuck to the script laid out by visionary JRR Tolkien, and the movies failed for the most part where he deviated and decided that he could impose his own vision on the original work.

Because he mostly stuck to the original in the original trilogy, the movies worked.

This cannot be said for the first of the second trilogy, The Hobbit, in which Jackson has basically abused the original story to a point where it more resembles one of those icky Transformer movies than a tale of magic.

Worse still is the fact that he had a body of back story that could have helped make The Hobbit a good companion pieces rather than a summer block buster released at the wrong time of the year, silly and forgettable.

The best parts – and there are only three – are those closest to the book, and I don’t mean the opening sequence that takes us back to the party scene of the first trilogy. I mean the unexpected party scene with the dwarves, to a lesser degree the scene with the trolls, and, of course, the master scene of the Gollum and finding of the ring.

Jackson screwed up pretty much the rest of the movie because as he has in the past he decided he knew better than Tolkien and imposed his own trivial vision onto what was fundamentally a solid fairy tale, trying to turn it into a myth – which he could have done had he paid attention to the materials he actually had, including things said in both collects of books to which he had already purchased rights.

His version starts out as a frame tale with Bilbo Baggins during the opening scenes of the Lord of the Rings finally telling the true tale of how he found the rings, goes through the introduction of the wizard and the dwarves before they rush off onto an adventure, flash back to the war between goblins and Dwarves at Moria, meet the trolls, collect their swords, meet Radigast the wizard who has come to warn them about the evil rising in the mirkwood, have a fight with Wargs, come to Rivendell (where the great wizards discuss the meaning of radigast’s vision), sneak off into the mountains where they are waylaid by giants, come into the caves where they are taken prisoner (with the exception of Bilbo who sneaks away and Gandalf who is still in pursuit of them), fight the goblins while Bilbo finds the ring, escape the mountains to be attacked by wargs again, and rescued finally from the trees where they have taken refuge by great eagles.

The first warg battle is simply filler material, and largely a waste of time, and the great battle in the mountain is so terrible as to be laughable if I wasn’t so busy crying over how much more time Jackson wasted making it seem like a cartoon.

The real tragedy is how badly Jackson handled the mythological elements he should have used to build the real back story – as to how he got the key to the lonely mountain where the great dragon Smaug waited at the end of this fairy tale and how this all fit into the mythology of the original trilogy.

Gandalf always had an interest in the great rings and was already concerned about the head of his order of wizards, Saruman, which is why he held back knowledge of finding the great ring later. But it was his search for the lesser rings of the dwarves that caused him to be captured by the Necromancer prior to the opening of The Hobbit. There he found one of the great dwarves in prison, after the Necromancer (Sauron) had tortured him long and taken the ring.

This should have been the opening scene of the Hobbit and Gandalf’s escape – although Jackson could not use the material in which Gandalf met the dwarves for the first time in Bree (because Jackson didn’t own rights to that book), the story should have made clear that there were other reasons why Gandalf pursued their venture, somehow suspecting that the Great Ring of power was involved, and that somehow Bilbo was meant to find it.

Whereas Jackson wasted the council of Wizards scene, the original back story had them well aware of the dark lord’s rise in the Mirkwood as they argued over whether or not this was really him. Jackson’s weak effort to have Saruman discourage Gandalf into believing the necromancer is actually Sauron may simply have been a foreshadowing, but it hardly represented the power struggle ongoing in the counsel, for who should lead the investigation, or showed the mistrust some members already felt about Saruman, who some suspected sought the great ring for his own uses.

This political conflict was starkly missing from the first of this new trilogy although it may later evolve, as Gandalf will later venture into the Mirkwood to confront the Necromancer in the second or third film. Hopefully, Saruman will become more clearly the evil force he will later become in the Lord of the Rings. But it is clear from the first installment of The Hobbit and his misuse of material in The Lord of the Rings, Jackson lacks the subtle touch for such work when deviating from script JRR Tolkien set out, wasting his time on ludicrous fight scenes while missing the heart of the real conflicts ongoing in his source material.

Too many people voting?

Friday, January 20, 2012

After a nightmare day traveling around Hudson County yesterday via the public transportation network, I decided to drive to Bayonne today.
I feel a bit like a vampire, only instead of being afraid of day light, I must be home before dark comes.
The newspapers is loaded with disasters, fires in Union City, and lawsuits in Hoboken to reduce the size of a ward the mayor’s ticket can’t win in.
One of the political organizers I knew in the 1960s said that people turned to the courts when they can’t win in the ballot box, letting the courts violate voters’ choices by legal ruling.
This may be the case here with municipal elections always a test of the mayor’s strength, and since the mayor has used the Governor’s office to undo her opponents, why not the court system as well?
We have always found ways to undo Democracy, especially when it inconveniently allows people we dislike to hold office.
Vote suppression can be done in many ways – by negative advertizing, canceling bus service on Election Day or by filing lawsuit in the courts.
But it amounts to the same thing: denying people their right to the representation of their choice.
This is one of the concepts behind Fascism, in which social and political policy is dictated from the top rather than evolving from public discourse.
People aren’t allowed to smoke in public places because new laws restrict where and how a person can exercise what it still a legal activity. People can’t park beyond a certain time because city planners deliberately downsized the number of parking spaces required when construction or reconstructing a residence. People can’t celebrate a holiday because the masters of the city have decided to cancel a traditional event or move it because the mayor or other leaders disagree with the culture it produces. Recently the Obama administration proposed making 100 watt light bulbs illegal, partly in an effort to push a social green agenda down the public’s throat – rather than allow market forces in a so called free market society decide what people want.
I keep hearing about how free we are in America as compared with other countries, but this isn’t exactly true.
Certainly, we’re freer than in France where if you express a bias or prejudice, you can be charged with a crime. But in America, we erode freedoms more nefariously, by getting court rulings to undo our voting rights, to create laws that narrow the scope of our freedom so slowly that like Lobsters in water gradually coming to a boil, we never quite know when our asses are cooked.
In Hoboken, the mayor and her followers file suit complaining about long lines for people trying to vote – after an election in which her administration canceled car service that would have allowed the poorer people in that same ward to get to the polls.
While in most cases the concept of long lines at polling places is a joke -- especially with the percentages of voters at record lows except in national and sometimes state elections, lines are pathetically thin. But in this case, the mayor has a point – when the voting district has many times the legal number of people voting in it.
So the mayor and others filed suit against the election board to make them change it, not bothering to call the election board to learn that this was already in process.
But the real reason may not have anything to do with oversized elections, but the need to expand the number of committee people who support the mayor. By increasing the districts – she proposed the one district being divided into three – which means that the overall committee numbers would increase by four, and if she can get the new districts in areas of that ward thick with her supporters, she can take back control of the municipal democratic organization she lost earlier this year by a very narrow margin.
This, of course, is classic politics.
The mayor may not trust the board of elections to make the division of the district the way she wants, and so she has decided to force the issue by having a court draw the lines instead.

Wraiths by night

Thursday, January 19, 2012

I’m at home working as I wait to make the trip to Journal Square to visit my eye doctor.
I spent a good portion of last night navigating the public transportation system after the council meeting, choosing to make the trip to the light rail rather than chance the bus system along Kennedy Boulevard.
The last time I went to take a bus after a meeting, I stood in the dark for an hour until the bus came – no, not one bus, but two – and I was so desperate I got on the first one, finding myself like a refugee among other refugees, stuffed between packages and people while watching the second nearly empty bus pass us by.
The walk was not significant, even in the cold, but the station at 34th Street was something out of Graham Greene novel, stark and empty, with the “Next Train” sign indicating a 25 minute wait for one bound to Hoboken.
An out of service train rushed through the station as if on fire like the train in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, beeping his horn the whole time.
Rather than sit in the cold, I hopped the train bound the other way, figuring it was better to be warm and seated than to stomp my feet on a platform alone. Passed my office the train went, then down to the new station on 8th Street, where we piled out, and the conductors separated some of the cars, reducing the size the train by half, then let the few passengers waiting there into the remaining cars.
As we waited another train pulled in on the other side, turned off its lights to wait out the night for the rush the next morning.
We took off a few minutes later, stopping at the stops I had passed on the way down, frigid people piling in like the refugees from my previous bus trip, all of them cold, all of them needing to catch this train than wait for the next one not due for a hour, each stop adding to the fullness of the car so that I struggled to get out at Liberty State Park where I had to change to the Tonnelle Avenue train.
This was more populated, but not greatly. A few people on the far side waiting for trains to either West Side Avenue or Bayonne, a handful on my side waiting for the train I needed.
In the parking lot across the street, the security guard’s vehicle – now decorated in orange lights along its side – continued to prowl the lot, checking on empty spaces, like one of those bored tigers I used to see pacing its cage in the zoo.
The wait wasn’t long. Although again, missing this train meant more than a half hour wait until the next one, so there was a rush to get a seat since everyone knew that the density would only increase with each additional stop, which it did, people piling in at every stop until I could barely elbow my way out again when I reached the 9th Street station in Hoboken for my ride up the elevator and my walk through Jersey City Heights to home.
Driving, the trip would have taken my less than a half our. This trip had taken me an hour and a half.
Walking on either end of the trip to or from the train, I was struck by how lonely the world is at night. Jersey City, Bayonne, even Hoboken haven’t changed to the degree we all believe, still a stark landscape after dark, with isolated characters like myself making our way through dark streets headed to unknown destinations, trying to sort out in our heads, why were are here at this time of night, and what in the end have we gained by the experience, people who are still wraiths in a gray world seeking answers to questions no one can answer.

A sign from God?

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

When I see a sign from God, I pay attention – mostly because I can be pretty sure it’s my mother speaking to me from beyond the grave.
Even before she died on Dec. 30-31, 2001, she haunted me.
She was always praying for me -- and I honestly believe she accomplished miracles through her prayers, keeping me safe when I otherwise should have perished.
When a Cadillac struck me on a back street in Hollywood and did no damage, I knew it was my mother’s prayers at work. When I gave the finger to a pack of Hells Angels wanna-bes and they leaped off their motorcycles with knives and chains to take me to pieces and an army of cops showed up to save me, I knew it was my mother’s prayers at work. When I tried to drive a 1955 two-tone Buick four door cross country from Portland, Oregon and found out only after I got onto the highway that it had no breaks – and still managed to survive the ride off the exit at high speed, I knew it was my mother working her magic with God through prayer.
All this might seem dubious to you, but the truth of the matter hit me hardest after her death – as big and small miracles arrived, some with her signature, some without.
One day in mid 2002, I was walking to work in Hoboken from my house in Jersey City Heights and I noticed a pair of green rosaries on the ground. I was struck by them partly because my mother had worn out many similar pairs she received regularly from the missionaries she funded out of her social security checks.
I thought, “this must be a sign from her,” more or less joking with myself, until – when picking up the rosaries – I noticed on the wall of the nearby house was posted my mother’s favorite picture of the Virgin Mother.
To say this disturbed me was to put it mildly.
I never got over my mother’s death – which was the concluding act of the best and worst year of my life, 2001, a year which saw me made Journalist of the Year, but also brought tragedies such as 9/11, various other disasters, the death of my hero, George Harrison, and finally my mother’s passing.
At work, I kept waiting for the sky to fall, and was grateful when I managed finally at 5 p.m. to escape unscathed.
I climbed the viaduct to the heights, and noticed something odd when I got to Central Avenue in Jersey City – none of the street lights were working. Darkness was coming on, and when I looked back at New York City, I saw a black hole – no lights there either, except for lines of automobile lights along West Side Highway.
I kept walking, and found the street lights out, store lights out, even lights in the windows of houses usually lit were now blackened.
This was true all the way home, except when I got to my house, my lights worked. It appeared that our block was in a narrow geographical band not affected by a black out that had wiped out the electricity for most of the East Coast.
My mother also watched over my wife, since my wife worked in New York City at the time, and was in the mass of craziness as people scrambled to make for the ferries – a kind of repeat of 9/11 but without the tragic deaths.
My wife wound up on a shuttle bus with a shameless driver, who rode over sidewalks, and somehow managed to get through the Lincoln Tunnel to bring her home to the heights.
All during the waiting for her to come home, I handled that green set of plastic rosaries I had found earlier in the day, watching the coverage on cable TV – which also somehow had not perished with the electric grid.
All this said, I walked to the train station this morning along pretty much the same route and saw a strange aberration on the wall of a building near Passaic and Paterson streets in Jersey City Heights. There was a reflection of light – I still don’t know from what – in the shape of a cross on the side of the building.
This was no ordinary building – but one that I had once sought to rent an apartment in for my mother. At the time, I thought the fact that my mother had lived in Passaic Street when growing up and had worked and lived in Paterson, made the apartment perfect.
While the apartment did not pan out, I never pass that building without thinking of my mother, and now, at work, I ponder what that sign could mean, and wonder if she is sending me another message.
Damn it, I’m scared to go home.

Who can protect me now?

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Woke up this morning to the first ice on the walk since the October snow wrecked my trees.
I ought to be grateful, and I suppose I am, that this winter has been so mild as compared to last year this time when the residue of the post Christmas snow storm still cluttered the streets.
Ice doesn’t sit well with me because I live near the bottom of a very steep hill, which I have to climb in order to get to public transportation.
Even when I had two eyes and could drive, climbing this hill was not fun, all spinning wheels and prayers that I didn’t slide all the way down to where the street meets the highway and the parade of tractor trailers making their way north from Port Newark.
Last year, walking down the hill, my wife and I both slipped on the same piece of pavement on the same night, but about an hour apart. This stretch is owned by some old mobster, who rarely shovels his walk, except to make a path for his Seville to park in, and never puts out salt when his pavers get slick.
We learned to walk on the far side of the street where the Head Start staff keeps their walks clean, but even then, melting snow or ice intrudes, leaving slick patches.
This morning being the first morning of ice, nobody put out salt so that the walk and street proved an even steeper challenge than usual, forcing pedestrians to cling to fence posts, car mirrors and any other protrusion to keep from falling.
Two women who also survived the climb pondered why news stations didn’t issue icing reports the way they sometimes did for snow, warning people that we risk life and limb if we go out at this particular time.
I guess we’ve been warned too much about every possible disaster, from terrorists to hurricanes that we’ve come to rely on someone telling us when to duck.
I remember some misguided woman who wrote about the history of children’s playgrounds, talking about how they were supposed to be safe for children – obviously misreading the reasoning and logic behind the original construction.
She tried to explain why playground got rid of concrete and asphalt and installed rubberized floors, as yet the next step in keeping children safe.
It’s not true. At least not all of it.
Playgrounds were made hard because they were built mostly in a working class era when parents needed to prepare their kids for the harsh realities of the world, and figured scuffed knees and bruised elbows taught children more about life than any lecture did.
As our nation abandoned the working class model and pressed people to aspire to middle and upper class values, we grew more afraid for our children, coddling them more, seeking more protection against things like asphalt. We did not want our previous progeny injured, and so we sought to warn them against things instead of letting them experience things first hand.
This idea that I have to make my own way in the world and deal with situations like ice and snow make me appreciate things better. I hated getting yellow and red terrorist alerts from a government too inept to protect me and yet left me with no way to protect myself.
We have divorced ourselves from FDR’s idea that fear is the only thing we need to fear, and we are constantly being encouraged to be afraid, warned of potential dangers – some of which we are helpless to avoid.
Perhaps this harkens back to the air raid drills I underwent as a kid, when nu ns at my school shouted for me to duck under my desk, when we all knew the desk couldn’t save us if someone dropped a nuclear bomb, and the least anybody owed us was to let me see the flash before it was all over.
The fact is the government doesn’t protect me – at least not from terrorists or bombs – but it makes a good show of saying it does, doing as much to make me scared to look around me as the terrorists or the soviets would.
Maybe we do need someone to tell us to look down at our own feet when we walk, to remind us that there is a real world that we should be aware of in order to protect ourselves, but I’m pretty sure the people who warn of us everything else, aren’t the people I trust to look out for my interests. I need to look out for my own, play in a playground that isn’t made too safe for me to ever injure myself, to walk on a sidewalk which the local mobster is punished for not keeping clear, to look up when the bomb drops so at least I get to see the beauty of its flash.

So who paid for the donuts Christie stole?

Monday, January 16, 2012

I woke up this morning to hear my radio alarm blaring Oprah interviewing Christopher Christie, and Christie talking about how as a young student, he and his buddies used to steal donuts from school.
Steal maybe too strong a word, since he made his political connection with the cook and as with the rest of the big shots in New Jersey, he learned at an early age how to get what something for free other people have to work hard for.
He was trying to sound like a “real guy,” and connect with the rest of us blue collar workers by talking about things he assumed the rest of us would do, and that somehow, he could form a human connection with us, his position as an elite Republican presidential-wanna-be denies him.
Oprah, who wields power like a sorceress, seems determined to give him the national exposure he needs in order to make his presidential ambitions credible.
I guess an appearance on Oprah’s show is part of Christie’s job description as governor of New Jersey – but like taking helicopters to catch his kid’s ball game – Christie has a better idea of what we tax payers expect of him.
` He once told a reporter that it was none of his business that he sent his own kids to Catholic school, while as Governor he wanted to gut funding for the state’s poorest school districts.
This elitism flies in the face of his attempt to be a common man, when he’s always been one of the insiders, one of those people who gets put in front of the line as places like Club 54, but needs Oprah to alter his image so that he can seem like he’s one of us, when the last thing he really wants is to be common.
I still pondering this when I got to the light rail station at 9th Street in Hoboken and a smaller than usual train pulled in, and an army of baby carriages rushed into it, filling all the aisles.
America’s population may be declining, but not in Hoboken, where everybody seems determined to procreate – and as I clutched a handle to keep my balance amid the carriage, I wondered, just where we would find room to park their cars when they came of age.
Fortunately, most of the baby carriages existed in Jersey City in the area of New Port/Pavonia, suggesting a strong tie between the two parts of the planet I’d not suspected before, common culture that might well justify NJ Transit’s plan to build similar towers over the rail yards bordering Hoboken.
Because of the holiday, I had a longer than usual stop over at the Liberty State Park station, where I saw the security guard in the parking lot driving up and down the aisles – even though there were only about six cars in the lot.
I didn’t think much about it, until I realized that he didn’t stop.
It reminded me of the mountain lions in the Cape May Zoo that pace their cages in total frustration, except the security guard was clutching a cell phone and kept going up and down the empty aisles.
After awhile, I realized that he was running up the odometer on his vehicle so that later, he could report that he had toured a wider area than he had, and eventually, when I took out my camera to take a picture, and he saw me trying to take the picture, he pulled up into a remote corner of the lot, out of range.
This abuse of authority seemed to be something that lingered from the Oprah interview with Christie, this sense of privilege that allows people to abuse their own positions while telling the rest of us how to live our lives.
Here was a security guard charged with making sure people like me didn’t park in that lot without a permit, yet could run up his odometer to make his boss think he was actually doing his job. Here was my governor (who I didn’t vote for) was being interviewed on Oprah about his youthful theft of donuts, using his government helicopters to catch his child’s ball games, and telling us we have no right to know why he chose catholic schools for his kids while destroying the trust in the public schools his kids did not attend.
Does he punch out a clock on being governor when he goes off to campaign for his republican friends in Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina? Is Christie running up the odometer when he flies to his kid’s game or appears on Oprah?
And who had to pay for the donuts he stole as a kid anyway?

An outlaw comes home

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a mythological journey in their lives or even recognize it when it occurs.
Sometimes, you don’t get to realize just how important an event is until long after it ended.
I recognized mine right away, but didn’t appreciate its value until later.
Today’s cold brought it back because it was a similarly cold day in January 1972 when my journey came to an end, and I returned to New Jersey.
After three years on the run from the police, I had decided to turn myself in, although I needed to meet with my family first, since they were the victims of the crime.
I remember calling up the old phone number and hearing my uncle’s voice on the other end.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Here, in New Jersey,” I said. “I want to come home.”
Only I didn’t want to have my friends dump me off in front of the old house in Clifton, and suggested that I meet the family at some neutral ground, and when I found that the boat show was underway at the Coliseum at Columbus Circle in New York, I suggested we meet there.
My family owned a boat store and put on a display at the show each year.
My friends agreed to accompany me to the meeting, fearing that my family might shoot first and ask questions later.
After my disappearance in 1969, my uncles had made East Village history when they stalked the streets in search of me, since they knew I hung out there most weekends, and had mistaken some other poor fool for me, realizing their mistake only after they had chased him for blocks and tackled him.
The fool, seeing the weapons my family carried – mostly left over from the Korean War – he did not call the police.
My family had also followed my friends, especially Frank, who worked at the Little Falls Laundry and lived on East 6th Street in New York. Every day, their cars trailed the bus back into New York, and were waiting in the front of his apartment building when he came out in the morning. Once, only, had they actually come into his apartment in search of me.
After a few months, even my thick-headed uncles must have realized that I had really taken off this time. Uncle Harold, the savviest of them, had checked with some mob friends he had about my possibly traveling to Colorado. But since I went to Denver via LA, lingering in the Latino quarter for a few weeks before going back to Denver, his friends missed me, too.
Now, almost out I came home, weary from hiding all the time and living under names that were not my own. I had actually dreamed of growing old and having the police show up one day to haul me away.
So my friends drove me to New York, and walked in with me to the coliseum, where we stood as if in the OK Coral as my uncles came towards us across the sales floor.
It was Frank who suggested we push my girlfriend and our one year old child in front of me.
“They won’t shoot if they see the baby,” he said.
They hadn’t intended to shoot, and when my uncles saw me, they nodded, and came towards me, their faces filled with that strange awe and anger that is born only out of years of worry and love, a confused pack of outlaws, who shook me first, then hugged me, and the later took me home, telling me “We’ll have to settle all this with the law, you understand. But it’ll be all right. Really it will.”
And though I didn’t know it at the time, it really did turn out all right.

For those interested in the full tale which I'm still typing in, you can check out the link:

http://www.scrappaperreview.com/road.html