It’s over. Finally. And I think I’m glad, too. Waiting a
year between installments is bad enough, but enduring the three-hour
roller-coaster rides that make up the Lord
of the Rings series is almost too much to bear. They’re too good. They’re
too emotional.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย They’re
also too long. The Return of the King (opens Wednesday, December 17) clocks in
at nearly three-and-a-half hours, which has got to be close to the point where
theaters would consider giving their patrons a brief intermission. You’d
certainly get one if King were a
play, and at a play, you wouldn’t be guzzling one of those refreshing
thirsty-two-ounce sodas, either. Those loud bangs you hear during the fight for
Minis Tirith may not be the Uruk-hai warriors beating their own chests. The
sound just might be your date’s bladder giving way.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย King is virtually the same film as The Two Towers, only with a resolution.
A really long resolution, especially if you have to tinkle. The quest of the
Fellowship officially ends right around the three-hour mark, but Hobbit-like
writer-director Peter Jackson spends another 20 minutes tying up various loose
ends (yet very much dismissing poor Eowyn and her big ol’ crush on Aragorn —
she deserves more, considering her larger role in this installment).
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย I
don’t know if any of this stuff was in J.R.R. Tolkien’s book or not, but a
20-minute coda, let alone one viewed through yellow eyes, is a little too much
to take. I understand it may have been hard to let go of the characters you’ve
spent many years bringing to life, but you’ve got to be a man and cut the cord.
That said, I don’t know what Jackson could have possibly removed or altered, so
I’ll shut up about the running time already.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย The other
major problem with King, other than
the encroaching repetition of journey and battle, is that, after the first two
films, our expectations are incalculably high for the third. When it’s only as
good, it almost feels a little disappointing. In retrospect, of course, it
isn’t. King is still one of the best
action films ever made, and certainly ranks among the best releases of 2003. It
will garner many Oscar nominations and break box office records. And best of
all, there aren’t any Ewoks, saving King from the fate faced by other trilogy cappers.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย King begins in the past, where a still
normal-looking Smeagol (Andy Serkis) and a buddy find The One Ring To Control
Them All during a quiet afternoon of fishing. Smeagol strangles his pal to get
the ring from him, before King shows
a quick montage of the CG-character’s gradual physical undoing. It’s a very
cool opening, and it perfectly sets up the similar struggles Frodo (Elijah
Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) will face on their trek to Mount Doom to destroy the
very same ring. Their journey is still lead by Smeagol, who continues to have
those bi-polar discussions with himself over how far he’ll go to recover his
“precious.”
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Meanwhile,
the rest of the Fellowship remains splintered into the same two groups we saw
in Towers, only with Merry (Dominic
Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) separated from each other for a good portion
of the film. Honestly, I couldn’t keep track of where Aragorn (Viggo
Mortensen), Legolas (Orlando Bloom), and Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) were, or
where they were headed most of the time. Usually their movement centered around
battles, including one involving Sam singing for the crazy Denethor. It is the
best action scene set to a quiet song since Face/Off‘s
fabulously beautiful “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” slow-mo dove carnage.
Only one prominent architect may have had a more messed-up death than Antoni Gaudi (he was a bit
eccentric and dressed like a bum, so when he was hit by a Barcelona streetcar,
people just let him lay there and bleed to death), and that person is the
subject of My Architect (opens Friday, December 19, at the Little
Theatre). The film is a documentary made by Nathaniel Kahn, who just so happens
to be the son of Architect‘s focus:
renowned engineer Louis I. Kahn. He created, among other concrete
monstrosities, La Jolla, California’s Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum in
Fort Worth, Texas, a series of governmental buildings in Bangladesh, and the
First Unitarian Church of Rochester on South Winton Road.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Louis Kahn,
who died bankrupt and alone in a Penn Station men’s room in 1974, was a short,
uncompromising man with Coke-bottle glasses and scars covering his hands and
face from a childhood accident in Estonia. Despite those physical flaws, he was
still quite the ladies’ man, carrying on two long-term extramarital
relationships. The spawn of one of those philanderings was Nathaniel, who
didn’t really know his father all that well when he died. He was only 11 at the
time.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Architect is really two films in one.
Nathaniel Kahn’s film is both a standard doc in which we are educated about a
person we may not know much about, but it’s also the story of a son searching
for information about what kind of man his deceased father was. Architect is full of interviews with
Kahn’s family and co-workers: colleagues to cabbies to the guy who found his
body in the crapper. Other luminaries in the field, like I.M. Pei and Frank O.
Gehry, pop up to talk about Kahn’s impact and his fusion of modern architecture
with that of the heavy stone constructions of ancient Rome.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย My
favorite, though, was an interview with Kahn’s old Philadelphia nemesis, the
still-angry Edmund Bacon, who tells a great story about Kahn’s proposal to
rezone the city’s downtown area to have no roads. A very interesting
documentary but one without much resolution. It won the Audience Award at the
High Falls Film Festival.
Interested in raw, unsanitized movie ramblings from Jon?
Visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy (www.sick-boy.com),
or listen to him on WBER’s Friday Morning Show.
This article appears in Dec 17-23, 2003.
