MOVIE REVIEW: The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey Extended Edition

When news came out that the somewhat slim Hobbit book would be turned into not one, not two, but three epic movies, the collective voices of the internet immediately shouted, “Shameless Cash Grab!” After the first movie came out last year, critics heaped scorn on its shallow and plodding plot, its uneven tone, and in the case of 48fps showings, its “Masterpiece Theater in HD” visuals.

Well, I’m here to discredit all of that. I saw it in 48fps in the theater last year and it blew my mind. At first I whispered to my wife, “There’s no way. There’s no way the movie is going to look like this for three hours.” The descriptions I had read were accurate. It looked as if you were viewing an extremely detailed live production through a giant window. It was glorious. And even after two hours and forty-five minutes, I was sad to see it end. Now, at the time, the visuals were so distracting (with 48fps, you’re receiving twice as much visual data than the normal 24fps of everyday schmoe movies), I barely paid any attention to the plot or what was happening.

Earlier this year the home video release of the Hobbit came out and I strained hard to resist it because I knew that there would inevitably be a special extended cut that would come out just before the next installment hit the theaters. And the extended cut did come out, just a couple weeks ago, and I greedily swiped it up and proceeded to watch the hell out of it.

After viewing the Blu-ray extended cut, the nine and half hours of behind the scenes special features, the movie again with commentary, and then half of it again in French just to see if the songs would be sung in a different language (they were!), I can safely say that I am qualified to review this movie, and that it is not shallow, plodding or a cynical cash grab by Warner Brothers. Although, the tone does jump around a bit here and there from kid friendly to gruesome, from corny dwarf songs to “serious” talk of mountains and dragons, I don’t personally find it distracting, that’s just part of the charm and epicness of the film. Nobody wants to be grim for three hours straight.

Any fan of the movie or the original Lord of the Rings trilogy should get this edition and watch the behind the scenes material. As was seen on the LOTR extended editions, the behind the scenes material is outstanding. Every aspect of making the film is covered in depth, in detail and in HD. It’s really cool to have a talking head tell you about an incident on the film set, and then they show the actual footage of that incident. Some of it seems pretty personal, for example a scene where Ian McKellen had to act in front of a green screen by himself for a long period of time and became quite upset about it. Other stuff is mind blowing in its conception. That same scene involves the actors performing live on two identical sets, except the one Ian Mckellen is on is slightly smaller in scale. Then they overlap the two and it looks like a large Gandalf walking around a tiny hobbit hole interacting with a tiny hobbit.

While the first disc of extra content covers the technical film-making side of things, the second disc covers the lore and creation of the film’s world. They go into extreme detail on each of the thirteen dwarves, showing their lineage, personalities, weapons, relations with each other, etc. It’s shocking how much of this content does not come across in the film. I’m assuming they will all be fleshed out more in the upcoming releases. At least, I hope so because it’s all really great. Did you know that one of the dwarves has an axe blade lodged in his head, and because of that he can only speak in Dwarvish?

The extended scenes only add up to about thirteen extra minutes of material, mostly taking place in Hobbiton and Rivendell. We get more great visuals and a few minor conversations, and a couple more songs. The scenes are seamless enough that I couldn’t really tell much of a difference. To me, the more material, the better.

Having experienced the Hobbit extended edition, I’m now psyched for the next two installments. I almost wish I could just skip the theater and immediately own the next two extended collections, but then I remember that 48fps. It’s the only thing the theaters can hold over me as competition against my comfy couch. Once again, if you’re into these movies, get this for sure. If you were a bit disappointed with this first Hobbit film, but wish you weren’t, then get this extended edition. I think it will let you enjoy the film a lot more than you did the first time around.

BOOK REVIEW: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I've finally done it. I've finished Infinite Jest.

For those unaware, Infinite Jest is a novel by David Foster Wallace from 1996 whose 1100+ pages contain a story notorious for being willfully difficult in a postmodern sort of way (this novel comes with nearly 400 endnotes, some of which run for ten or so pages and have their own endnotes). It's long been though of as "that big book that some people put on their shelves just so they look smart." I've started and given up on it multiple times, but I've finally slayed this beast of a novel.

Reading this book is not unlike eating a cinderblock. It's an original experience that doesn't relent in its challenge, and the first bite goes down pretty much like the last bite. The story takes place mostly in Boston, specifically an upscale tennis academy/boarding school and a nearby halfway house for drug addicts of various kinds. The two locales are eventually linked in the narrative by the search, conducted by triple- and quadruple-agents for a film made by the former headmaster of the tennis academy that is apparently so compelling that it will render a viewer hopelessly, fatally addicted. However, the chronology is a purposeful mess, and many of the scenes of expository action are present only in semi-occluded references, which means that figuring out what's really going on is a puzzle of fairly tall order.

Since Wallace is very interested in being (maddeningly) detailed, you will, over the course of this novel, learn way more than you ever wanted to know about competitive junior's tennis and drug addiction, not to mention fictional US/Canadian relations, optics, and whatever else Wallace decides to include, often at very little prompting. The obsessive detail leads to the very real fact that a reader of this novel will need to be able to confront more than three pages in a row with nary a single paragraph break on a regular basis without cracking. It makes an already very long book even longer as it forces your brain to render all that data into a coherent scene.

The story takes place in the near future, which means the near future from a 1996 perspective, which actually means approximately now-ish. As such, he's included speculative elements about the course the nation could take; some fantastical, some all too possible. It provides him a way to sneak even more commentary into the book, a tendency that he indulges on basically every page. For example, there's a great twenty+ page scene that finds the high-schoolers at the academy playing "Eschaton," a game of their own invention that sits at the intersection of tennis, international diplomacy, and thermonuclear war.

Very few will attempt this novel, fewer will make it through, and fewer still will understand just what happened, but those who do will be rewarded, if rewarded is the correct word, with images and scenes that are totally indelible. It's a book of great density and Byzantine structure that will necessarily change how a person views both fiction and human observation, but whether or not it's worth it is entirely up to the reader, as is the decision as to whether the nested references to Hamlet and other such brain-intensive exercises are actually genius or merely overwrought. For my own part, I'm immensely glad I got to see the view from the top of this word-mountain, but it's unlikely I'll climb it again.