movie review: The Battle of Between Four and Seven Armies

The best literary description of The Battle of the Five Armies is not by J.R.R. Tolkien, but by Dr. Seuss.

What do you know about tweetle beetles? Well ...
When tweetle beetles fight, it's called a tweetle beetle battle.
And when they battle in a puddle, it's a tweetle beetle puddle battle.
AND when tweetle beetles battle with paddles in a puddle, they call it a tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle.

Having used up the rest of The Hobbit in his previous movies, Peter Jackson had nothing left for this one except six chapters, some 50 pages, largely occupied by Smaug's attack on Laketown, the siege of Erebor, and the titular battle. We know how much he likes battles, so end to (nearly) end nonstop battle this movie is. So it's like tweetle beetles in that we don't see the characters do much of anything but battle and prepare for battle. There's also paddles and a puddle for good measure. It's also like the tweetle beetle battle in being a giant muddle.

These six chapters of the book include four songs. There are no songs in this movie. There is no consideration of audience knowledge, either. Viewers who aren't familiar with the book had better remember the earlier movies pretty well if they hope to make any sense at all of most of this. Nor is the title ever explained. In the book the five armies include the Wolves. There are no wolves here, so the uninformed viewer may be baffled about the number. The orcs have two separate armies; does that count? Is Thorin's band a separate army? How about the Eagles? So it could be any number from four to seven.

In the previous movie, Jackson threw the entire relevant chapters of the book away, leaving only the character names and a paragraph's worth of plot structure. He's nowhere near so cavalier in this one, so the changes clang more. I started out by noting that the people of Laketown evidently believe they're located on the River Anduin, which is actually on the other side of Mirkwood; that the arguments in the conflict over who gets the treasure are sufficiently tweaked that I predict it will confuse future students of the book in the way Jackson has confused them over Aragorn's attitude towards the kingship; and that, when Galadriel rescues Gandalf and Radagast from Dol Guldur - OK, that's another change - she vamps out, the way she did in Jackson's Fellowship, and, if I'm reading the imagery accurately, disembodies the Necromancer, leaving only the vaginal slit famous from the LotR movies. I'd guess that somebody told Jackson he had been in error in depicting Sauron as a helpless disembodied eyeball, so he has concocted this explanation as to how Sauron got that way.

After that I stopped keeping track, though it was hard to miss the Elven-king's parting advice to Legolas to seek out a Ranger called Strider, although at this point in Tolkien's history he was still a ten-year-old boy in Rivendell called Estel. Bilbo, very much a supporting character in this story - what a waste of Martin Freeman's considerable talents - gets to say "The Eagles are coming," although not until long after they'd dramatically arrived, and he mutters it without anybody within earshot, so as a dramatization of one of the great "book moments" it lacks effectiveness.

Basically, book fans trying to find moments to squee in delight at will feel like they're trying to suck through a straw at an emptied glass. Bard doesn't apostrophize his black arrow. The language of the negotiations at the Gate is softened into pudding. Bilbo's farewell to Thorin has most of the words, plus some unnecessary ones, but the context of the scene is entirely different, so that didn't work as a "book moment" either.

As a wall-to-wall battle movie, I found it tiresome. All the armies move in mechanized lockstep unison, even the Elves putting their arrows away or the Dwarves hastily erecting a wall of shields. Scenes like this dwell in the Uncanny Valley. The Orcs outweigh the good guys so massively that in order to keep some kind of equilibrium, they have to be ridiculously easy to kill. The Elven-king swipes the heads off a whole line of them with one stroke while they're clinging to the antlers of his moose (heroes riding ridiculous choices of animals is another continuing theme in this movie), without even damaging the antlers. This applies until the painfully prolonged Single Combat Warrior battles against the monster commanders Azog and Bolg (Azog and Bolg, eh? Book fans, shake your heads again), who are, by contrast, ridiculously difficult to kill, so it goes on and on. Legolas climbs up rocks falling through the air. "Oh, come on," in the words of Dain finding that the first orc army has entered the battlefield by tunneling through the mountains with the help of giant Were-worms, the ones mentioned by Bilbo back in chapter one. As Jonathan Fischer points out, Dain says this so that you don't have to.

cat column

There's been big changes in our cat culture here lately, and if they think it's because of the visit they paid to the vet yesterday (always a traumatic occasion), they're right.

Maia had been eating by grazing at an always-filled bowl on the counter in the upstairs bath, where we'd kept it ever since that was the room we kept her in for a week when we first got her, so she knew food was there, and Pippin wouldn't find it.

Meanwhile Pippin was on a strict diet, so we fed him twice a day, and since Maia (like Pandora before her) would nudge her way into his food despite having her own, and he is too much of a giant wuss to stop her, I'd developed the practice of using Pippin's feeding time as Maia's playtime, enough so that Maia came to know to wait under the cat tree as I put Pippin's bowl out, because that meant the delectable peacock feather would soon make an appearance. (I am still holding back the laser pointer until she gets older and slower, because the laser pointer is the turbo-charged crack of cat toys.)

But now the vet says that Maia could use a bit of a diet too, a bit of a surprise since she's never eaten all that much, but now Pippin's mealtime is hers too. Pippin eats on a blanket by the piano bench, where we originally put his food in a futile attempt to keep it away from Pandora whose food was in the kitchen, and when Maia isn't playing and isn't stealing his food she likes to watch him from above. So now we put her food on top of the piano bench, where again Pippin is unlikely to notice it. It took Maia a few days to figure out that Pippin's foodtime was now her foodtime too, but again she eats a little and goes away.

It does mean that Maia's playtime has been moved away from mealtimes, and she lets me know when she'd like to play by flopping on the floor, usually upstairs, where I've taken to petting her with my foot. We then either play on the cat tree downstairs, or I stand on the staircase and drag the feather across the carpet on the upstairs landing, which she also loves.

The only catch is that it turns out that Pippin, who would like more food than he gets, associates Maia's playtime with his mealtime as firmly as Maia had associated them the other way around, and when I play with her he comes up and gives a "well, are you going to feed me?" look.

concert review: International Orange Chorale

I'm really glad I went to the effort of attending this succinct choral concert at an acoustically excellent church in the City.

Though they're called the International Orange Chorale, they wear black on stage. (Sorry, Orange Mike.) The program says it's a volunteer group, but the voices are impressively professional in quality.

Ten pieces, all unaccompanied, none longer than about 8 minutes, 9 of them written in the past 5 years for this ensemble and the other about 15 years old. All ten of the composers (8 men, 2 women; at least four involved with the choir and 2 others local and present) are now aged between 28 and 44; the chorus members all looked within that age range as well, and so did most of the audience.

One of the two composers I'd previously heard of was Caroline Shaw, and I certainly welcomed my first live encounter with her eerie post-minimalist music. I found that I liked the pieces pretty much to the extent that they departed from straightforward text settings. That made Shaw's Fly Away I, which uses phased buildups from rhythmic monotones into rich consonant harmony to set chopped-up phrases from a hymn tune; Paanyaya 3 by Robin Estrada, which builds up cross-rhythms over percussive use of the phonemes in the Tagalog text; and Nico Muhly's Lord Heare My Prayer Instantly, a really imaginative setting of a couple of Psalm verses, the best pieces on the program.

But even the more straight-through text settings, many of them of renowned poets, were often attractive, varying mostly in the amount of dissonance they provided. Most consonant was Chorale director Zane Fiala's Cosmos, setting a chunk of Carl Sagan's narration with some VW-like harmonies here and there. Most dissonant was Chorale member Elizabeth Kimble's setting of Whitman's The Unknown Region. Kimble says in the program notes that what this poem evokes about the unknown for her is the fear of it, that it's "huge and terrifying." And then she conveys this through high, screechy, intense dissonance. Ouch.

concert review: Symphony Silicon Valley Chorale

This chorus continues to get better under Elena Sharkova's direction. And with Karen S. as a member, they can't lose.

This was their Christmas concert, held in the California Theatre instead of the Mission - a really good idea - and with a very small orchestra - also a good idea. The centerpiece was John Rutter's Magnificat, probably the most outright cheerful large-scale piece of religious choral music I've ever heard. Rutter doesn't have the spiritual intensity of Tavener or the sheer beauty of Lauridsen, but he does have warmth and geniality. He's also a fully competent choral-orchestral composer. He knows how to handle both ensembles with clarity and keep them from getting in each other's way. The chorus writing is mostly smooth, the orchestral rather jangly, yet they fit.

Unfortunately the soprano chosen as soloist had an approach to pitch of "I wonder as I wander," but otherwise, good show from both ensembles.

Most of the remainder of the program was carols and carol medleys by or arranged by English composers. More Rutter, some Holst and VW and John Gardner. Especially cherishable for Holst's setting of Rossetti's "In the Bleak Midwinter," my choice of most beautiful carol ever, and VW's rumpus arrangement of the Wassail song.

Near the end, the program got a bit fancier and more American with an old Chanticleer medley of spirituals, which the chorus managed to give a little honest swing to, and a setting of "A Visit from St. Nicholas," something I'd never heard before in musical form. According to Wikipedia the music is by one Ken Darby, though this name isn't credited in the concert's program. It adds a final verse, an altered reprise of the opening. The song was rendered with a fair amount of acting out, including having individual choristers leap up every time St. Nick mentions the name of one of his reindeer.

A few audience singalongs of well-known carols, also, with an assistant conductor - a boy of about 12 named Leo, a student of Sharkova's I guess, with lots of presence vocally but not so much physically - to lead the audience, who didn't pay as much attention to him as they should have.

linkomania

Silly links:

An impressively clever (and well-researched) Tolkien satire.

11 Types of Young-Adult Novels You Totally Miss. Gets a little overgeneralized near the end when it reaches "fantasy" and "science fiction", but umph there are a few zingers earlier on.

Diet & Fitness Books of the Bible. Because it's about time someone suggested that Pilates is the plural of Pontius Pilate. What else could it be?

Pride and Prejudice in Strine. Is this realistic, or just the antipodean equivalent of Valley Girl?

And a serious one:

Pilotless airplanes and what happens when someone needs to pilot them. Replace "airplane" with "car" and "pilot" with "driver" and this is our future on the roads. Has anyone considered that wrinkle yet?

And a freebie:

Buy online a ticket to the Hobbit movie and they'll give you a free Nook copy of the book. Assuming you still have a Nook.

graceless and pointless

[semi-spoilers ahead]

B. and I have been watching this mini-series, Gracepoint, starring David Tennant of Dr. Who and Anna Gunn of Breaking Bad as a pair of detectives investigating a boy's murder in a small town on the Northern California coast (played by a small town on Vancouver Island, where the filming is cheaper). I'm glad it was only ten episodes. This meant I knew it was going to end, and there was a limit to how high they could pile the plot twists.

I'm curious if the procedures here are at all typical of contemporary murder-mystery storytelling, because I don't read much in that genre, and if it's like this, it isn't encouraging me to. But my limited experience suggests it is.

The way you spin a story like this out to ten episodes is by having suspicion fall on various plausible characters sequentially, with everyone involved turning on them savagely. Then have that character clear themselves by revealing a terrible personal secret. Added points if it's something that's long cast a hidden shadow over them but of which they are actually innocent. That is, at least by their own account. Further added points if you can get one of the detectives to confess such a secret too, even without having been a suspect.

Start wrapping the show up two or three episodes before the end by having a couple witnesses show up with useful data that, if they'd only bothered to mention it earlier - and there's no obviously compelling reason why they shouldn't have - the show would have been a lot shorter.

Have the most logical and compelling suspect in custody by the end of the penultimate episode, but hint in the previews for the finale that there's one more big twist to come. The experienced mystery reader will immediately recognize this as meaning that it's time for what was known in the era of the classic British cozies as "the butler did it": that is, the true culprit will turn out to be the most overlooked major character on whom no suspicion has yet fallen, just because nobody will suspect them - except the viewer, who's read stories like this before.

Sure enough, begin the last episode with the abrupt confession of this person, which is less plausible and generally makes less sense than any of the previous wrong theories, and so out of character that it will feel like they've switched out actors for the part. Leave as many as possible of the other evidentiary puzzles unexplained. (There's time for one last twist-within-a-twist, too, but it only makes the problem worse.) CYA by having everybody say the culprit's behavior doesn't make any sense. Have the culprit say this. Doesn't help. A promising story ends like a wet rag, because you forgot to think up the explanation before you wrote the script.

cat in a rainstorm

We braved the storm to take the cats to the vet today.

The storm, which rolled in from the North Pacific, was built up by the media as some kind of epic coming of the apocalypse, and it scared several school districts into pre-emptive cancelling of classes. Actually, it was just a normal California winter storm: a little flooding in low spots, a lot of traffic jams, and just sopping wet everywhere. (California rain tends to be what people used to cloudbursts would consider an intense drizzle: it just lasts all day.) The only difference is, this is the first one like it we've had in over two years, and folks forget.

[ETA: They even cancelled this evening's symphony concert. Is this kind of cowering the result of too much fear of terrorism or something? I've gone up to plenty of symphony concerts in weather as bad as this.]

Pippin remembered what it meant when we reached for him, and went to ground in the closet, from which he was easily retrieved. This was Maia's first vet visit, but, alas, she too could not be beguiled, and ran off to hide in various successive corners. We'd had all the room doors shut, but eventually opened a bathroom door, because a cat in avoidance of being caught can usually be counted to dart into a bathroom if one is available, which is a bad strategic move on the cat's part.

Nobody meowed on the drive, unlike the late Pandora who would wail piteously. They're healthy; we're going to try brushing Maia's teeth (as if she'll let us); and also try to teach her to eat regular meals instead of grazing.

reviews: play, concert, blank space

1. Wandered down to the local high school because they were producing Noises Off, one of our favorite plays. It was, perforce, a high school production. After the first act, students behind us who hadn't seen it before were asking each other, "Is this supposed to be funny?", and we were tired enough that we considered just going home. But I'm glad we stayed, because the remaining two acts got successively better, nonwithstanding major rewrites both intentional and apparently unintentional of the script. The student director played, not the director of the play-within-the-play, but the stagehand, who consequently - in a manner familiar to me from a production of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet in which the choreographer danced Mercutio - became a far more prominent character and the most competent one of the whole hapless bunch.

2. Symphony Silicon Valley played Bruckner's Fourth. Oh yes, I had to hear that. It started out cold, but both the orchestra and conductor Tatsuya Shimono rapidly warmed up and swam beautifully. Great sound, adjusted for the fact that I was in the worst section of the house. The oddest-sounding violinist I know, Mayuko Kamio, brought a light Mozartean edition of her peculiar tone quality to Mozart's "Turkish" concerto. This was pretty good too, but turned out to be just a curtain-raiser for her encore, an arrangement of a work that I know well, but was so not expecting to hear in this context that it took me a bit to recognize it. It was Schubert's Erlkönig, the entire piano and vocal parts stuffed into the hands of one violin. What I didn't know was who had the gall to arrange it, but this was easily researched online: it was a 19C virtuoso named H.W. Ernst.

Kamio just tore the pants off this thing, an amazing performance. There are others online, but I'm not going to link because they're not a patch on hers. I will, however, direct you to the score (pdf), decorated with double stops, triple stops, yea even quadruple stops, and which should give a good idea of what it's supposed to sound like.

I reviewed this, but a new copy editor tore it apart and made hash out of it. I managed to get the more serious damage undone, but I no longer have warm thoughts of this review.

3. The other thing I should have done last weekend was attend the annual Reading and Eating Meeting of Khazad-dûm, the local Mythopoeic Society group. Except for possibly one or two years when I was in Seattle, I've been to each one of these for 40 years now. We eat a potluck dinner and then sit around the fire reading stories. But not this year, because it was cancelled at nearly the last minute due to serious illness in the hosting house. Not the contagious kind, but bad enough that having people over was not on. I hope this is not the end.

a school for wizards

A school for wizards, how original, was many people's original reaction to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. And over there in a corner was Ursula K. Le Guin, waving her hand and saying, "Excuse me, but I did that back in 1968." Nothing wrong with admiring Rowling's stories or what she did with the concept of such a school, but you can't credit her with being the first to originate it.

What nobody seems to have asked is whether there's any actual relationship between Hogwarts and Roke in Rowling's creative imagination. Nor has anyone to my knowledge brought attention to a relevant datum on this subject that came out a couple years go. In a New Yorker profile of Rowling on the occasion of the publication of The Casual Vacancy, writer Ian Parker interviewed her secondary school English teacher, a man named Steve Eddy, who says that his syllabus for class reading included A Wizard of Earthsea (along with Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, a book which I'd say resembles Harry Potter in tone a lot more than anything in Earthsea does). [New Yorker, Oct. 1, 2012, p. 56]

This was when Rowling was aged 11, so it would have been 1976-77.

I loathe the sort of criticism which predetermines that every author's good ideas are borrowed from some other author. And even if Rowling remembered Le Guin's Roke, it doesn't necessarily follow that the idea for Hogwarts came from there. They're quite different places, and the derivation of Hogwarts from a hearty British schoolboy story with the addition of wizards seems far more likely. Nevertheless, just as a datum, let it be recorded: Rowling as a child read, and therefore had access to, Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea.

concert review: Redwood Symphony

One of the things I'm thankful for this Thanksgiving is that I was able to write this review for the Daily Journal. I got my editor's agreement in advance to my warning that, if I was going to review Mahler's Ninth, I was going to let it all hang out - all the personal baggage and resentment I bring from all the bad performances (including MTT's) of overlong, tiresome Mahler symphonies I've heard in the past, and I borrowed a little from my past posts on the topic. I'm not sure if SFCV would have let me get away with this approach, and I expect I would have gotten a lot of carping in the comments if I had.

Tim Page said in the critical institute I attended last month that it's permissible for reviewers to bring their personal experience into their reviews, but it's rarely necessary. This time I thought it was necessary. I've given anodyne evaluations in reviews before of established "masterworks" that I secretly hated, but they haven't been the whole concert. I couldn't write an entire review that way, but what could I write? The problem when, say, Joshua Kosman reviews Carmina Burana, is that his distaste for the work clouds his ability to evaluate the performance. I think I avoided that.

The summary of the review I put in my cover letter was, "Hated the work. Loved the performance," which makes the headline the editors put on it a little misleading. It's not the work that even Mahler-haters will love, but the group that played it. I was really wondering if Kujawsky's commitment to the work could convince me it was really all it was cracked up to be, but the sheer badness of late Mahler is beyond such saves. While he convinced me it wasn't a sea of featureless nonsense, it still didn't strike me as beautiful or moving, and I'm utterly convinced that it's twice as long as it needs to be.

Following my own advice to not repeat myself endlessly, I cut out a few choice cracks from the review, notably a realization that, by going on and on long after he's finished, Mahler is the Hubert Humphrey of composers. I'm not sure how many people will still get that reference. (David Frye had a routine on one of his records in which Humphrey's conscience despairs at his own speeches. "Thank God, I think I'm finishing at last ... no, wrong again, Hubert.")

But people often say that Bruckner goes on far longer than necessary, yet I adore his work. What's the difference? Well, part of it is that I simply enjoy listening to what Bruckner is saying. Bruckner is spiritual, Mahler is neurotic. Spiritual music nourishes the soul, while the amount of time I want to spend listening to a neurotic composer expressing his angst is strictly limited. But there's also a deep structural difference. Bruckner moves at a slow pace, so his length is commensurate with his content. Even in his adagios, though, Mahler moves at the faster pace of a more typical composer, and consequently he's finished sooner, or ought to be. Instead, he goes on. His works deserve the criticism I've used of a lot of similarly overblown new music, that it's five pounds of music in a ten-pound bag.