Workwise, yesterday was mostly frustration. Today, I hope, will be marginally less so. I have to read over "Our Lady of Tharsis Tholus" before I send it to Lynne Jamneck for the Dreams in the Witch House anthology. It's a long tale, almost ten thousand words, so that will likely take me all day. There's also Alabaster related business – I keep trying to forget about it. I'm not good at intentional forgetting.
This entry is beginning to look as anemic as I feel.
Last night we watched – finally – Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies (2014), the only one of Jackson's six Tolkien films I didn't see in the theater. I'm honestly not sure what to say about it. It's the sort of thing that leaves me deeply conflicted. It was, for me, a thing that could only be enjoyed in spite of itself. When the needs of the 3D gimmick are placed before the interest of cinematography, a film is crippled from the outset, and Jackson crippled all three Hobbit films. The 48 fps format creates such a garish, disorienting, overly lit mess that it can be hard to see past. Nothing here has the splendor of Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. Like 3D, the "hyper-real" effect bestowed (probably unintentionally) by HFR works against the suspension of disbelief, the creation and maintenance of illusion. But, I knew all this going in. It's why I put off seeing the final film for so long. Still and all, I have to say that The Battle of Five Armies is the best of the three films. I enjoyed the fight at Dol Guldur, though I wish it had been handled more as Tolkien wrote it, as "the Battles of Lothlórien and Mirkwood," instead of "two elves and three wizards open a can of whup-ass on Sauron." I was surprised found myself caught up in the story of Kíli and Tauriel, and I liked Lee Pace as Thranduil. It didn't hurt that the Elvenking rode into battle on a what looked an awful lot like a Megaloceros.
Okay, I could go on, but I need to wake up and get to work.
TTFN,
Aunt Beast