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Rooting for snowstorms

For as long as I can remember, I’ve rooted for snowstorms.

As a kid, I wasn’t alone. What student doesn’t celebrate when school gets cancelled? Lying half-awake in the pre-dawn dark, I’d switch on the radio. The newscasters rattled off local cancellations, and I desperately hoped to get lucky.

But that doesn’t explain why I still love a good blizzard, even as an adult. After all, working stiffs don’t get many “snow days.” No, I love snowstorms because they feel apocalyptic. A taste of catastrophe from the safety of my living room.

My love affair with any given winter storm starts long before it strikes. I spend the season tracing the jet stream, hoping for an expressway to open up between the moisture-rich Gulf and my Appalachian home. I pray for cold air to tumble down from the frozen north.

As a storm approaches, my obsession grows more severe. I watch the radar constantly, willing the darker blues to slide my way. I curse the weatherman who downplays the storm and venerate his hyperbolic colleague. When local newscasts (inevitably) freak out, their reports from the empty bread aisle fill me with glee.

Once the first flakes begin to drift down, I stop watching the radar and start watching the window. The car’s hood measures the accumulation totals for me, and as long as the pile keeps growing, I’m in heaven. I love how snow mutes traffic. How it shrouds winter’s grim pall and the skeletal trees. How familiar streets feel abandoned and hostile as the snow falls.

Storm-love has its dark side, of course. A similar impulse drives me to YouTube every time a major weather event strikes elsewhere. Asia tsunamis and California earthquakes enthrall me, entire divorced from any compassion for the victims.

But as long as no one gets hurt, apocalypse in miniature feels kind of fun.

Betting on the binge: Netflix, House of Cards, and the future of appointment viewing

We rejoined Netflix, and I can’t stop watching.

I’ve already devoured two seasons of The Walking Dead, AMC’s zombie gore-fest. We’re plowing through Arrested Development, a show that somehow slipped under our radar back in its day. West Wing looms on the horizon, along with a half-dozen other series we never caught the first time around.

In other words, we’re binging—and loving it. It’s a pleasant way to veg. No weeklong wait between episodes. No commercial breaks. Dig into a show on your own terms, not on the schedule that helps the network win sweeps week.[1]

We love it, and so do millions of other viewers (especially the younger crowds marketers salivate over). For us, this is “TV”. Not hundred-dollar cable bills. Not frustrating slogs through weeks of reruns, waiting for a new episode. Just an easy-to-use, inexpensive service that encourages us to overindulge on our favorite shows.

Knowing how much its users love to binge, Netflix has gone all-in. (more…)

First things first: why Peter Jackson should have made The Hobbit before The Lord of the Rings

Back in the mid-nineties, Peter Jackson had a problem. He (and his creative partners) had unveiled plans to film J.R.R. Tolkien’s most celebrated novels, using their native New Zealand as a stand-in for Middle-Earth. They hoped to make The Hobbit—chronologically, the series’ initial book—first. But Jackson’s producers failed to secure rights for The Hobbit. Undeterred, Jackson shifted gears. Rather than start at the story’s start, his team would adapt Tolkien’s massive, rambling follow-up to The Hobbit: The Lord of the Rings.

The rest is history; Jackson & Co. convinced the studio to finance three separate LOTR pictures—one for each book. Each proved spectacularly successful (both commercially and critically). A decade later, The Hobbit finally escaped development hell; the first film, An Unexpected Journey, was released in December 2012.

What’s done is done. Still, I can’t help but wonder: what if Jackson had obtained the rights to The Hobbit, way back in 1996? What if he adapted that book first? How might this version of *The Hobbit* differ from the one now in production? And what effect might this have had upon the subsequent Rings sequels?

My next few blog posts address these questions. Next time, we’ll consider Lord of the Rings. Today, I explain why The Hobbit should have come first.

The Hobbit is a short book. Quick readers can plow through the entire novel on a long Sunday afternoon. So when Peter Jackson announced that his adaptation would span two films, fans scratched their heads. Would the material stretch that far? And then, just a few months before the first film’s completion, the studio agreed to a Hobbit trilogy. Fantasy nerds began to fret; the expansion felt like a cash grab, rather than a creative imperative.

The December release of An Unexpected Journey has done little to allay those fears. This first Hobbit film takes far too long to do far too little. Nearly every scene would have benefited from ruthless edits, and many sequences should have been cut altogether. To borrow Tolkien’s words, the movie felt “thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

But if The Hobbit had come first, things might have been different. It’s unlikely that the film’s corporate backers would have green-lit two Hobbit films (let alone three). An unproven director like Jackson (whose earlier films were low-budget and small-scale) wouldn’t enjoy that sort of leeway. Instead, the studio would minimize its risk by demanding a shorter run time. Dependent on their funding, Jackson would have been forced to trim down his Hobbit, streamlining the narrative and paring down any excess.

What padding might Jackson have stripped? First and foremost, he’d face no temptation to stuff The Hobbit with Middle-Earth footnotes. In his ongoing Hobbit trilogy, Jackson extends his screenplays by mining the Lord of the Rings appendices for relevant subplots. A shorter Hobbit offers no room for such additions. Specifically, the entire Necromancer storyline would have been cut. Since this clunky subplot revolves around characters the audience has never met (Sauron, the Ringwraiths, Saruman, Galadriel, Radagast), including it makes little sense.

With this one move, Jackson drastically improves his movie, since An Unexpected Journey’s most cringe-worthy scenes never even get filmed.[1] And good riddance! Consider: Tolkien had reasons for banishing this material to the Rings endnotes. First, it’s tangential to the story’s heart (i.e., Bilbo’s wide-eyed introduction to the world). Second, it lacks the book’s charm and whimsical tone (Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for juvenile readers).

If this hypothetical Hobbit had no time for Tolkien’s canonical glosses, it certainly couldn’t have fit Jackson’s own plot inventions. Journey’s framing device—an older, nostalgic Bilbo, badgering his nephew Frodo—wouldn’t have made the cut. With no *Lord of the Rings* for context, the audience wouldn’t care about these characters. The “orc hunting party” wouldn’t make it in, either. Why bother resurrecting Azog (in The Hobbit book, he’s unmentioned and long-dead)? Smaug the Magnificent provides all the fierce villainy you need for a shorter movie.

Make these changes, and you’ve saved ninety minutes from the bloated first film. With a few deft rewrites, you’ve made room for an abbreviated, thrilling adaptation—all contained in a single film. Or, if Jackson somehow convinced his handlers to approve two movies, these cuts set up an epic final act: the barrel ride to Lake-town, the glorious, dragon-centric climax, and the Battle of Five Armies as a stunning, poignantly tragic denouement.

Had Jackson secured the rights and made The Hobbit first, fans would’ve enjoyed a tighter film that better respected its source material. But what might this have meant for The Hobbit’s vast, sprawling sequel? Next time, we’ll explain why The Lord of the Rings would have worked better as a follow-up to a successful Hobbit adaptation.

  1. I expect that we’ll see fan edits of these films emerge soon after each DVD release. It’ll be interesting to see how well the film holds together when Jackson’s excesses are excised.  ↩

Why Luke Skywalker must turn to the Dark Side in the upcoming Star Wars sequels

Geekdom is abuzz; Star Wars will be reborn. Out of nowhere, Disney snatched up the rights from Lucasfilm, simultaneously announcing sequels to Return of the Jedi. After the disastrous prequel trilogy, a new director and proven screenwriter will attempt to jump-start the stalled franchise.

Fans are already speculating wildly about the new trilogy’s likely story. What conflict will drive the films? How long after Return of the Jedi will the movies take place? Will we re-join familiar characters—Luke, Leia, and Han—or will a new cadre of adventurers steal the spotlight?

To me, one question looms largest of all. How do you tell a good story when the main character is dead? According to Lucas, Star Wars (Episodes I-VI) centered around Anakin Skywalker: his mysterious origins, his fall from grace, his ruthless rule, his ultimate redemption, and his tragic death.[1] With Vader gone, what’s left to tell?

Of course, you could simply shift the focus from Vader to the characters who survived Return of the Jedi. What are our old friends up to? Luke likely spends his time scouting wunderkinds for a Jedi Academy. Leia wades through Galactic Senate bureaucracy. Han Solo gives up smuggling and starts his own shipping company.

Hardly spellbinding stuff. In fact, a Vaderless Star Wars sounds insufferably boring. Who wants to eavesdrop on Leia’s interminable Galactic Senate hearings? Or watch Han Solo chair Kessel Transport board meetings? Or look over Professor Skywalker’s shoulder as he revises the syllabus for Jedi Mindtricks 101? “Happily ever after” reads well on paper, but in practice proves sadly dull.

Even introducing some replacement villain seems fraught with downsides. How do you top Vader’s menace? All due respect to Darth Whoever or Admiral Thrawn, but Ol’ Helmet Head automatically trumps any newcomer. The Dark Lord of the Sith is a tough act to follow.

So what can you do? ROTJ painted the franchise into a corner. Lucas killed off the lead, burned him on a pyre, and turned him into a ghost. Everything revolved around Vader—the prophecy, the conflict, the heartbreak, and the biggest stakes. How do you move on from that?

Simple. You don’t move on. You stay with Anakin Skywalker; you make his legacy the central conflict. Focus your films on the one character who can’t shake Vader’s shadow.

In short, Luke Skywalker must turn to the Dark Side.

In fact, we’ve already seen Luke start down that path. Watch his Return of the Jedi entrance again. Skywalker strides menacingly into Jabba’s palace, cloaked in black and brooding. He chokes Jabba’s guards (to death?), then threatens to destroy Jabba himself should the Hutt fail to acknowledge Luke’s power. The transformation takes us by surprise; these aren’t behaviors we expect from the blasé Jedi.

We begin to wonder if the Emperor might have been right about Luke. “I have foreseen it,” Palpatine crows, predicting Luke’s downfall. “It is your destiny,” he insists later. And Luke does eventually give in. When Vader threatens to corrupt Leia, Luke lets love crowd out the detached, Zen-Jedi mindset. Hatred flares up, and Luke rages against his father, the machine. For a while, at least, Luke indulges the Dark Side of the Force, before that same compassionate streak prevents him from finishing off Vader.

That brings us to the end of Jedi. In the wake of Vader’s death (and his own flirtation with the Dark Side), Luke must face serious questions about the Force. “How can the Light Side be truly good,” he must wonder, “when it demands that I ignore my deepest feelings, my love for family and friends?” Kenobi and Yoda endorsed a sterile, calculated approach to the Force. Meanwhile, the Sith embraced the full breadth of human experience: desire, yes, but also compassion and love.

As the decades pass, Luke attempts to forge a middle way—to “bring balance to the Force,” as his father did. To check cold logic with compassion. Skywalker’s syncretism slowly corrupts the Jedi way. Eventually, some impossible scenario pits his heart and head against one another. Maybe Leia is put in harm’s way, and Luke vows to protect her—by any means necessary.

Whatever the particular details, Luke falls. The filmmakers would probably save the big reveal for Film Two—echoing the original trilogy’s major revelation in Empire Strikes Back. Just imagine the gasps when the audience sees Luke Skywalker, that archetypal movie hero, finally turn. How heartbreaking would it be to watch a bewildered, elderly Han Solo die at Luke’s hands? And think of the conflict in Film Three, as Leia must plot to end her brother’s life.

The story would be deliciously controversial. Fans would debate, berate, and celebrate the plot twist, just as they did when Vader declared himself Luke’s father. Hopefully, J.J. Abrams and Co. have the guts to take such a risk—to sully the reputation of Star Wars’ golden boy. Handled well, it would do more than just pay homage to the early films’ central character. It would rescue Star Wars from years of neglect.

  1. Perhaps Lucas was not being entirely truthful. A New Hope doesn’t seem to focus squarely on Vader. Grand Moff Tarkin share the top villain billing. Did Lucas really always intend to elevate Vader in the later films?  ↩

Why low margins get a bum rap

It didn’t take long to come to a decision. We’d match the 50% off. We had to. Our leading opponent had challenged us to a game of who can hold your breath longer. We were confident in our lung capacity.

Eugene Wei, former Amazon employee, defending Amazon’s low-margin (and small-profit) strategy. Wei argues that while high profit margins may pad the coffers, they also invite disruption from the low end. Via John Gruber.

Salvaging Star Wars, Episode IV: Leaner green screen

The last few posts have addressed a single question: how might the Star Wars prequels have been salvaged? How might George Lucas have kept that trainwreck on the rails? In the first post, I questioned the whole “prequel” concept. Then, I discussed how real-world analogues polluted the Star Wars universe. Finally, I suggested some ways that the prequels might have better explored the characters of Anakin and Obi-Wan.

Today’s post addresses the most obvious, glaring problem with the trilogy. To fix the prequels, you’d have to scale back the use of green screen.

“Green screen”—or chroma keying—has become an indispensable tool in the arsenal of modern filmmakers. It allows directors to compose shots that—just a few years ago—wouldn’t have been possible. Whole worlds can be invented, and the creator’s imagination faces nearly no limits.

Ironically, it is the lack of limits that makes green screen a problem for many directions. Creators need ceilings against which to bump their heads; they need obstacles to invent themselves around. Creativity means subverting the limitations of your chosen medium. A New Hope blew our minds because Lucas used models to make us believe in spaceships and laser beams. But without practical obstacles to overcome, Lucas leans too far out into the imaginary, making the action unrelatable and alien.

Overusing green screen and CGI poses problems for actors, as well. Actors need the context that green screening removes.

Why? After all, good actors don’t need a set to deliver a stirring performance. Thespians have dominated empty stages for millenia. Instead, it’s a problem of physics and improvisation. “Physics,” because an actors can’t really fake the subtle way that feet slide differently over carpet than over painted plywood. “Improvisation,” because green screen tends to remove the props and set-pieces that invite impromptu, grounding interactions. When asked to act to an empty room, actors tend to stand around. That’s pretty much all we get from Episodes II and III.

It’s a shame; Lucas hired great actors for his prequel trilogy: Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, Ian McDiarmid. If any cast could have convinced us that the world was real, it was this one. They couldn’t (no one could). Lucas wasted his fantastic actors by filming them in a sterile, green-walled prison.

This combination—static actors on a fantastically animated background—unnerves the audience. They don’t know why, but things feel unreal. They know, instinctively, that nothing’s really at stake. Such disbelief only further undermines the prequels’ subpar characters, dialogue, and plot. Conversely, while real sets and on-location shooting wouldn’t have single-handedly redeemed the prequels, it couldn’t have hurt.

That wraps up the “Salvaging Star Wars” series. What more is there to say? Lucas wasted his fans’ good will and irreparably damaged the greatest franchise in cinematic history. No thought experiment can change that. But maybe, just maybe, future filmmakers can ask themselves the same questions and thus avoid making the same mistakes on the upcoming Star Wars sequels.

Salvaging Star Wars, Episode III: show some character

Recently, I’ve been outlining ways that the Star Wars prequels might have been improved. First, I suggested that the whole ‘prequel’ concept is irredeemably flawed. Then I complained about how real-world analogues cheapen the Star Wars universe.

Today’s complaint? The Star Wars prequels spoil some of cinema’s best-known, most beloved characters.

Take Obi-Wan Kenobi, that quintessential space wizard. Now, if we’re honest, the Jedi Master comes across a bit static—even in A New Hope. In that original film, Obi-Wan learns nothing and can’t be rattled; he’s more like Luke’s Jedi Encyclopedia than an actual character. Even Alec Guinness himself despised the character and cursed the film’s “rubbish dialogue”.

In fairness, though, it made sense that Obi-Wan wouldn’t change much in Episode IV. The film depicts only the very last chapter of a much longer life story. Obi-Wan’s defining moments happened decades earlier, we learn: Clone Wars heroics and a tortured falling-out with Vader.

That’s where the prequels’ potential lay; we’d finally get to see how it all happened. How did Obi-Wan become the cool, unflappable mentor of A New Hope? What flaws did he overcome? What conflict shaped his elderly personality? One idea: maybe Obi-Wan’s inability to save his mentor’s life haunts him. Maybe it makes him overprotective. Maybe that control-freak behavior pushes Anakin towards reckless power grabs. In any case, regardless of the arc’s specifics, Lucas shouldn’t have hesitated to rough up the golden boy a bit.

Instead, Lucas extends Obi-Wan’s milquetoast personality all the way back to day one. He was (we learn) always incorruptible. Always steady. He’s always been the beige palette against which more colorful characters are painted: Luke, Qui-Gon, Vader.

Speaking of Vader… there’s another great character squandered. The prequels inherit the greatest villain of all time—then manage to spoil him. To Lucas’s credit, Anakin does has an arc (unlike Kenobi); he journeys from adorable, pod-racing wunderkind to moody teenager to malevolent cyborg. But if Obi-Wan’s statis bores us to tears, Anakin’s metamorphosis confuses us. We never quite believe the reasons we’re given for his downfall. Why can’t Anakin handle his mother’s untimely death? Why does he snap. After all, his son faced nearly-identical tragedy (his family’s horrific immolation) with courageous determination.

How might the prequels have better explained Anakin’s degradation? Show us how childhood wounds fester into adult corruption. Make the Skywalkers’ slavery unpleasant to witness. Make Anakin damaged and powerless as a boy, so that his hell-bent power quest makes sense. Show us the hurt; don’t rely on Hayden Christiansen to emote it with furrowed eyebrows and a whiny delivery.

Next time, we’ll wrap up the “Salvaging Star Wars” series. In our crosshairs? The prequels’ over-reliance on CGI, to the detriment of story.

Salvaging Star Wars, Episode II: Cheap Analogues

Earlier, I bashed the much-hated Star Wars prequel trilogy. How did a franchise so beloved produce something so unwatchable? In the posts to come, I’ll explain how the prequels might have been salvaged.

Here’s one way: let the Star Wars universe stand apart. Throughout Episodes I, II, and III, George Lucas tosses out cheap analogues to real-world culture. In Phantom Menace, for example, the pod race features a track announcer straight out of NASCAR. The character serves to help the audience understand the race as it progresses. But its clunky “on-air” banter and over-obvious observations repeatedly remind us that the Star Wars world is shallow. The move effectively screams, “We don’t have enough ideas of our own to bring this world to life. We’ll steal some that the audience is already familiar with.”

Another example: in Attack of the Clones, Obi-Wan needs some inside information, and he visits a favorite informant for the dish. Okay so far. But their rendezvous point is ridiculous: an American diner, straight out of the 1950s, complete with gleaming chrome, steaming kitchen, and upholstered booths. Worse, the informant himself is an aproned, greasy short-order cook, glossed over with an alien face. Not so much “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” but more “1993 in a Dayton Waffle House.” The informant’s name? “Dexter Jettster.” You can’t make this stuff up. Or, rather, you can’t make this stuff up, unless you’re already obsessed with merchandise sales.

To be fair, fantasy requires some real-life analogues; the imagined world should intrigue us with its alienness, but it should also be familiar enough to understand. If Star Wars really cut its ties to our world, after all, there’d be no human characters, no English dialogue, and no intelligible plotlines. Yet there’s a line here between intelligible references and on-the-nose anacosmisms.[1]

Other fantasies—even great films—fall prey to the same temptation. Consider, for instance, Gimli’s “axe embedded in his nervous system” line from The Two Towers (extended edition). This dialogue would be clunky in any film, but it’s absolutely cringeworthy in Middle-Earth (with its medieval understanding of anatomy). But such missteps interrupt our sojourn through Lord of the Rings very rarely. In Star Wars, they come all-too-often. The filmmaker seems to delight in watering down the marvelous with the mundane.

“Salvaging Star Wars” continues next time, when we’ll consider how the prequels squandered and spoiled one of the greatest characters in cinematic history.

  1. Made-up word. If an “anachronism” is something that’s out of its native time, then an “anacosmism” is out of its native universe.  ↩

Salvaging Star Wars

The Star Wars prequels were a catastrophe. These clunky, over-animated films enraged a generation. Thirty-something movie geeks, who had invested love and loyalty in this “far, far away” universe, watched as George Lucas transformed childhood daydreams into a commercialized, overwrought nightmare.

Many have attempted to redeem Star Wars since. Some dreamers still defend the prequels as “Star Wars for a new generation” (millennials enjoy the movies much more than Generation X). Others have attempted to “fix” the prequels via fan-edits, trimming the fat and re-rendering the most offensive animations. Still others, despite being burned in the past, look to the upcoming sequels to restore the tarnished Skywalker legacy.

But it’s too late. Episodes I, II, and III happened. And they sucked. They’re fine for distracting the kiddos on a Saturday morning, but they hardly belong on the bookshelf beside The Empire Strikes Back. Fans are left to dream wistfully of what might have been. To ask “What went wrong?” To wonder how Lucasfilm might avoided the prequel disaster.

I’ve got a few ideas. Over the next few posts, I’ll suggests a few ways that the prequels might have been improved. We’ll call the series “Salvaging Star Wars.”

My first suggestion? Don’t make prequels. At all. With very rare exceptions, prequel films pose problems that should daunt any good writer. First, such projects smack of corporate avarice. A good original film (or film series) ties up its plot threads and wraps up each character’s story. It’s meant to be whole and compelling and complete. But when that film earns big bucks at the box office, the suits trump the creatives. The studio demands a sequel, eager to milk its new-found cash cow. But because there’s no more future story to tell (the villain died; the galaxy was saved; the end), the writers must mine the past instead.

But there’s the second problem. The past is past. It’s history; the audience already knows what’s going to happen. In the case of Star Wars, we know that Obi Wan and Anakin and Yoda and the Emperor will survive. We know that Anakin gets hurt and becomes a hell-bent cyborg. We know that Padme will die. We know (or can very quickly guess) that Senator Palpatine is a secret Sith Lord.

The prequels attempt to generate some drama by introducing characters whose fates we can’t foresee. We get Jar Jar and Samuel L. Windu and Qui Gonn Jinn and Darth Maul and the Trade Federation bozos. But even if these were interesting characters (spoiler alert: they’re not), the audience can’t be fooled. If these characters don’t even get mentioned in the real Star Wars movies, how could they possibly be worth our time?

But there are other prequels that beat the odds. That present a compelling prologue to the original. Think of Godfather II or X-Men: First Class. It’s theoretically possible to make a prequel project work. So how might the Star Wars films worked, then?

Next time, we’ll dive into the films themselves and explain how the Star Wars universe got muddled with our own—to the prequels’ detriment.