Season of the Witch

A recent College Humor video humorously posited the life of Nicolas Cage's agent, a man forced to contend with his client's perennial inability to say "no" to any project in order to keep himself in castles and pyramids. But that sketch, of course, was lighthearted and broad, building the man's outsized grief at being saddled with Cage's willingness to do everything and dilute his brand until the pain reached a frenzy. I like to imagine Cage's agent as a man who expresses his sorrow in the opposite fashion, silently nodding with resignation as his client agrees to be in the latest piece of crap, hanging up the phone and reaching for a home blood pressure kit to test his heart.

He must have had to put a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue when Cage signed onto Season of the Witch, a film that all but begs comparisons to Monty Python and the Holy Grail despite its straight face. As with that legendary comedy, Season moves largely in a series of vignettes vaguely resembling a plot, but where that played into the Pythons' sketch comedy genius, Season merely moves as if caught in the death rattle of the Black Plague, leaking pustules of narrative drying and caking around swollen nodes of plagiarized fantasy tropes. The plague features prominently in Dominic Sena's film, and I found myself in the unexpected position of feeling sorry for a pandemic disease.

Opening with a scene with only the slightest bearing on the rest of the film, Season of the Witch establishes its style -- for want of a better term -- instantly, carving out its identity with disorienting edits, a slew of references to other (and better) movies and an adherence to historical accuracy that could charitably be described as laughable. Three women accused of witchcraft receive the farcical trial afforded to heretical suspects before being chucked off a bridge with ropes around their necks before their corpses are lowered into the river below, hydroponically planting the corpses in such a way that one simply must expect something bad to happen soon (does that then make this the Spring of the Witch?). A priest wishes to read an incantation to ensure the accused witches stay dead, but a knight says that a hanging and drowning were sufficient. In the interest of honesty, I should say I found this a fair and logical assessment. But of course, they should have let that monk read from his blinged-out book, and soon a drowned woman comes back long enough to wreak a bit of havoc before heading...to some other damn movie, apparently.

But don't think about that, 'cause here comes a Crusade montage. Thousands of miles away, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman), two knights in service to the Church, gleefully hack their way through Saracens and other enemies of God. Whatever statement Sena might have wanted to make about the hypocrisy of religious purity -- and Lord does he want to make that point -- gets swallowed up in the fun he has clumsily staggering through this montage, broken up briefly by a "wait, what?" shot of the two knights reveling in the most minimalistic medieval tavern ever set up on an empty stage before returning immediately to more shots of God's warrior tearing through the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Unhelpful title cards provide no sense of logical progression -- they seem to go into the Middle East, return to Europe to fight dissident Christians and then back to Smyrna for a bit of Turkish delight.

But then, after years of killing, Behmen accidentally stabs a woman whose protracted death gasp stuns the man into suddenly giving up his ways and returning to England with Felson, only to immediately be recruited once more by a monk who believes the outbreak of bubonic plague in the knights' absence can be attributed to a young woman who has "confessed" to being a witch. A monk, Debelzaq (seriously?), charges the deserters with helping deliver her to trial in some mysterious monastery, the location of which he barely knows. "I serve the Church no more," Behmen intones with solemn finality, about five minutes before he willingly serves the Church again.

And there, after 20 minutes of largely unconnected, gaudy visuals, ends the plot. The rest of Season of the Witch gets by on weak jump scares, poorly choreographed suspense sequences and dialogue so stale you could store it for food on the long journey to the New World, which of course wouldn't be discovered for another century after the timeline of this film but why should I be held to an accurate, linear account of history when no one involved with the film was? Out of context, some lines attain a terrific comedy: one of the women at the beginning about to be hanged pleads innocence for her ointments. "It was just pig fat," she shrieks with wild eyes. "It wasn't witchcraft!" In one scene, Felson undercuts Behmen's religious rants by saying "Keep your souls. I just want a chicken." Behind him is an untended, well-fed dairy cow that could provide drink and meat in much larger quantities. In context, the lines pile up in collisions of exposition, a crisscrossing web of dialogue as self-defeating as the contradictory plots and themes that dialogue attempts to elucidate.

Nothing in this movie fits together, as if someone attempted to complete a single puzzle with the pieces from five or six separate boxes. The only chemistry that exists between Cage and Perlman must be drawn from the juxtaposition of their faces, Cage's giant forehead playing off Perlman's massive, sloping jawline (Perlman's head is so huge that he can make medium shots into de facto close-ups). Perlman, the only decent aspect of the film, brings his one-man, don't-give-a-damn swagger from Hellboy to the role, making him mesmerizing despite his clunky dialogue (nothing but references to food and sex) but solitary, while Nicolas Cage has the look in his eye of a gold digger lying there and thinking of the Lambourgini that's coming his way once the old bastard dies. A veritable "who's that?" fills out the rest of the cast, some of whom are getting their first major international exposure in a manner they will no doubt attempt to hide in the coming years. Oh, but Christopher Lee shows up for a cameo as a dying cardinal with the world's worst zit, inspiring the question, "Is Christopher Lee running out of money?" God damn it, David Cameron, I don't care how bad the economy is; give this man his proper pension. When FDR installed Social Security as a means of protecting the dignity of the elderly, this has to be what he had in mind.

What the hell even happens in this movie? How can a plot so linear and derivative yet so incomprehensible? Everything exists as a storyboarded sequence, though that would imply that enough planning went into the movie that even a connected series of suspense and action scenes might have arisen from pre-production. Season of the Witch moves through so many Tolkien ripoffs that one setpiece impressively manages to plagiarize Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep in one go. They wade around a bit in a forest, engaging in one of the dullest rickety bridge segments I have ever seen, and there is in fact competition for so narrow a scenario. Sena's camera moves with all the precision of a North Korean nuke, though it makes me just as wary: no spatial continuity exists between random close-ups and medium shots that make up all action shots. Even establishing shots don't help, and most long shots appear to move away from the action as if the DP was trying to slink out of the project as surreptitiously as possible. Poor Claire Foy, in her big-screen debut, is forced to oscillate so rapidly between shivering innocent and manipulative, sinister harpy that one could use her performance as a fan.

So jumbled and meaningless is the film that whatever points Sena and writer Bragi F. Schut (who undoubtedly uses the middle initial to distinguish himself among the other Bragi Schuts) might have made are instantly canceled out by a plot contrivance that occurs typically minutes later. Behmen has seen the evil of the Church and both he and another knight (Ulrich Thomsen) know that religious leaders use witch trials to eradicate dissidents and those who don't fit neatly into the Church's vision of the ideal society. Oh, but wait, there actually are witches and demons so some of these hanging/drowning/inexplicably necessary incantations are clearly justified. Ergo, a few holy men might be full of hot air, but the Church itself is founded on a true basis of supernatural connection and some of the most grisly executions in human history are warranted. Likewise, someone finally has the sense to point out the protagonist cannot atone for years of atrocity by saving one pretty girl, but then that's exactly how how Behmen redeems himself.

That's what makes the film's smug tone all the more infuriating. It actually thinks itself clever, gracelessly speaking aloud its perceived subversion before showing another picture entirely. But everyone involved clearly thought they were making something intelligent until the focused looks begin to slack off about halfway through and Cage starts letting his hair do the acting. Sena even had the audacity to cite The Seventh Seal, one of the landmarks of film history, as a key inspiration. One can almost imagine the haughty son of a bitch lounging in an interview, casually taking a pull from a long cigarette and unironically saying, "Well, I felt a certain intuitive bond with witchcraft, because I'm in the business of making magic."

Season of the Witch has that cheap blue-gray glaze that directors like to use to instill a sense of chilly foreboding and despair, but I didn't need color suggestion for this film to make me sad. Compared to the host of oneiric films last year that incorporated dreams and highly subjective filmmaking into corkscrewing narratives, the third-person distance of Season of the Witch should make the movie far more linear, yet the lazy abandon of continuity and thematic development made the film so hard to follow that those series of useless title cards upfront become even more offensive in their inefficiency. We are spared even the glorious overreaction of Nicolas Cage's weirdness, and I feared that the accused witch at the beginning got that pig fat for her ointments by draining that glistening ham that is an unleashed Cage. Too dully self-confident and plodding to work as unintentional humor, Season of the Witch denied me even the thrill of a Nic Cage stinker. I'm giving the film one star, and that's solely for the brief flash of unintentional humor that had me rolling: a freeze-frame on Cage's face that looks as if someone snapped a drunken self-portrait at a Renaissance Fair-themed frat party. It's magnificent: the shot is supposed to move the audience, and I had tears in my eyes, all right.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Though Peter Jackson shot the three Lord of the Rings films simultaneously, the technical progress from Fellowship to The Two Towers is immediately evident: the CGI is more detailed even as it expands to absurd dimensions, Jackson's more direct camerawork no longer clashes so garishly with the poetry of the location shooting and set design, which looks even better than it did in the previous film. Indeed, for better or worse, the massive expansion of scope in The Two Towers paved the way for the swords and sandals epic that became a brief fad in the middle of the decade after Gladiator set up the foundation. (The genre eventually fizzled out after most of its entries lost money, with audiences just smart enough to realize they were paying money simply to see LOTR again; still, while we had to suffer mediocrities like Kingdom of Heaven, we also got some fantastic works like... the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven).

The enlarged scope of the action, however, almost entirely eliminates the personal feel of its predecessor. Bifurcated into separate plots involving Sam and Frodo's suicide mission to Mordor and the remaining Fellowship members' fight against corrupt wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee), the story must leap great distances to follow its characters. Indeed, compared to the endless close-ups of Fellowship, Two Towers tends to track movement through extreme long shots in bird's-eye views, dwarfing characters against the beautiful New Zealand, and where I complained last time that Jackson kept cutting to close-ups when I wanted to see more of the world around the characters, these long shots often prevent an emotional connection with the characters. If it seems at this point that I simply cannot be pleased, know that I am wondering that myself.

Yet one must acknowledge that, compared to the first film, Two Towers zips along with vigor: Fellowship spent a notable chunk of time (particularly in the extended cut) simply roaming the idyllic Shire, giving some time to characters who have no impact on the rest of the story. Following an eight-minute montage of Middle-Earth's past and the history of the One Ring, Jackson never cut away from the Shire until the 32-minute mark and only moved away to other locations once or twice for the rest of the first hour. Within the first 32 minutes of The Two Towers: we see a longer version of the fight between Gandalf and the Balrog that continues after he falls; Frodo and Sam making their way to Mordor, meeting, capturing and "taming" Sméagol/Gollum (Andy Serkis); Saruman's Uruk-hai and Orcs march captured Hobbits Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan) until the reach the edges of Fangorn forest and the two factions begin killing each other before Men arrive to slay the stragglers; another contingent of evil creatures terrorizes and burns the homes of the people of Rohan; Saruman converts his home, Isengard, from a lush garden into an industrial nightmare to breed (literally) an army; Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn chase after the Uruk-hai who captured Merry and Pippin; Théoden, King of Rohan, is so poisoned by the spell of Saruman that he banishes his brave and loyal nephew Éomer and does not even acknowledge the death of his own son; then, finally, the three Fellowship members chasing the Uruk-hai stumble upon Éomer and other banished soldiers.

Phew. To Jackson's credit, he never flags when jumping across different perspectives and huge physical distances, but here he's missed the point that he understood with Fellowship: The Lord of the Rings isn't about the plot -- which is ultimately no more complicated than a journey from point A to B -- but the finely detailed minutiae that turned the simple act of a long-as-hell hike into one of the great works of 20th century literature. Jackson barrels ahead in such an action-oriented mindset that character and atmosphere falls to the wayside:Legolas and Gimli become nothing more than comic relief, more so even than Merry and Pippin: Tolkien wrote the characters to comment upon intolerance and xenophobia, but they bond here only through light insults and fascistic displays of murderous violence (this existed in the book, but it was never a true competition between the two). Compare their tedious boasting to the bit in the extended cut of Fellowship in which Gimli is so overwhelmed by Lady Galadriel's beauty that he can ask her for nothing but a single hair from her head, and the deference he feels for Elves afterward. Éowyn (Miranda Otto) and Éomer have nothing to except pine for Aragorn and be surly, respectively.

The most troubling development is the massive rewrite of Faramir's story: in the book, Faramir (David Wenham) and his Gondorian Rangers stumble across Frodo, Sam and Sméagol, he questions Frodo and Sam about the Ring and his slain brother Boromir and then releases them, aware of the danger of the Ring and unwilling to risk its corruption to wield its power. Jackson and co. completely rewrote the character into someone scarcely different from his brother: "Filmamir" manhandles the Hobbits and tacitly condones the beating of Gollum, even choking the creature twice in rapid succession in their last moments together. Faramir does not release the Hobbits at first but drags them to the besieged city of Osgiliath, sure that the Ring will somehow help Gondor's fortunes. By the time he does display the nobility and wisdom that separated him from his brother, it's impossible to distinguish between the two. A flashback (deleted in the theatrical cut but available in the longer edition) helps explain the Faramir's motives for attempting to seize the Ring, but it's simply not enough justification. Jackson added such a massive deviation because he moved the book's climax to the third film (rightly so, to correspond with the actual chronology of events), but he ruins a great character in the process, undercutting Faramir's moral fortitude to stress the necessity of Aragorn's return to the throne. Jackson would have served himself better by simply making the more epic Helm's Deep sequence the full climax and using the time allotted by cutting this stuff out by fleshing out the world to the degree he did in Fellowship.

Of course, when Jackson deigns to let us wander a bit, Two Towers has the same epic poetry that its predecessor contained in greater abundance: Rohan is a nondescript, wide-open plain -- the Kansas of Middle Earth -- but Helm's Deep is a masterpiece of miniature construction. A stone behemoth carved from the mountain it's connected to, Helm's Deep promises a hell of a fight before anything happens; for my money, the battle sequence that takes place here trumps the larger one in Return of the King. It lacks some of the dodgy CGI of the later sequence, and it's epic without brushing up against the border of absurdity (oh, that Oliphaunt riding thing continues to grate, doesn't it?). For that matter, Isengard is also a terrific creation, nicely juxtaposing the furnaces of industrialism with the hellfire of Mordor. The real treat of the film, though, is simply following Sam and Frodo on their quest to Mordor: the Dead Marshes, Emyn Muil, the Black Gate of Mordor. All of them look fantastic and suitably unsettling and unwelcoming, offering the only true ambiance of the film.

And, behold, great character development exists, in the form of a completely animated character. Looking back, if Two Towers' animated battle sequences paved the way for mass epics, then Gollum revealed that heavy animation in live-action films could carry emotional weight. He's a masterpiece, owing both to the incredible work by Weta Digital (only occasionally can you spot moments where the technology used on him has dated) and the exceptional, award-worthy performance by Andy Serkis. He captures the character(s) perfectly, imbuing the split personalities of Sméagol and Gollum with such depth and distinctive originality that one can always tell "who" is speaking at any moment -- to find a similarly bravura performance, one would have to turn to Nicolas Cage's performance as the twin Kaufman brothers in Adaptation. He could have been nothing more than a set piece, a bit of technology to be ogled at but never explored (like, say, the magnificently rendered creatures of Avatar), but Serkis and the writers give him pathos and empathetic qualities. Nothing else in the rest of the trilogy is as brilliant as the shot/reverse shot conversation between Sméagol and himself: initially funny, it morphs into a heartbreaking portrait of a wretched creature tortured by a curse that destroyed far stronger people.

So, for all of The Two Towers' flaws, it's still incredibly entertaining, indeed probably the most viscerally and immediately enjoyable of the three. For that reason, it has its ardent defenders, but I can't help but view it as the odd one out; the pendulum simply swung too far from "overly intimate" to "epic but impersonal." Furthermore, where the additions in the extended cut of Fellowship let us languish a bit more in this beautiful world, the deleted scenes of Two Towers interrupt its narrative momentum, breaking up its breezy pace with moments of limp comic relief -- yes, I suppose that Éowyn's lack of cooking skills reflects upon her predisposition to fighting and not "woman's work," but the way this is used to signify her masculine outlook on life is just sexist. Besides, they don't make a convincing case for her warrior spirit (save for a few tough-talking lines here and there) when she spends nearly all of her screen time staring atAragorn with longing eyes. Yet even if The Two Towers is the only one of the trilogy to be hampered by its additional scenes, it has enough breathtaking action scenes and moments of quieter beauty to make the task of sitting through its hefty length an easy one.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

[Over the last few months I've been reviewing some of the more noteworthy releases of the decade in preparation for a best of the decade list. In some cases, I've been watching films for the first time and gauging them against established favorites, and for those older films I'm revisiting them to see how I still feel about them and whether they would indeed remain on any list of the films that most affected me. As The Lord of the Rings trilogy had a great deal of impact on my formative years, so, as I have never known the touch of a woman nor gone outside since we built that bomb shelter for Y2K, I have decided to run through the extended versions of the trilogy to decide if one or all of them still catch my fancy. Be excited.]

In 1995, Peter Jackson, Kiwi horror/comedy maestro, approached American studios with the idea of adapting J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, wondering why no one else seemed to care about the beloved fantasy epic. It was a fair point: at the time, Tolkien's work had only found its way on-screen with a generally well-received 1978 cartoon and a Rankin-Bass version of Return of the King that featured, among other things, singing goblins (oy). That Jackson ultimately secured the keys to what would seem a sure-fire hit only demonstrates how little the studios cared about Middle-Earth and its inhabitants: at the time, Jackson's only critical hit was the coming-of-age thriller Heavenly Creatures, a lovely film that introduced the world to Kate Winslet but hardly gave the impression that the creator of Braindead and The Frighteners was ready for his shot at the big time. Miramax decided to give him a two-picture deal to tell the story of the three books, and was later urged to cut it down into one. Understandably upset, Jackson took his two scripts and some test footage around town until he got to New Line Cinema CEO Robert Shaye, who, in one of life's little moments, asked why they were making two films when there were three books.

Therefore, The Lord of the Rings has "labor of love" etched in every frame, its synchronous production of all three chapters bewildering in its innovation and the work ethic it required. You can see it when the prologue, depicting and swiftly summarizing the the history of Middle-Earth and the One Ring, gives way to the lush shots of the Shire, enhanced by the extended version with Bilbo's (the always entertaining Ian Holm) loving voiceover describing this quaint little community for little people, all of whom have big feet and big stomachs and green thumbs. Jackson moves his camera through this hilly, mole-like suburb with a wistfulness befitting a Cameron Crowe film. Looking back, Jackson so marvelously and lovingly captures the Shire that it's actually a comedown when Gandalf (Ian McKellen, who spends all of his time in this idyllic location chewing the scenery to test if he's actually there or on a set) rides into town and starts setting off fireworks like a jackass.

I wonder if there is any point in plot summary, even as the basis of further analysis and not as a means to its own end: the books are the highest selling work of fiction of all time, and the films made a cubic ass-ton of cash, so why waste everyone's time with a recap? There's a Ring, it's bad, time to go on a hike to a volcano. Boom. What makes Fellowship, compared to its grander sequels, interesting is not its plot but its impressive evocation of another world. With on-location shooting around New Zealand, Fellowship naturally anchors itself in reality, but Jackson and his design team craft beautiful sets that fit in so perfectly with the landscapes one might easily assume them to be genuine relics, and that all the behind-the-scenes features revealing them to be nothing more than foam and plastic are filthy lies.

The primary joy of the extended edition of the film, happily treated with severity by Jackson and not as a simple DVD gimmick with sloppily reinserted deleted scenes, is that the added footage allows us to roam this world a bit longer, through foggy, grimy marshes and impossibly green and inviting meadows and craggy, treacherous mountains. It also abets (though not entirely) one of the major problems of the film, indeed the entire franchise: a loose grasp on temporal relations. Many complained about the films' lengths, but Jackson powers through The Lord of the Rings. When Gandalf returns to the Shire to warn Frodo (Elijah Wood) of the impending danger of the Ringwraiths, what in the book was the passage of decades is presented as maybe a week or two, a month tops. The longer cut allows us to see Aragorn leading the Hobbits from Bree to Weathertop, and the simple addition of a single scene adds so much more entertainment value because we're stopping occasionally so see the sights instead of being stuck on the Middle Earth bus tour that was the theatrical version.

Not until the characters reach Rivendell and the larger arc of the trilogy is forged does the story mesh with the visual splendor in an entertaining way. Compared to the fractured perspectives of the sequels, Fellowship plays as an ensemble piece, allowing us to spend yet more time with the backgrounds before the sequels personalized the story. A number of the actors, chiefly those playing the Hobbits and Orlando Bloom, don't have full grasps on their characters yet, but working within a group dynamic allows them to soften their weaknesses, and even McKellen dampens his OTT theatrics and turns Gandalf into an interesting team player instead of a demigod who cannot relate or be related to any of the other characters -- this might explain why the character so rarely used his supposedly powerful magic over the course of the three films.

In retrospect, it's easy to see that Jackson was out of his element with the scope required for the story. His direction in the battle sequences is overwhelming and viscerally disjointed (at least in this installment, which lacks the epic action pieces of its successors), but occasionally he carries that frantic style into the calmer moments, haphazardly editing from one action to another that is linked to the previous one but entirely separate from the last scene, traveling impossible distance for what is meant to be a quick cut. When Frodo announces among the squabbling Elves, Dwarves and Men that he will take the Ring to Mordor, he can barely be heard over the din, yet Jackson immediately cuts to a close-up of Gandalf wearily closing his eyes with regret and turning as the crowd silences to face his wee chum. The wizard was shouting alongside the rest a split-second earlier, and for him to immediately become calm and somber is such a jarring example of bad editing that it continues to baffle me each time I visit these films. That brings us nicely to another problem: the endless close-ups. Jackson must have spent his free time in pre-production vegging with Eisenstein's filmography because he adds so many emotional counterpoints of close-up reactions to nearly every action that I expected an open political message to pour out of these characters' mouths.

He overcomes these shortcomings, however, out of sheer enthusiasm. He has a steady grasp of Tolkien's themes -- environmental concerns, distrust and xenophobia, the typical battle between good and evil -- and he's smart enough to recognize that, when shooting in a country like New Zealand, one need not ignore the scenery. Furthermore, some of his visual choices, such as the distorted haze that blurs the screen when Frodo wears the Ring, are wonderful touches. He also perfectly captures the inexplicable lure of the Ring, though I find it somewhat amusing to watch the film now and find a certain link between the Ring's, a suggestive object (especially when pierced with a finger), maddening effect on people and the equally hysterical reactions that the sexual metaphor of Twilight extracts from its characters*. As for the design, well, do I really need to explain the magnificent costume and makeup? The Orcs and Uruk-hai look absolutely perfect, all oily skin and twisted visages and gnarly teeth. The Elves, illuminated with an aura and donned in light clothing, resemble angels and inspire a serene calm even when engaged in battle. The only one who doesn't look the part, hilariously enough, is Orlando Bloom. My only complaint regarding the costumes is that the outfits look too pristine here, too clean despite the rough journey through various terrains, but that would fortunately change later.

When I first saw The Fellowship of the Ring back in 2001, I was 12 years old, unconcerned with technique or acting and caring only for that most dubious of adaptive goals: faithfulness. I had read the books for the first time in anticipation of the release and loved them, and like the fool that I was I just wanted this Peter Jackson fellow to put all of the novel's good stuff in the movie. And while I loved the film, I bemoaned the lack of Tom Bombadil , a character I didn't even fully understand, all the while missing how Jackson and his writing partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens made much subtler changes to the main characters that proved vastly more important and distinctive. He, Walsh and Boyens give a reasonable motive to Boromir where his character originally received a rounded appraisal only in the final volume, while Sam (Sean Astin) is slowly reshaped into a model of loyalty and Platonic love, a change that would become evident over the next two films. Of greatest interest is Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen ), altered from a consummate hero into a sort of Christ figure (or more so, at least), technically human but something else entirely, filled with self-doubt but ultimately committed to his destiny. The only unwelcome change involves the simplification of Gimli (Jonathan Rhys-Davies) and Legolas , who scarcely have anything to do save lob semi-racist digs at each other, insofar as insulting fictional species constitutes "racism."

So, while my enjoyment of the film has been tempered by the realization of its shortcomings, to say nothing of some dated special effects -- I wouldn't call them weak, but it's easy to discern the real actors from the CG models even in the waves of clashing armies, and green-screen backgrounds are identifiable from natural backdrops -- it's also been enhanced by how much more I appreciate the beauty and passion of the project. Jackson establishes a dialectic with this film, between personal, emotionally identifiable intimacy and epic storytelling, that would define the franchise. Fellowship, as the first of the franchise and thus the one that must introduce and establish the characters, swings more to the "personal" side of the balance, its endless close-ups stressing the importance of the group even as I try to crane around their big heads to see all the pretty stuff behind them. Howard Shore understands Fellowship's more subdued focus, and his excellent score, while properly boisterous and swelling at times, is often reserved and trusts the visuals to impart the film's beauty without imposing an overbearing score. So, while the film's lost some of its luster, I have to admit that I still find it a glorious, all-encompassing fantasy world that remains ever so inviting and enjoyable; here is a film that makes me care even about locations we do not see, places with long-winded titles that crumbled long ago and took some piece of this expertly defined world with them forever.



*Forgive me for comparing The Lord of the Rings to Twilight.