“Ed”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/ed/ and I were at a Chinese restaurant yesterday for lunch, and it struck me how much it resembled most of the other mid-range Chinese restaurants I’ve ever been to. I think it was called “The Golden Wok,” though it might have been “The Golden Dragon.” And it shared a common, perhaps universal, list of traits with similarly-named restaurants:

* Located in a strip mall or other low-rent location.
* Ornate, slightly garish wallpaper, with either a floral or a generic Asian pattern.
* Cushy booths, round tables, chairs with rounded tops, cloth napkins.
* A proprietor eager to greet people as they enter. On the counter by him or her is a bowl of mints for on your way out.
* Serving staff who obsessively refill your glass of water
* Americanized Chinese food, which, if not authentic, is definitely tasty, accounting for the large number of these sorts of restaurants.
* Those cheap little wooden chopsticks in the red paper sleeve. And of course the fortune cookies with lousy fortunes.
* The syrupy red sweet-and-sour sauce and the yellow spicy mustard sauce.
* UPDATE: How could I have forgotten the paper horoscope placemats? Thanks to “Jim Zoetewey”:http://www.geocities.com/jim_zoetewey for pointing that out in the comments.
* Most importantly: The Lunch Menu. A dozen or so dishes served with choice of soup, an egg roll, steamed or fried rice, and complimentary tea. It always amounts to an amazingly good deal for a lot of food for lunch, though the exact price varies depending on where you live.

You know the place of which I speak. You probably know of half a dozen such places in the city where you live. They could almost be a franchise, but of course they’re not — they’re all individually owned. So how is it that they end up so similar? Is there a three-ring binder, a la _Snow Crash_, that dictates the Successful Chinese Restaurant Decor and Business Plan?

A sideline for those not familiar with _Snow Crash_: the novel takes place in a fanciful near-future where everything, from the place where you order pizza to the burbclave you live in to the highway you drive on, is a franchise. America is a teeming multicultural soup of dozens of disparate languages and ethnic groups, so the way that brand uniformity is established for all these franchises is the ubiquitous three-ring Binder: a repository of all the information needed to create and maintain a given franchise unit. I’d quote some amusing scenes from the book here, but unfortunately I don’t have my copy with me.

Back to my point: maybe there exists a mythical Three-Ring Binder for Chinese Restaurants that lays out the idiotproof plan that makes them all so similar. But whether or not there’s an actual, physical binder out there, there must be a loose body of information — a collection of memes spreading virally, if you will — that has retained a remarkable degree of internal consistency across the country. (Question for international readers: do they have these places in other countries too?)

Fortunately, unlike a true franchise, there are plenty of points on which individual Chinese restaurants may distinguish themselves, with actual food quality topping the list. The Golden Wok was pretty good, but there’s a place on the Twinbrook Parkway in Rockville that has hunan chicken to _die_ for.

Chinese restaurants probably the only ones with a three-ring binder linking them together. In the past couple of months I’ve eaten at the Washington Brewing Company and the Grand Rapids Brewing Company, and you probably know of that other place by you that also does the Americana food thing and has the four or five brews that they make right there in the building. Don’t even get me started on Indian all-you-can-eat buffets. The real challenge, it would seem, is finding a restaurant that’s truly unlike any other.

Overheard conversation next to me at the Laptop Bar at “It’s a Grind”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000233.html. Guy 1 is the guy who was plugging in his network cord even though he had a wireless card, and needed to call someone on his cell phone to figure it out why his access was screwy.

Guy 1: “Hey there. This is my first time logging on in three weeks. I’ve got _forty-five_ emails!”
Guy 2: “Wow, that’s a lot.”
Guy 1: “Yeah, but most of ’em are probably porn. In case you want to look at any.”
Guy 2: “No, no porn for me.”
Guy 1: “Me either. I gave up porn for Christianity.”

At first I assumed he was joking, but now they’re talking about their churches and Guy 1’s praise band.

UPDATE: I wish I had been listening more closely, because Guy 1 just used the word “hyper-Calvinism,” followed quickly by “liturgy” though he pronounced it “li-TUR-gy.” Only in West Michigan.

I’ve been chafing under the burden of dialup access while trying to blog or surf from the trusty laptop ever since arriving in West Michigan. But now, a reprieve: wifi access at “It’s a Grind”:http://www.itsagrind.com/ in Grand Rapids. Good coffee, fast Internet, and my buddy “Ed”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/ed/ here too, though he’s actually _working_ right now. Good times. If there was only a backgammon board lying around it’d feel just like home.

Recommended reads from the blogosphere and beyond:

* “Slacktivist”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/ is right: you could do worse than read “this Anne Lamott essay”:http://archive.salon.com/mwt/lamo/1998/12/10lamo.html every Christmas.
* “Sauron: Offer and Acceptance”:http://blog.qiken.org/archives/000196.html is a great piece by a U of M law student analyzing Sauron’s offer to the Dwarves (as related during the Council of Elrond). Very funny, and don’t miss all the subsequent legal commentary in the comments. Hat tip to Christopher DeJong. UPDATE: Possible subconscious hat tip to “Amygdala”:http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/, too.
* This one’s a couple weeks old, but Jim Henley is at his best in “this entry”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2003_12_14.html#004819 on freedom and democracy:

I really regret the way we toss the term “democracy” around in our foreign policy rhetoric. It gives people the idea that the most important thing in politics is voting. But the most important thing in politics is freedom. The American model is not “democracy,” it’s constitutionally-limited government with a democratic component (even still). Far, far more important than the fact that Americans get to vote is the large category of things on which Americans don’t get to vote. Locking up people who write bad things, jailing people for worshipping the wrong gods, compelling self-incriminating testimony in criminal cases, issuing bills of attainder and other items on an admittedly shrinking list. Even here, it’s shameful that people can vote to prohibit behaviors that a sane country would call “making an honest living.” But we had the idea right. Then we go an screw up explaining it to everyone else.

* Greg Costikyan rather incisively “picks apart”:http://www.costik.com/weblog/2003_12_01_blogchive.html#107202887690337465 a New York Times Magazine “article on computer games”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/magazine/21GAMES.html.
* John Holbo’s “recent offering”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/12/difficult_writi_1.html is only the tail end of a ongoing discussion about the difficulty of academic writing that’s been threading across a number of blogs. I mention it not because it’s an easy gateway to the prior discussion, but because John happens to sum up my thoughts on the subject rather well.
* “Dropload”:http://dropload.com/ is a very cool site where you can leave a file (up to 50 MB) for someone else to pick up. Everything gets taken off after it’s been there for two days. Hat tip to “Lawrence Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/blog/.
* Best wishes to Puddingtime, who “waxes philosophical”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/archives/misc/001592.php on a topic I remember all too well.
* And some happy news: Joss Whedon “has finished”:http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main.html?2003-12/23/11.00.film his script for the “Firefly”:http://www.scifispace.com/html/firefly.php movie. Hat tip to “Amygdala”:http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/, who also brings a bit of bad news: Keanu Reeves is going to play “John Constantine”:http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0360486/. Though it also occurred to me that now that the Matrix trilogy as a whole officially sucks, it’s possible to be annoyed by Keanu without having to include any caveats. Call it a silver lining.

In considering the above question, let’s take as evidence Jackson’s statements concerning the theatrical and DVD cuts of The Lord of the Rings. If you’ve heard his commentary tracks on the extended DVDs, or read one of several interviews with him through the years, you’ll know what I’m talking about, but for reference here’s an excerpt from a recent press roundtable, sent to me by alert reader Michael Thomas:

The DVD versions . . . it’s so interesting, because it’s all so new, this DVD thinking, a new way of thinking about filmmaking. It’s just kind of fun. (Pause.) I mean, the films that we’ve cut and released theatrically I regard as being the best versions of the movies that we should have in theaters. The motivation for the DVDs is to give the fans the stuff that we couldn�t include in the films. And it has only grown out of the fact that we have so much footage. We didn’t ever think we were doing extended cuts when we were shooting the movie, but when we started to cut the films, and we realized there were all of the scenes that weren’t going to be in the movie, we just thought, “Well, these are good scenes, they’re legitimate parts of the book, they’re scenes that people would be wanting . . . or expecting to see.” So, we put them in this alternative version of the fans. At the time, I felt that I was sacrificing pacing and momentum in order for these scenes to go in, but I figured that the theatrical version exists, so this is like a version for the real aficionados who want to see this extra material. Clearly, the dynamics of DVD is different: you can get up and have a cup of tea anytime you like, you can pause it, you can watch it over two nights. Now, I read reviews where people say that the extended cuts are much better than the theatrical cuts. That’s the response that some people are happening. The unknown factor that you can never really know is would the extended cuts have gone down so well if they were the theatrical releases, and you had people sitting in the cinema for three hours forty minutes instead of three hours. Who knows? I don’t really regard them as the definitive versions of the movies, but I’m happy . . . every time I see a review where someone says, “Oh, this is better than the theatrical version.” I’m happy because they like the DVD version. That’s a nice thing to read. But I’m too close to it. I don’t really know.

The notion that the DVD release is “an alternative version for the fans” stands in direct opposition to what I’ve argued which is that the extended cuts represent the “complete aesthetic product as it was intended”—not just a better version, but the version that Jackson himself would consider the “real” one. So it naturally irks me to see Jackson saying things to the contrary. I’m perfectly capable of separating out the fanboy in me from the steely-eyed critic; the extended cuts aren’t only superior because they include more memorable moments from Tolkien, but because they include crucial information for understanding the plot, and in many cases, far from “sacrificing pacing,” actually fix pacing that’s broken. I’m hardly alone in thinking this, or in being somewhat baffled by comments like those above.

So what’s going on here? We have a couple of possibilities:

1. Peter Jackson has other things he’d rather say in an interview, but can’t. Privately, he rolls his eyes at the fact that some pinhead at New Line got confused between Osgiliath and Helm’s Deep and made him insert a dumb scene where Faramir painstakingly points out the difference on a map—and to keep that scene when he had to cut other, much better ones. He knows perfectly well that the extended cuts are better—and maybe should have been even longer—but to say so makes public some of the tensions between him and the studio, which is something he doesn’t want to do.

The same principle applies for all that documentary material on the DVDs. It’s very easy to be lulled into a false sense of intimacy through the commentary tracks, because it feels like it’s just you and the filmmakers in a room, like they’re talking just to you. But they’re not, and Jackson has to watch what he says in there even more than he would in an interview.

Maybe Jackson will eventually speak on his real feelings about the cuts he was forced to make, once enough time has passed, or if something happens to spoil his relationship with New Line anyway. Until then we’ll have to work from rumors we get from our friend who knew that one guy who was at a party with Orlando Bloom.

2. Peter Jackson is insane. He firmly believes that the theatrical cut is every bit as good as the extended one, just like he says. Like Quentin Tarantino, he’s a brilliant filmmaker who fails to appreciate just what it is about his movies that makes them works of genius. Jackson’s lack of sanity might give us cause for concern about whether his future film projects will be as well-crafted as The Lord of the Rings, but we can be thankful that he decided to do the extended cuts at all, regardless of what he thinks of them.

There is, of course, a modified version of possibility #2 that’s more likely to be true: as is often the case in creative projects of any sort, Jackson is too close—mentally and chronologically—to his work to see it clearly. He believes what he says now, but in a few years, looking back, he’ll slap himself on the forehead and realize that when he was slicing things down to fit into three hours per film he was actually doing some damage.

And there’s another, scarier possibility, which is that I am wrong. The strongest evidence for this is that everyone I know who feels strongly about the superiority of the extended cuts is to some extent a Tolkien aficianado, and most of the people I know who haven’t read Tolkien don’t think the difference is as big of a deal. This indirectly supports Jackson’s case, but I hasten to note that the films are an adaptation, and so our critique of them must account for how well they adapt. Therefore it is to the aficianados we must turn for the clearest appreciation of Jackson’s failure or success.

UPDATE: There’s much commenty goodness in this entry, so don’t miss out.

It’s Christmastime. Beautiful carols float in the air; the ground is flaked with snow; peace and warmth abound. Why oh why is it, then, that the song that’s been stuck in my head for days — that I can’t get out of my head no matter how hard I try — is “Fett’s Vette”:http://www.mcchris.com/lyr_vette.htm by “MC Chris”:http://one.mcchris.com/?

Sigh. I blame “Ed”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/ed/.

. . . to juggle time in West Michigan between both sides of the family and many friends, all the while with a new baby in tow. Point being: _’tisnt_ the season for frequent blogging. Expect things here to be a little sparse for the next week or two. And have a splendid holiday season.

(This review is rife with spoilers. Read it after you’ve seen the movie, not before.)

.
.
.

The Return of the King is easily the best movie of the year, the best-directed movie in recent memory, and one that includes the best battle scene in all of film.

And it is also a movie where important chunks are glaringly absent in ways that screw with the pacing and leave us wanting more in the bad sense, just as I feared. As with The Two Towers, we’ll have to wait for the extended edition on DVD to get the real, complete film. I don’t know whether to curse New Line for forcing Peter Jackson’s hand this way, or thank them for the fact that in a little less than a year we’ll get to see a new version that’s even better than this one.

On to the details.

The shot you see time and again in Return is one from a camera in the sky, of an eye peering down the slope of precipitous heights, whether at Minas Tirith or Minas Morgul or Dunharrow or the Crack of Doom. It’s an apt visual metaphor for a film where every moment represents a razor’s edge between hope and death, and vertigo is a constant companion. Even when we’re not being literally brought to the edge of our seats wondering if someone’s going to fall, those heights create a tension that never really lets up once it has you. It’s just one element in Jackson’s bag of tricks that he’s had three films to refine, alongside the ever-moving camera, the grandiloquent tracking shots, and the ubiquitous (and yet deft) use of slow motion. There are many things that make this film a masterpiece, but Jackson’s greatest accomplishment in the whole trilogy is this: he creates a visual language in perfect harmony with Tolkien’s words, pitch for pitch, timbre for timbre.

This struck me time and again in Return, from the lighting of the signal fires to the severe austerity of Denethor’s hall to every single terrifying moment in Shelob’s lair. It struck me most on Mount Doom, the climax of the trilogy, in which I experienced the unlikely thrill of seeing everything unfold just as I had always imagined it, with relentless intensity and nary a false step. Think of that moment after the false ending, when we see Frodo and Sam’s limp bodies on the mountainside, surrounded by lava. Clear sky fills the upper right half of the screen, and out of the sunlight, three eagles appear, a hope unlooked-for. Everything that Tolkien ever said about eucatastrophe is contained in that shot. I knew exactly what was coming, and it still choked me up to see it.

The centerpiece and crowning accomplishment of this film is the Battle of Pelennor Fields. It’s awe-inspiring in a way that’s pointless to try to describe; you have to see it to get it. Jackson set out to create a scene that in scope and energy and sheer brilliance outdid every other one like it by a long shot; he succeeded. Grond. The Witch King. Those freakin’ mumakil. Eowyn’s unveiling. The Army of the Dead. Each cylinder fires perfectly.

In the commentary to The Two Towers, Jackson talks about how important the buildup of tension before a battle is—you get the sense that for him, getting that part right is as crucial as the battle itself. It’s a notion that Tolkien would have favored. Far more of his pages are taken up by anticipation and aftermath than the battles themselves; indeed, one of the major differences between film and book is the number of minutes Jackson spends dramatizing the action scenes themselves. Even so, the time he spends on those ramping-up moments and pre-battle speeches borders on the excessive—but only borders. In this as in so much else, Jackson constantly pushes the envelope, taking risk after risk of being too grandiose or melodramatic but only rarely stepping over the line. The reward for these risks is moments of emotional and lyrical intensity that no one else has accomplished in film because no one else has dared to try.

Now for the problems. The movie starts strong, with an unexpected and riveting depiction of Smeagol’s first murder, segueing into one of my favorite moments in the trilogy: Merry and Pippin smoking on Isengard’s ruins. But shortly afterward we hit the first glaring gap: the complete lack of any denouement whatsoever to the story of Saruman. It’s well-known now that this is one of the things that Jackson had to cut, to be restored in the extended version, but that doesn’t make it any less egregious. Sure, this movie doesn’t need that moment, but it’s an ugly loose end for the trilogy as a whole.

We don’t hit any omissions that glaringly bad for awhile, but from the aftermath of the Battle of Pelennor Fields until the moments when Frodo and Sam reach Mount Doom, the Return has far too many bad cuts and pacing problems. One thing that’s missing is the Houses of Healing, where we would get a chance to see Faramir and Eowyn meet. Not only is that a worthy scene in itself, it would provide crucial downtime as a counterpoint to Sam’s rescue of Frodo in the orc-tower and the march of Aragorn’s army to the Black Gate. Without it, the other scenes feel rushed and clumped together in exactly the same manner as the end of The Two Towers’ theatrical version did.

So much for the cuts we know about; I can only hope that the orc-tower scenes and Sam and Frodo’s march across the plains of Gorgoroth were similarly butchered and will be restored in due time. Thank goodness the scenes on the mountain are so good, because the clipped nature of everything between there and Shelob threatens to completely undermine the exhausting momentum of their journey. No doubt there are many smaller cuts, too, that will seem equally egregious once we realize what’s missing. I’m hoping that there will be a later beat emphasizing the toll that gazing into the palantir took on Pippin, as well as one that foreshadows the arrival of the Eagles.

The biggest disappointment that has nothing to do with cuts is the character of Denethor. While he retains the deep despair he displays in the book, he lacks eloquence and force of personality; he is less a tragic figure than a straightforward villain. He doesn’t have a palantir either, which takes away the root cause of his despair and leaves him both shallow and unmotivated. This in turn poisons Faramir’s last key moments; they’re just another rehash of the “impressing daddy” bit we already got in the extended version of Towers. It’s possible (here’s hoping) that we’ll get to see Faramir’s character arc fully rounded out in the Houses of Healing, come November.

There’s a classic Jackson overstep in the Minas Tirith scene when Gandalf swats Denethor down with his staff and takes charge of the defense. I didn’t like it. And yet, I’ve got to admit, the audience applauded when it happened, and I don’t think it was because they thought the lowbrow humor of the moment was cool—it’s because real tension has been building as to what the heck was going to happen with Denethor mismanaging the city and the army of Mordor approaching, and seeing him finally taken out of the picture brought a palpable sense of relief. And this is, after all, exactly the tension that Tolkien was building up at that moment in the books. I still have a problem with the scene, but you can’t deny that at some level it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

I missed seeing the Mouth of Sauron at the Gate. Also, that moment where Aragorn seems to falter before leading the charge is a poor payoff for the self-doubt he’s struggled with in the previous two movies. Obviously this is the film where he has to come into his own, but his final triumph of will should have come more slowly, and at a higher price.

Miscellaneous things to be thankful for: Gimli not sucking. Elijah Wood and Sean Astin’s astounding performances. Arwen’s role remaining low-key but crucial (though points off for the bizarre and unnecessary bit about her ‘disease’.) The fact that of all three movies, this is the one that stays most faithful to the books—certain moments, like Eowyn vs. the Witch-king, follow Tolkien’s words to the very letter.

And what of the endings? There are quite a few of them in Return, from Frodo’s bedside to Aragorn’s coronation and then the Shire and the Grey Havens and the Shire again. As I fanboy I loved it, though I could see someone less devoted to Tolkien finding the seemingly endless parade of codicils too much. But each has its place, and I loved the fact that the movie ended with Sam returning home, just as the book does, and with a round hobbit-door closing. For entirely personal reasons, seeing his daughter run out to meet him durn near melted my heart. In any case, when you sit down to watch all three of these movies (extended versions, naturally) back to back, the long descending action will fit just right. And, as with the books, that’s clearly how they’re meant to be experienced: in one fell swoop.

There’s no question, looking back at the trilogy as a whole, that as an adaptation of Tolkien it’s very fine and as a work of film it’s an unprecedented, thrilling work of collective genius. The Lord of the Rings is a triumph of directing, design, acting, and writing, in that (descending) order. Just as I look forward to re-reading the trilogy every couple of years, I look forward to making time for glorious twelve-hour movie marathons, maybe on alternating years, with a roomful of friends, ale, hobbitish stew, and time for pipesmoke between discs. Who’s with me?

Just heard on NPR: Boeing’s CEO is named “Harry Stonecipher.” That is so cool. Somewhere, someone typing out page 243 of a mediocre fantasy novel is throwing his arms up in disgust. “Crap! Who would have thought _that_ would be taken . . .”

Chad Engbers of Locust Wind (now defunct) has written an excellent piece speculating on what the Professor himself would have thought of the film version of The Lord of the Rings. As befits someone with an incisive understanding of Tolkien’s works, Chad touches only lightly on the obvious “JRRT was a Luddite” meme and quickly takes us to more interesting ground:

In fact, I would like to think that some part of Tolkien would have appreciated the making of the recent film versions. I say the making of the recent film versions because Tolkien had a profound reverence for arts of making. Reverence is not too strong a word. He referred to the act of writing good fantasy as “sub-creation,” a lesser imitation of the primary creation through which God formed the real world. The hallmark of good fantasy, for Tolkien, is “the inner consistency of reality.” A fantasy world cannot advertise itself as a fantasy world; it must feel real.

Peter Jackson’s productions have done that. The people who designed the cave troll in Fellowship, for instance, gave him a crusty back and weaker flesh on the front, imagining that he had spent much of his life hunched over in the caves. The foliage around Bag End was planted a year in advance—it was real, natural foliage. Detailed craftsmanship is praised throughout The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, and I suspect that Tolkien would respect the efforts made by the recent production—even if he had little regard for the finished film.

More importantly, however, I believe that he would ultimately be delighted to see his story enter another medium. Most of the material that Tolkien himself studied, loved, and emulated was composed in oral traditions and only later written down. Literature such as Beowulf and the Kalevalla was passed down by word of mouth for generations before someone finally recorded them as a written text.

Chad’s right on all the main points, which leaves me scraping the bottom of the barrel to find something to comment on other than to say: “Read it!” But I think I see something . . . wait . . . it’s stuck . . . ah, yes, here we go!

In a couple of places on the extended DVD of The Two Towers, Philippa Boyens (screenwriter) remarks that Professor Tolkien would not have approved of some changes that were made to the story. I agree. I think that he would have been appalled at what happened to, say, the character of Faramir in The Two Towers.

There’s probably a lot that would have appalled him, but Faramir isn’t the example I’d reach for first. If Tolkien understood film well enough to appreciate the different demands of the medium (and I realize he almost certainly didn’t), he would have been OK with the changes to Faramir—or at least other things would have bugged him first, like the debasement of Gimli or the decision of the Ents not to go to war. Earlier, I somewhat overstated the case by suggesting that by making some of the characters in the films darker, more prone to corruption, and more full of self-doubt than their counterparts in the books, Jackson was being “more Tolkienian than Tolkien.” In rare cases doing so has unquestionably improved on Tolkien—for example, the addition of the scene at the end of Fellowship where Frodo and Aragorn part. Chad points out that The Silmarillion was always Tolkien’s favorite project; the doubting, ‘weaker’ versions of Aragorn and Faramir in the films would be much more at home in a work alongside Feanor and Turin than the upright versions of them in the books.

On to the “Stuff I Just Realized That Others Have Probably Already Noticed” Department. I was musing on what Tolkien would have made of what seems like a pretty obvious choice: dramatizing the takedown of Isengard instead of having it related afterward by Merry and Pippin, as it is in the book. Of course, a secondhand account in a book isn’t as a big a deal, since as a reader you’re imagining the scene either way, whereas the experience of a viewer would be profoundly different. Even so, wouldn’t presenting such an important and memorable scene directly be a pretty basic tenet of Novel Writing 101?

Then I remembered how often stories get related secondhand in Beowulf. Or, heck, in the Odyssey, or in Greek drama. I’m going to go out on a limb way beyond my expertise and speculate that it may have something to do with the oral tradition, where, as with text, your audience still gets to imagine the scene regardless of whose eyes it’s coming through, plus you get the added bonus of doing the whole thing in a different wacky voice. No surprise, then, that Tolkien would adopt such a technique, whether consciously or unconsciously. I have no idea whether any of this would have any bearing on what he would have thought of the Ent-attack in the film, but I’d like to think that upon seeing their craggy forms marching down the razed hillside, he would have felt the same flutter in his stomach that I did.