Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Three Thousand Years of Longing/They-Them/The Rings of Power/Samaritan/House of the Dragon
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Three Thousand Years of Longing (in theaters)
You love writer-director George Miller, even if you don’t know who he is. Go on, head over to IMDB and look at his directing credits; I’ll wait.
See? You love him, and with good reason. He’s a director’s director, one of the most technically proficient filmmakers working today. He doesn’t make a lot of movies, not compared to some other directors. But what he chooses to direct (or write and direct) are inevitably worth your time. So let it be with Three Thousand Years of Longing, a movie that will be relegated to arthouses, which is a shame because I think it has nearly universal appeal, thanks to both Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba.
“Nearly Universal Appeal” doesn’t guarantee that you’ll like this movie, a narrative framing device with three embedded tales, told in voice over and filmed in a lush, saturated color palette, magical special effects, and a credible attempt to emulate if not simulate old, illustrated storybooks like the kind that were published at the beginning of the 20th century with full color artwork by people like N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle and Edmund Dulac.
All of the above sounds great, but the pacing is quite deliberate, and the way in which the story is told seems at odds with casting The Ancient One and Heimdall in a movie and then not letting them use all of the tools hanging from their considerable belts. Granted, when they do get to speak to one another, they make the most of their eye lines and seem to genuinely connect.
In the end, Three Thousand Years of Longing earns its Art-House designation by virtue of it not being Mad Max: Fury Road. I was in the right mood to have this movie sort of wash over me and let it entertain me. It’s not a potboiler, and the trailer is cut to show you all of the exciting stuff in one breathless gasp. In between those two minutes of zooming around, there’s 100 minutes of exposition and longing looks.
They/Them (Hulu)
Blumhouse decided some time ago that they were going to be the New Line Cinema for the up-and-coming horror fans of the world. In this capacity they have been very successful at producing low-budget (but not necessarily cheaply made) horror movies aimed squarely at their demographic. They do this by taking some of the more enduring chestnuts of the horror genre (such as the camp killer) and dropping in a few updates and twists to freshen the concept. The results, overall, are decidedly mixed, but when they work, it’s pretty entertaining.
This premise of They/Them couldn’t be simpler: a group of LGBTQ+ kids arrive at a conversion camp for a week of fun outdoor activities, Circle-of-Trust rap sessions, one-on-one counseling and...DUN DUN DUNNNN...NO CELLPHONES! AIEEEEE! Oh, and someone is killing the kids and the counselors off, too, but...NO CELLPHONES!? My God...the horror...the horror...
(Side Note: cell phones are one of the great roadblocks to effective horror stories, because the first thing you have to do is neutralize them if you want to create that feeling of helplessness and sense of isolation. Thank God for service providers like AT&T, or we’d never have any dead spots to set these stories in, eh? Like that little 365 mile patch between Amarillo and Dallas in North Texas, for instance...)
They/Them may have another purpose, too, in getting the parents of Gen Z to tune in, as well. That’s why Kevin Bacon is front and center in the poster, and the cast includes Anna (My Girl) Chlumsky, all grown up and playing the camp nurse. This is—I think—clearly intended to draw in the parents of certain kids who may be in that demographic. We don’t even have kids, but Jes said, “KEVIN BACON!" and so we had to watch it, you see.
The kids are an intentional and carefully chosen rainbow spectrum that hopscotches back and forth between clichéd stereotype and boldly inspired choice. Our POV person won’t be split along the lines of the Boy’s Cabin or the Girl’s Cabin, and right away, we know, this kid is the Conan of the movie.
They/Them is more of a psychological thriller than a horror movie, and has the best chance of creeping out said LGBTQ+ community because of what the adults promise and then take away. Forty years after the first Friday the 13th movie, you still can’t trust adults for shit. It will also offend anyone who has a problem with gay make-out sessions. But Kevin Bacon (and for that matter, all of the other adults, too) is great in the movie, whether he’s playing the disarmingly charming camp director or the God-Awful horrible camp director.
They/Them is not scary, at all, but it was effective and managed to just barely squeak over the line of having enough twists and turns as to be a nearly-fresh take. Veteran horror fans will be wondering just how much of the cult classic Sleepaway Camp the film borrows from, and the answer is, nothing, but Blumhouse sure tries to convince you differently.
The Rings of Power (Amazon)
Long ago, before the various rings were forged, Middle Earth looked very different, and this is where the one-billion-dollar Amazon series decides to set their story—what amounts to a few pages of notes from Tolkien’s papers on this early time period. Hobbits weren’t even hobbits yet, for crying out loud! Elrond and Galadriel were hot elven twenty-somethings (they live a long time, you see). And the dwarves were vast in numbers and no less fun to watch.
If you’re reading this review (or breathing air) then you’ve seen countless people weigh in on this show. Half of you hold deep feelings about this. The other half just want to know if it’s worth the time sink. Before I answer this, I want to briefly mention another beloved fantasy literary masterwork, from Texas author Robert E. Howard: Conan of Cimmeria.
The first Conan story appeared in Weird Tales magazine in 1932, some five years before Tolkien’s The Hobbit was published in England. Conan was not the first, nor the last, fantastic character created by Howard, who had a successful career and wrote prodigiously. In the 1960s, when fantasy was being reprinted in mass market paperbacks and enjoying a kind of Renaissance, the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Robert E. Howard were produced in the millions and brought legions of loyal fans to these worlds.
Howard’s sword and sorcery hero-kings (a genre he pioneered and popularized), were a reflection of his own feelings about the decadence and corruption of civilization and all of Howard’s heroes were known to keep their own council and follow their own moral compass, regardless of what side of law and order it put them on. The Conan stories were popular during Howard’s lifetime, and a devoted cadre of fans helped keep what would become known as Sword and Sorcery alive in the 20th century in fanzines, hardcover small press books and new stories in sf magazines, and finally, mass market paperbacks with Frank Frazetta covers. This led to comic books, in 1970, and started the ball rolling, right into the movie in 1982, until Conan reached a kind of pop cultural critical mass, much like Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, and Dracula; characters recognizable by name, and with an image of them springing instantly to mind, usually from movies or television. Speaking of which...
In Conan the Barbarian (the highest grossing sword and sorcery movie of all time, incidentally), a young boy, Conan watches his family slaughtered by a wizard’s war party, and then he is sold into slavery, where he becomes a gladiator and eventually masters the martial arts of warfare and swordsmanship. Once free, he becomes a thief and pulls off a caper with luck and a little help from two friends. Then the king offers them the chance to go rescue his daughter who was indoctrinated into a cult, run by (get this) the very same wizard that killed Conan’s family. He tracks down and kills the wizard, but at great personal cost.
You watch the movie, and it’s a lot of fun; very bloody, lots of spectacle, thumping music, iconic imagery, and several meme-generating quotes that will live on in the annals of pop culture.
It also has fuck-all to do with Robert E. Howard and his original literary creation. The movie that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name is a mishmash of some Howardian names, a couple of set pieces from a few stories (actually, they were the comic book adaptations of Howard’s stories), some Code of the Bushido samurai stuff cribbed from Akira Kurasawa movies, a healthy dollop of cinematic auteur John Milius’ own personal philosophy.
There’s even less REH present in the sequel, Conan the Destroyer. And the re-make/do-over, from 2013? Well, they got the casting right with Jason Momoa. Too bad they tried to remake the movies instead of starting over. Then there’s the wretched Kull movie, starring Kevin Sorbo. And how about the Solomon Kane movie? The origin story for a character that had no origin story? A great film, sure, as long as you completely forget who and what Solomon Kane is.
I find it interesting and just a little galling that the Tolkien fans of the world are so righteously indignant at these perceived inaccuracies with the Tolkien movies (and now TV shows) of the last twenty years. “Where’s Tom Bombadil?” they howl in anguish. “Why can’t they get it right?” they bemoan.
Where, indeed. My reply, just as loudly delivered is, “Where’s Conan? Or Kull? Or Bran Mak Morn? Or Elric? Or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser?” My answer, just as strident, is “At least your giant-ass mega-budget media event is recognizable as the thing it’s trying to give you.” If you don’t like it, and many of you evidently don’t, you’ve got a number of other versions you can cling and cleave to that floats your particular boat. I’m not a big fan of the Bakshi or the Rankin-Bass versions of LoTR, but that’s neither here nor there. They exist, and have existed for quite some time. And they are, for whatever reason, much beloved.
Tolkien takes up a lot of oxygen in any discussion involving or invoking “high fantasy” or any over dragon-strewn quest narrative. As big, as epic, as seemingly unfilmable as his works are, y’all sure have a smorgasbord of stuff to look at, don’t you?
Crybabies. “Why can’t they get it right?” You miserable little ingrates. Have you ever watched Conan the Destroyer? You know what Robert E. Howard fans have to do? We have to watch movies that have nothing to do with Conan, like Pitch Black, and Braveheart, and the great series Wayne, and comment on the Howardian concepts present in the movie. We don’t even get an actual film or TV show to complain about! But if it makes you feel any better, the second we do, some of my tribe most certainly will.
If you saw what I had to put up with for over forty years now, you’d all shut up your damn heads about The Rings of Power and just not watch it. I realize that means you have to put your misplaced aggression somewhere else, because you’re not really this worked up about a TV show that cost a billion dollars to make, but that’s probably a lot healthier for you, anyway. What you’re really mad about is either (a) this faux outrage about Elves of Color and being inclusive in 2022, or (b) you’re a textural purist and it’ll never match what’s in your head, which begs the question of why you’re watching in the first place.
Just for the record, I do not consider either of these to be valid criticisms. This whole “woke” thing? You’re not clever. And your wide-eyed, blinky-blinky feigned incredulousness about where it came from and why are they doing it just makes you look like a numbskull. Either the thing you’re kvetching about has always been in place (Star Trek) and for whatever reason, you’re pretending to just now notice it because YouTube gives you an extra dollar for negative content, or what’s happening is a course correction in a world that now has a lot more people wanting to participate in that nerdy thing you do, and they don’t want to feel like the Foreign Exchange Student at the Catholic School when they go to conventions. If you’re really getting all hepped up by what the “Leftie-Libtard Snowflakes” are talking about, the best thing you can do for your blood pressure is to quit Twitter and never look back. And your YouTube channel content sucks, too, while we’re at it.
Saying that any movie isn’t like the book and wondering out loud why they can’t get it right is asinine (and I say this as someone who has savaged many a movie for just such a thing) and it reveals a lack of understanding how storytelling in different mediums works. In this particular case, saying that the TV show isn’t like the thing they were forbidden to draw from? It’s just stupid. This series is culled from the appendices of a trilogy, for crying out loud. There’s barely enough in there for a log line and a synopsis, much less a treatment, or even a single episode’s finished script. No Tolkien? No duh.
But you already had a movie—no, a trilogy—that looked like Tolkien, brought hundreds of thousands of people into fantasy, won 12 academy awards, and sold at least a million extra copies of your favorite book. Please, please, please...shut the hell up about this.
Sorry. I just had to get that off my chest.
I’m not going to get into the rights issues, or what Amazon could use and couldn’t use in this new series. You can look it up if you want to or read this summary. It’s pretty complicated, but it boils down to this: Amazon wanted to make a big, epic fantasy series to take the place of Game of Thrones in the marketplace (whoops!). So they went to the most successful, the biggest new ‘franchise’ in the past 20 years. They couldn’t use a lot of stuff from the books, because the Tolkien estate has always been difficult to deal with. So, they used what they could (which wasn’t much) and invented all of the rest of it. It was a way for people to enjoy Tolkien without having to license Tolkien. Yeah, sure, kinda like fan fiction, or...
Do you know what this series is? This is the Dungeons and Dragons version of a big, epic, sweeping TV series. Consider this for a second: when D&D came out, there was a lot they couldn’t use, but it was all creatively based, derived from, or an homage to (all euphemisms for a kinder, gentler sort of rip-off) the various fantasy paperbacks of old. I cut TSR some slack because when this game was first made, these kinds of rights didn’t yet exist, and anyway, this was only supposed to be something for other wargame nerds to dork around with.
When the game took off like a rocket, they suddenly had to get their ducks in a row. Most of the central elements in the game were given a quick once-over to keep them from being inherently actionable. They couldn’t use the name “hobbit” outright, but they could squeak by with “halfling,” a somewhat derisive term for the above. Many of the monsters and races were hand-waved in because you can’t copyright “elf” and “dwarf” and “goblin” (not for a lack of trying). Rangers, thieves, wizards, orcs, wraiths, magic rings, glowing swords, and all of it...it wasn’t quite Tolkien, but it was easy to see what they were referencing and invoking with their little game with the funny dice.
The thing was, back in 1977, when D&D dropped, in that iconic blue box, most Tolkien fans didn’t get mad about it. On the contrary; they rolled up their sleeves and grabbed some dice and started playing. They were considered separate things unto themselves.
Let that spirit be your guide in this new series, which—and I hope you know this—isn’t interested in textual fidelity. It’s hoping to scrape off most of the fans of the Peter Jackson trilogies and attract the younger generation of newbies who have very different sensibilities than all of the neckbeards online, frothing from the comfort of their basement lairs.
Or, to put it another way, when you play an elven archer in D&D, we all know you’re trying hard to be Legolas, even though you can’t be, not really, but that doesn’t stop you from enjoying the adjacent experience of being a Legolas-like character in a world with dragons and rangers and hob—halflings, and dwarves and treasure and spiders and stuff.
I have no allegiances to Tolkien’s works. I read them, and they passed through my filter, and not much got caught in the trap. I’d already been through Tarzan, Conan and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and it ruined me for Middle Earth. I really enjoyed the Lord of the Rings movies; I thought they adapted them pretty smartly and made great ads for the books. I didn’t like The Hobbit trilogy as much, but it struck me as feeling a lot like some D&D games, which makes sense, since Tolkien was a major stylistic ingredient for the game from the very beginning. In that spirit, The Rings of Power drifts even more into the role-playing game lanes for me. If you liked Jackson’s movies, this is much more of a continuation of them than an attempt to bring Tolkien’s worldbuilding documents to life on the screen. It’s a new iteration, a copy of a copy.
Of the two episodes I watched, the first one bored me to tears. It’s got about 80% more elfstuff in it than I like. I don’t care if Elrond and Galadrial are at the beginning of their adventuring career. They even lead armies into battle in a way that makes me say, “Yes, we know, get on with it.” Sitting through all of that elfstuff made me want to suck on a smallpox blanket. It’s all exposition, all talking, and even some sailing on a boat that moves so slowly, a glacier could overtake it.
Episode 2 was the complete opposite, full of monsters and combat and dwarves, and even though there were elves present in the show, they were doing interesting things, like fighting monsters and talking to dwarves. Evidently if you spread them out amongst other folk, they go along with the group, but put three or more of them together in a scene and watch it grind to a bloody halt.
There are eight episodes in all, and now that we have events in motion, I’m expecting more swordplay, dwarves doing dwarfstuff, and I’m even kinda charmed by the Proto-Hobbits. Will this season end with the forging of the rings that caused all of the problems? Doubtful. Not when they can spread that out over a few seasons.
If you are playing D&D right now, watch The Rings of Power. It’ll be good for some ideas you can swipe for your campaign. If you’re a fan of the trilogies, watch the show. They are evidently attempting to carry on in that tradition. If you’re a Tolkien purist, give it a pass. Or, you know, do like every Robert E. Howard fan has had to do for forty years and sack up and set all of your expectations at the door and look for other things to like about the series. There’s some good stuff in there if you divorce it completely from Tolkien’s works.
And hey? All you Incels? The orcs are evil.
Some concepts are evergreen.
Samaritan (Amazon)
Sylvester Stallone, who evidently stopped aging twenty years ago, stars as a garbageman who dumpster dives and rescues old tech and rebuilds it. He’s in a world where two super heroes, Samaritan and Nemesis, fought an epic battle a couple of decades ago, wherein the Samaritan killed Nemesis and caused a massive explosion, and hasn’t been seen since. Is it Stallone?
Well, of course it is, don’t be silly. But this young punk in his apartment complex doesn’t know that, at least, not until he is rescued, Mr. Miagyi style, by Stallone from a gang of serious juvenile delinquents. Thus their budding friendship and the leader of the delinquents’ plan to resurrect the Nemesis brand and “take back the streets” are destined to collide. But can an old hero find redemption, or will the mistakes of the past continue to haunt him?
This is not a franchise film. It’s also not a film from this century. If this had been made right after Demolition Man, it would have been a perfect fit. Or Judge Dredd, maybe. In terms of style, scope, and tone, it’s got much more in common with M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable and Sam Raimi’s Darkman than anything from the MCU or even the DCEU. There’s even a jaw-dropping twist at the end.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing is the twist, one I unfortunately saw coming a mile away. It didn’t spoil the film for me, but it was not the “gasp” moment that I know they were shooting for. As a Stallone fan, for my sins, I always like watching him in movies in that “he plays the same meta-version of himself” kind of way. If you like him, too, you’ll dig Samaritan. Or maybe if you want a low-stakes super hero movie that gets in and gets out and doesn’t ask you to visit the Wikipedia page to make sense of it, this will fit that bill nicely.
House of the Dragon (HBO)
Two hundred years before Daenerys Targaryen. lost her damn mind and flipped some tables and killed everyone in reach for no damn good reason that we can see, the Targaryn family was in full control of its faculties, insofar as dragon-loving, incest-allowing ash-blonde creeps could be considered fit to rule the lands of Westeros. They even tell you this in the opening cards of the series, just to make it very clear that we’re nowhere near that train wreck.
In fact, we’re so far in the past, it’s not clear what’s going to happen and that is this series’ saving grace. With no novels to crib from, Martin deeply involved in the show, and no kind of fan mandate in place to comment on how closely this series follows the books, we’re all left with the question: do we want another series set in the Game of Thrones universe?
My answer is yes. Very much so. Before the series went off the rails, I’d stack the first four seasons of GoT up against any TV of the time in terms of quality, jaw-dropping moments, political intrigue, blood and guts, and sword and sorcery derring do, at the time, the only thing going that had it. Never mind how it ended. George is back now, overseeing this new series and he’s very pleased with what they’ve done.
King Viserys Targaryen has been trying for a heir to the throne for a while now—well, make that a male heir. He’s got a daughter, a plucky dragon rider named Rhaenyra who would make a fine queen, except that a woman has never sat on the Iron Throne. The king’s nutjob brother, Daemon (foreshadowing) is the rightful heir to his brother’s throne if the queen doesn’t deliver a baby boy. Skipping over a few things, when Viserys names his daughter as he rightful heir, he puts a target on her back, as various forces start to align in an effort to win the throne for their own ends.
This feels like HBO’s apology lap. They know they botched it with the ending of the original series; they literally killed, cooked, and ate their golden goose. Now they are hoping one of the surviving eggs hatches and they can try again.
Did you like the political machinations from the series? This appears to be mostly court intrigue with a sprinkling of dragons and knight-on-knight violence. The best thing I can say about The House of the Dragon is that the pace appears deliberate and measured, setting everything up in the first episode. This is probably because they know they have a limited window to hook everyone, and I’d say it’s successful.
Time will tell if the show goes off the rails. But the first two episodes do a good job of laying out the political situation with a minimum of fluff. Characters are sharply delineated so that you understand who they are very quickly. And aside from all of the blonde wigs on-set, like a Village of the Damned fan gathering, the production values look good—seeing dragons fully realized, with little blonded girls flying on them, made me a bit nostalgic for those halcyon days of 2015.
The stakes are much lower here than with The Rings of Power. House of the Dragon is a safe bet for those of you wondering if you should allow Westeros back into your homes on a Sunday night. We live in a time of amazing television. Sit back and enjoy some of it.
“Crom is our local nature spirit. He roots for us and urges us not to give up!” -Conan the Adventurer, animated series
Ha!
Very good, but you made me chuckle as I imagined your blood pressure rising from 'Crybabies' to peaking at 'Leftie-Libtard Snowflakes'. I got hooked on REH by the Lancer paperbacks and have been disappointed in most things Conan-related ever since. I do like things like your 'Blood and Thunder' book.
RoP episode 1 was worth the time just to see Galadriel kill the ice troll. Too bad they didn't get to forge on northward and fight more trolls and such.