The Battle of Evermore Thursday, December 18, 2003

Gut reaction: I didn't like it.

Let's start with the good stuff. Smeagol and Deagol were note-perfect: greedy little hobbits who didn't know what they were playing at. Gondor looked gorgeous, with narrow winding streets and dark-and-light marble--like the Italian cities Tolkien loved. (He once referred to Venice as Gondor.) The Riders of Rohan once again brought a lump to the throat--how can you not love the cavalry showing up?--and Eowyn got her moment in the sun, marvelously. The Mordor orcs were subtly different than the Isengard ones, less showy and stupid, more determined. Wonderful quiet moments with Gandalf and Pippin, Pippin and the steward. The oathbreaking ghosts swarming over the city--noncanonical but breathtaking. Frodo's face inside Mount Doom. The hobbits returning in finery, larger and wiser. The last line of the movie, the same as the book, the only way the story could possibly end.

But the stuff between those moments just didn't hold up. There were so many false climaxes (Frodo sent Sam away! Will he come back?) and so much dopey Hollywood dialogue (Stand up and be the king! You never told me there was a baby!) that the bright moments got overwhelmed. A better way to put it: Every time I started sinking into the story, something struck a jarring note and brought me back to reality.

And so many omissions, to the point that the story didn't make sense at some points. Denethor's nuts! Why? We never find out. Saruman's locked up in his tower! Whew, glad we settled that. And then...no Mouth of Sauron. My absolute favorite moment from the books, the one I would've forgiven them anything if they got right. Gone. Just gone. In the book, the armies fought even though they knew the mission had failed, they were fighting to strike one last blow before the world fell into darkness. Here, it's a load of new age macho bullshit: Aragorn finding his inner Numenorean.

On the other other hand, everybody else seemed to dig it so maybe I was in a weird place. Another viewing necessary.

@ 11:08:00 AM, ,

...And the P.S. of Doom Wednesday, December 17, 2003

All of which makes the inquisition, and the Catholic persecution of Jews throughout the centuries, all the more hateful. How can anybody follow a church that tortured people into conversions and stood largely silent through the Holocaust?

That's a larger question than I can answer right now. For my part, I have faith in the institution--that it will grow wiser and stronger and correct its mistakes, or at least see the error of its ways and seek forgiveness for them. (As the current pope has done for the church's long horrible history toward Jews.)

@ 12:06:00 PM, ,

The Nine Fingers

Hey there. Sorry for the long silence. Mrs. WTJ and I have been putting the house in order and I've been hunting and pecking away at the Secret Thing. Let's just call it "the game," from here on, because the more I use the former phrase the more scuttling and depressive it sounds. The game is coming along well, although I think I may stop at this point and rewrite what I've got. Which is not to say I have no ideas for what comes next...

Return of the King today. We went to see the expanded version of Fellowship in a snowstorm, and Two Towers in the middle of a Times Square crowd-gasm. Both films are incredibly long, but I think only Fellowship holds up. The dialogue in Two Towers is just plain dopey, which wouldn't matter if we were talking about, say, Star Wars--dopey can be ingratiating in those kinds of cases. But when you've got source material like Tolkien, dopey is a mortal sin.

I also owe my buddy, who I mentioned earlier, a fuller response about Catholicism. For the time being, I'll toss out a riddle that one of favorite Catholic writers, Walker Percy, posed time and again: Explain the Jews. Come up with any historical theory you want, any catchall that explains the ebb and flow of human culture--dialectical materialism, the will to power, blind luck. Nothing explains the persistence of the Jews. Where are the Hittites? Where are the Canaanites? Where are the Babylonians? There is no other group of people from ancient times who persist to this day as a singular, unassimilated entity, under their same name. The Jews lived alongside empires and god-kings and much mightier peoples--who are all gone now, their singularity drowned in the gene pool, their bloodlines untraceable, their names changed many times over.

But the Jews--whose kingdom was destroyed, whose people were scattered, whose land was occupied--have persisted. Why? What possibly explains it? There's simply no materialistic explanation that covers it. Something else is at work. Or someone.

This doesn't, of course, answer the numerous charges my friend made about Catholicism, but it provides a starting point, I think, for a discussion about the "specialness" of Catholicism and its claims to truth. One of the most moving things I have ever read is an exegesis of the gospel passage where Jesus, on the cross, is speaking to Mary and the Beloved Disciple; Jesus tells B.D., "Behold thy mother," and tells Mary, "Behold thy son." This is usually interpreted as Jesus remembering mom in his last moments, and arranging for her care. The interpreter I read had a much deeper take: B.D. is the Christian church; Mary is Judaism. Jesus--and the priests who read the passage aloud to their congregations--was reminding converts of that relationship.

That kinship is the starting point for discussing the truth of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. How do we know the church's message is true, and if it is true, how do we know it is the One Big Truth? Start with the Jews. The mystery began with Abraham. And it hasn't ended yet.

@ 11:51:00 AM, ,

Sharkey's Night Sunday, December 14, 2003

Hussein, he of the mass graves, rape gangs, torture pits and jails for children, has been captured. He out-Heroded Herod. Good riddance.

@ 10:20:00 AM, ,