The Hobbit Hole III - Journey to the Cross-roads!

[HairOfTheDog]

Welcome to The Hobbit Hole!

Journey to the Cross-roads
The Two Towers Edition

Come on! Come in! -if you would like to have some seedcakes and a pint and relax a while. (If it is a special occasion, we still have a few bottles of the old wineyards left!)

Our first thread ( New Zealander builds Hobbit hole ) reached 4,100 posts, and we thought that was big. Our second thread (The New Hobbit Hole ) held us for over 48,000 posts, and we loved it dearly. We talked about moving to a new thread for the last 38,000 posts, but we are really slow to muster! Finally, the time has come. Tomorrow (at 12:01 am, to be precise!) The Two Towers comes out, and we start a new chapter.

[Alkhin]

Do what Susanna at 'cut on the bias' is doing...signing up for that 'virtual protest' that is going out, and 'tweaking' the forms/letters/statements' to fit her viewpoint (pro-war) and sending that in.

cut on the bias

she's funny! and good!

Oh and yes... I am in Texas!!! Native Houstonian living on the banks of the Brazos de Dios, the "Arms of God." I think the Spanish had their tongues planted firmly in cheek when they named the river that.

[Dawntreader]

Morning WN!!

That's great about college....it will work out fine I'm sure!

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

Well I wasn't familiar with the comic book and I really enjoyed it

Oh, good. I was afraid that they were trying to pack in too much information, including his origin story and all. It was a fairly short movie (1:37 running time, iirc) and I think it could have used another 20 minutes at least to flesh out some of the characters and storyline. Since it did so well at the box office though, I expect there will be a sequel.

[2Jedismom]

This is my response, although I haven't sent it yet...

I have never been so offended in my life as to receive this piece of garbage in my email. I trusted you with my personal email address so that I could keep in contact with you concerning business matters only and I receive what I rank right up there with pornography from you. It is the worst betrayal of trust I have ever experienced with a business.

I don't know what my recourse is at this point, when a business uses my email for something other than it was intended, but I certainly intend to find out.

I consider this spam in the highest order. Needless to say, you should probably remove me from any of your lists, including the catalog list. If I hear anything from you or Lark in the Morning again...and I mean anything, including a response to this email, I will consider it harassment.

I think you are despicable.

[Dawntreader]

Thanks Ruthie and thanks for elevenses! I was hungry!

[SuziQ]

I bit the bullet and applied for admissions into college this morning. Hope there's no big rocks under this water I'm just diving into.

You'll do fine! You need to hook up with Carton253; she's in her forties as well, went back to college just after 9/11, and has been working hard. Haven't seen her online recently, but I think Corin and ksen have been in touch with her.

[Corin Stormhands]

We couldn't believe it; the cameraman caught the beginnings of the fire...

And weren't they there working on a documentary about fires in night clubs?

[rightwingreligiousfanatic]

You've just got to write them off for good.... What incredible fools they are!

[Corin Stormhands]

The handwriting recognition is actually pretty good, and then there's also speech recognition too.

Actually, the handwriting is one of the reasons we need a laptop. But we probably will look at the voice recognition. That's just a software issue...right?

[2Jedismom]

Should I send my scathing reply or just unsubscribe?

I'm so mad I can't see straight.

[Alkhin]

OOOOOOOOO!!! I love it!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm jealous cause I can't put MY name to it...

aww hell, do it anyway.

You are SO right...they are despicable!

[rightwingreligiousfanatic]

what is a funkle? I never did get that.... 5 successive posts from the same poster... (talkin to yourself)...

[rightwingreligiousfanatic]

Oh, definitely send the scathing reply! They need to know how offensive this is.... Consider it a mini-FReep ;^)

[HairOfTheDog]

The funny thing about that speach is that I watched it live.... and it was the most rambling, incoherent speach ever delivered. This may have been what he wrote, but he spent most of his time talking about missing the Grand Old Opry.

[HairOfTheDog]

Speak does not become speach? NO! - it becomes Speech! - forgive me for not grasping our language.

[carton253]

Smeagol is around, sneaking here and sneaking there...

[ecurbh]

Definitely send it.

[Alkhin]

YES SEND IT!! THEY NEED TO KNOW.

Hair, did you say Sean Astin was in Texas now??? I am at the library at the moment, and havent had a chance to go back and read earlier posts...

[Overtaxed]

Who is Lark in the Morning? I always bounce email whose sender(s) I don't recognize.

[SuziQ]

OK here's the review. I forgot that I'm registered there, but prolly not everyone is!! As I said, the reviewer was really 'snipppy' about the movie! Hope the formatting holds in the transfer to posting.

---

February 21, 2003
Gory, Glory Hallelujah
By STEPHEN HOLDEN


Gods and Generals," a lumpy three-and-a-half-hour glob of Civil War history, occupies a narrow but self-important cinematic genre that might be called American History Pageant. As it follows more than two years of Civil War strife, from early 1861 through 1863, the film sustains a tone of grave, high-minded seriousness.

This is history with a capital H; therefore no humor or spontaneous passion is permitted to leak through the solemnity. Panoramic, meticulously reconstructed battle sequences are interspersed with long-winded reflections by legendary historic figures musing in ministerial tones. Speeches that cry out for abbreviation are dragged out to their final, redundant flourishes. The only villains in a movie that portrays the military brass on both sides as staunchly heroic are three Confederate deserters.

Nobility is the official sentiment that washes through "Gods and Generals" like a purifying bleach. When wounded soldiers die, they pass into the great beyond with little fuss, their eyes turned expectantly toward heaven. The survivors grieve in discreetly choked sobs, comforted by the certainty that their departed loved ones are reclining with the angels. War may be hell (and in fairness to the movie, its battle scenes are moderately gory), but "Gods and Generals" makes going to war feel like going to church.

The movie is the prequel to "Gettysburg," an even longer 1993 film (and subsequent television mini-series) overseen, as is this one, by Ted Turner; he also makes cameo appearances in both. Here he joins Confederate soldiers in a rollicking sing-along of "Bonnie Blue Flag."

Both films were written and directed by Ronald F. Maxwell and adapted from a sequence of Civil War books begun by Michael Shaara, whose 1974 novel, "The Killer Angels," became the movie "Gettsysburg." Since Shaara's death in 1988, his work has been carried on by his son, Jeff, whose novel "Gods and Generals" was published seven years ago.

Although the two movies share the same epic ambitions and majestic visual sweep, something has gone terribly wrong in the decade separating them. "Gods and Generals" carries the earlier film's tendencies toward ponderous sermonizing to ludicrous extremes. At the same time, it lacks its forerunner's grasp of the flow of history. Events are confusingly piled onto one other, often with too many distracting details. (For no apparent reason other than to flaunt its scholarship, the movie lists the names of actual brigades as they go into battle.) And just when it seems about to gel as a narrative, the film has a way of taking a tangent to rope in subsidiary characters, who subsequently disappear. (Maybe, in the inevitable extended mini-series format, we will see more of them.)

The film's biggest structural problem is its unwieldy time frame. Where "Gettysburg" focused on a battle that lasted three and a half days, "Gods and Generals" encompasses three major Civil War conflicts, all in Virginia: the first battle of Bull Run, the battle of Fredericksburg (in which successive waves of Union troops were beaten back by entrenched Confederate forces) and the battle of Chancellorsville.

It was at Chancellorsville that the victorious Confederate general Stonewall Jackson (Stephen Lang) was accidentally wounded by his own troops. He died of pneumonia eight days later. Typical of the movie's lack of editorial discretion is the way it lingers by his deathbed for an excruciatingly dull 20-minute farewell.

Robert Duvall's soft-spoken portrayal of the Confederate commander Robert E. Lee gets special star billing, but it is Mr. Lang's fiery-eyed Jackson who dominates the film. Even though "Gods and Generals" worships Jackson's heavy-bearded gravitas, he comes across as a bully and a religious fanatic prating endlessly about "God's will." The nadir of the film is a grotesquely sentimental episode in which Jackson, who has just learned of a little girl's death from scarlet fever, breaks down weeping in front of his soldiers. An outpouring intended to humanize the character comes across as a grandstanding gesture of imperial self-pity.

The biblical cadences of Jackson's and Lee's speeches are augmented by a turgid, Americana-flavored score (by John Frizzell and Randy Edelman) that plays almost continuously throughout the movie. The doughy amalgam of oratory and quasi-symphonic bombast that makes heavy-handed use of a chorus produces the sinking sense of being trapped at an endless memorial service.

The religiosity of the rhetoric may be authentic, but its relentlessness portrays the Confederate cause as a holy war. At the same time, the movie's undiluted adulation of Lee's and Jackson's machismo appears to put it on the Confederate side. "Gods and Generals" goes out of its way to follow the example of "Gone With the Wind" in sanitizing the South's treatment of African-Americans. Its one-sided vision shows freed and about-to-be-freed slaves cleaving to their benign white masters and loyally serving the Confederate army.

About an hour into the film, "Gods and Generals" belatedly tries to balance the moral ledger by bringing back Lt. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels), the virtuous Union leader who was the shining sage of "Gettysburg." A Maine college professor who gave up a promising academic career to enlist in the army, Chamberlain delivers the movie's sharpest diatribe against slavery in a speech in which he calls its abolition a cause worth dying for. But Mr. Daniels, who has gained a double chin since "Gettysburg," has shed his luminosity. Next to his Confederate foes, he comes across as a bloated, ineffectual wimp.

It is only when "Gods and Generals" holds its tongue that its virtues begin to emerge. Those strengths are primarily technical and scholarly and should delight Civil War buffs. The movie, which opens today nationwide, was beautifully photographed in various locations around Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia, and in certain scenes you can almost taste the nip of frost in the air. The populous, precisely choreographed battle scenes, which use 7,500 Civil War re-enactors, transport you directly to the front lines of a conflict whose mid-19th-century rules of combat bring an antiquated code of manners to a barbaric enterprise. Back in the era when soldiers faced each other eye to eye, you are reminded, war could still be viewed as a gloriously heroic blood sport.

"Gods and Generals" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has extended, gory battle scenes.

GODS AND GENERALS

Produced and directed by Ronald F. Maxwell; written by Mr. Maxwell, based on the book by Jeff Shaara; director of photography, Kees Van Oostrum; edited by Corky Ehlers; music by John Frizzell and Randy Edelman; production designer, Michael Z. Hanan; visual effects producer, Thomas G. Smith; released by Ted Turner Pictures and Warner Brother Pictures. Running time: 225 minutes, with an intermission. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Jeff Daniels (Lt. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain), Stephen Lang (Gen. Stonewall Jackson), Robert Duvall (Gen. Robert E. Lee), Mira Sorvino (Fanny Chamberlain), Kevin Conway (Sgt. Buster Kilrain), C. Thomas Howell (Sgt. Thomas Chamberlain) and Frankie Faison (Jim Lewis).