Letterbox’d Litter #6
By: James Powers
Tags: Film, Film Criticism, Review, Animation, Marvel

Letterbox’d Litter #6

The Hobbit (the old one) / Iron Man 2 / Baskin

I watched this movie many times as a kid, which I think explains a lot. It’s very pretty, very strange, very ’70s. Per their usual MO, Rankin and Bass bring their weird little vision to life with painterly animation, wonderful voice performances and unsettling character design pretty much across the board.

Thanks to the demands of broadcast schedules and kids’ attention spans, it blasts through Tolkien’s story at a bonkers pace. Don’t look to it for a religious translation of the book; instead this is more of a… funky aesthetic reprocessing of it. Sometimes to great effect.

For example, Andy Serkis was great and all, but for sheer creepiness he didn’t get within a stone’s throw of Theodore Gottlieb’s frog-faced cave-lake-lurking Gollum. That whole sequence is spooky as hell; the random sung riddle about darkness makes my skin crawl every time. Just one of many things in this movie that left my six-year-old self a bit more screwed-up.

But for all its terrors, there’s a real sweetness here as well. Can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s something to do with Thorin’s words to Bilbo at the end, and Glenn Yarborough’s warbly anthem woven throughout.

That all being said — I’ve had the mfing goblins’ song popping into my head repeatedly ever since I watched this. When will it stop. 3/5

Me: So this was written by Justin Theroux.

Also Me: Hold up hold up — this was written by Justin Theroux??

Me: … yes, James. This was written by Justin Theroux.

Also Me: Well! Butter my butt and call me a biscuit!

(bemusedly, to self)

This was written by Justin Theroux…

Anyway, my flabbergastery at that little revelation aside, this movie is not very good. Not as good as the first, as someone else has probably said somewhere.

I mean it’s fun, don’t get me wrong. But fun in a way that neatly highlights my beef with the Marvel brand. The performances are universally winning, the dialogue snappy and enjoyable, the effects and production design dazzling.

But all of this is offered as a kind of cocksure smokescreen to obscure some frankly ridiculous storytelling, and seasoned with perfunctory lip service toward moral and political tH3mEs as well as some cringy portrayals of women / people with foreign accents.

At its best, the Marvel formula offers license for mythic, boisterous, freewheeling escapism. But just as often, it tries to legitimize lazy writing (sorry Justin 😭) with a $200 million swagger. This is far from Marvel’s best; in fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s, like, fine I guess. 2.5/5

Ok, I’m probably not gonna be able to sleep until I get my thoughts down about this movie. Baskin blew my mind.

I never — like, never — bail on a movie part-way through because of its content, but I was on the razor’s edge of doing so with this one. Coming from a horror fan, I know that sounds like a recommendation, but I’m not sure that it is. Maybe I should have bailed, I dunno. The fact that Baskin ultimately left me exhilarated rather than nauseated is a bit disturbing to me.

This film is really depraved, and really effective. I could break down a lot of the technical reasons for why I think it works as well as it does, but I’ll skip that for now. There’s also some interesting symbolic and thematic stuff going on, pretty near the surface, but I won’t get into that either.

Suffice to say that, as a devout Catholic, I think this film paints an extraordinarily vivid and convincing picture of hell. Jesus said that “the kingdom of Heaven is among you,” suggesting that heaven is less a physical place than it is a state of being. And as Baskin’s transfixing villain puts it, the reverse is also true. 4/5