Top Five Casting Decisions: The Lord of the Rings

One more Lord of the Rings movies post for good measure.  The acting is one of the many things that make this trilogy for me, with pretty much every actor bringing it hardcore.  In a franchise filled with a lot of spot-on casting, these are my favorites.

Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf

This one’s a no-brainer.  McKellen is Gandalf, plain and simple.  He handles the wizard’s mischievous twinkle and powerful gravitas in equal measure.  His genuine appreciation for hobbits is absolutely lovely, and even when he’s just delivering exposition, he can bring it like nobody’s business.

Andy Serkis as Gollum

The start of a beautiful friendship, one might say, between Andy Serkis and motion-capture performance.  In essence, the CGI becomes incredibly high-tech makeup that merely makes Serkis look like Gollum, while it’s his creeping physicality, his otherworldly voice, and his unhinged quality that really imbue the character with life.  At the time, it was a technological milestone, but it’s also just a damn good piece of acting.

Sean Astin as Samwise Gamgee

For my money, Sam is the absolute heart of the trilogy, and Astin’s open, honest performance is note-perfect.  He’s very affecting as this hobbit who doesn’t quite recognize how brave he is as he gladly goes to the ends of the world to keep his friend safe.  As Sam, Astin brings humor, action, and emotion as needed, with tremendous warmth throughout.

Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn

I feel like it’s maybe a little harder to pinpoint exactly what it is here, but Mortensen perfectly captures Aragorn for me.  It’s a fairly subtle performance that finds the balance between Aragorn’s reluctance to be the leader others want him to be and his natural tendency toward heroism.  I especially love the easy, offhand way he slips into Elvish when he’s talking to elves; it’s a little thing that adds a lot to his character and his background, and Mortensen plays it just right.

Cate Blanchett as Galadriel

It took me a while to decide on my fifth, because there are just so many spot-on performances here.  In the end, though, I had to give it up for the Lady Galadriel herself.  Blanchett’s appearances in the franchise are brief, but she makes the most of every moment, and when she has her big scene with Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring, she knocks it out of the park.  It would take some doing at this point to convince me that she’s not an elf.

Favorite Characters: Karen Page (Daredevil)

It took me a while to appreciate Karen, and I really don’t think it should have.  I feel like I initially had a tendency with her character to take a few details about her and fill in a type, when in truth, there’s more to her than that, and as I’ve come to understand that, it’s greatly increased my enjoyment of her as a character (Karen-related spoilers.)

I don’t know why, in Daredevil’s pilot, the first impression I made of Karen was “damsel.”  It’s true that we meet her shaking and terrified, and that Nelson and Murdock saves her legally (from a crime she was framed for with evidence so damning no other defense attorneys would touch her) while Daredevil saves her physically (from a hired goon sent to her apartment to kill her,) and that she’s thin, blond, and softspoken.  However, it’s also very true that the only reason she’s framed for murder – way more than enough to throw anyone off their usual game – is because she uncovered proof of her company’s wrongdoing and the only reason she’s even at her apartment when she gets attacked is because she’s retrieving the flashdrive of evidence against the company.  If she needs saving, it’s because her enemies are so much powerful than she is but she still takes them on anyway.

For me, Karen’s most defining traits are her determined pursuit of the truth and her tireless work ethic for obtaining it.  These qualities serve her well working at Nelson and Murdock fighting on behalf of their clients to uncover the corruptions in the system that have let them down.  In season 2, she makes an intriguing shift from dogged legal assistant to investigative journalist.  It all starts with the Punisher:  first looking for information simply about who he is, then the trauma that shaped him into who he’s become, then evidence that can be used in his favor for his legal defense, and finally, proof that someone else is setting him up to answer for their crimes.  She finds enormous, hidden truths and risks her safety on countless occasions in tremendous ways, all in her quest to understand this person and what is going on around him.  In her investigation, she proves supremely competent, with a fine head for conjecture and seeing which threads are the right ones to pull on.  Foggy sees how skilled she is and asks if she’s ever considered law school herself.

I also like the interesting evolution of Karen’s moral considerations.  Despite the way Matt views her, consciously or otherwise, as a Good Girl (especially compared to Elektra,) Karen is no stranger to darkness.  She gives the first impression of being someone Hell’s Kitchen will eat for breakfast, but she knows how to make hard choices and has gotten her hands very dirty to protect her and her own.  That’s left her questioning who she is, what’s right, and what’s wrong.  While Matt wrestles with similar issues (as does the show altogether,) he actively trained and prepared for the dark path he’s gone down, whereas Karen has just sort of found herself on it and is trying to reevaluate what she’s capable of and where her lines are.  It leads to the great interactions between her and the Punisher.  On one level, she sees how he does terrible things (murdering gangsters) for what he feels is a just cause (avenging his family and preventing them from hurting anyone else,) and she wonders if her own dark actions can be justified.  On another, she sees how the man who only kills “bad people” spares her, and she wonders if she deserves it.  Neat stuff to explore here.

A Wrinkle in Time (1962)

I’ve been meaning for a while to do a nostalgia tour through some of my favorite genre fiction from my younger days, and where better to start than with Madeleine L’Engle’s time quartet?  I still have such vivid memories of my mom reading all the books in this series to me when I saw a kid, but especially this one.  As early as the first chapter, I knew there was something special here:  “Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”  Yes!!

Meg Murry, awkward tween extraordinaire, has a lot of anger to direct everywhere – at her own dissatisfaction with herself, at the neighbors who sneer at her little brother Charles Wallace (who they call an idiot, when he’s actually a genius,) at the world that’s taken her father from her with no hint of what happened to him.  Her world changes late one night, however, when she’s introduced to Charles Wallace’s new friends, the mysterious Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which.  The three ladies prove far more than meets the eye, and they talk Meg and Charles Wallace – along with Calvin, another new friend – on a fantastical journey to recover their father and to battle the very forces of evil itself.

Reading it again as an adult, there are a few bumpy spots that don’t escape my notice.  There are points where the “lessons” are pretty fairly telegraphed, and it makes me chuckle that the ultimate force of pure evil in the universe, as expressed in this Cold War-era book, basically looks like communism.  (Yes, it’s implied that the Black Thing encourages moral ills of all sorts, but Camazotz, the most dramatic example of a planet that’s “fallen” to the Black Thing, is a classic dystopian communism metaphor packaged in a way that’s accessible for kid readers.)

But any complaints here are minor.  I love this book.  All the characters are wonderful.  I’ve written before about the deep, beautiful relationship between Meg and Charles Wallace, who both dazzle in their own ways individually and together.  I love Meg for her faults, and I love Charles Wallace for his otherworldly knowing and his manner that’s somehow totally precocious but 100% natural at the same time.  Calvin is such an earnest picture of kindness and hope, and the Mrs. W’s, L’Engle’s own weïrd sisters, are each shiningly unique, at once absurd and tremendous.  The book is littered with golden character moments, perfect lines and little details that fit each like a glove.

The characters, for me, are the main attraction here, enough that I would probably love a story about them no matter what they were doing, but in this case, they’ve got a pretty darn good plot to work with as well.  Although the whole idea of tessering is mostly similar to opening worm holes, the way it’s done and described in the book is entirely its own, and the different worlds, peoples, and creatures explored here are all really neat.  And really, the ending can’t be beat.  I love A Swiftly Tilting Planet almost as much as this one, but in the end, I always keep coming back to A Wrinkle in Time, and it’s in no small part due to the pure beauty of that ending.

Warnings

Scary moments for kids and thematic elements.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)

Buster in a musical, people!  Not that he does much in the way of actual singing – I think he sing-talks about one line, and that’s it.  (For further reference, he also appeared in a national tour of Once Upon a Mattress in the early ‘60s, playing the mute king.)  A very so-so adaptation of this Stephen Sondheim show, and Buster’s role is pretty small, but he also gets in some good laughs.

In ancient Rome, the slave Pseudolus concocts a plan to win his freedom.  In exchange for his emancipation, Pseudolus agrees to help Hero, his young master, woo the lovely Philia, whom the lad has seen in the neighboring brothel from his window.  Naturally, this has to be as complicated as humanly possible, and the resulting scheme involves multiple instances of disguises, mistaken identities, a fake soothsayer, a made-up plague, and a ship to Crete.  Will the young lovers win out, and will Pseudolus achieve his dream of being free?  Come on, what do you think?

The comedy is amusing in a sort of quaint-naughty, cheesy way.  The silly jokes come fast and furious (“Is it contagious?!”  “Have you ever seen a plague that wasn’t?” – that kind of thing,) and the farcical plot is good for a laugh.  The cast is also entertaining; notable faces include Zero Mostel as Pseudolus and a young Michael Crawford (this even predates Hello, Dolly! by a few years) as Hero.  Also?  Third Doctor Jon Pertwee has a minor role as a ship captain.  Seeing him puts a smile on my face.

As an oddball comedy, I’d say it’s pretty decent, but as an adaptation of a Sondheim show, it doesn’t measure up, mainly because it has so few songs in it.  I’d say maybe a third of the show’s songs are present here, and a lot of the cut ones are great.  We’ve got no “Free,” no “Love, I Hear,” no “Impossible.”  To me, what’s the point of doing a Sondheim movie with hardly any music?  Tsk, tsk.

But Buster, as briefly as he’s used, is quite funny.  He plays Erronius, Hero’s long-absent neighbor (that’s neighbor on the other side – not the brothel owner) who’s recently returned from an unsuccessful quest to find his children, stolen in infancy by pirates.  The main humor is milked from Erronius’s terrible eyesight, and there’s something about Buster’s matter-of-fact delivery that makes pretty obvious jokes so entertaining.  He also gets in on a little physical comedy toward the end, and for whatever reason, his delivery of “those filthy pirates!” is an absolute hoot.

Warnings

Lots of suggestiveness (including a lot of fairly tame prostitution) and silly takes on serious topics.

A Few Notes about Companion Deaths (Doctor Who)

Spoilers, obviously.

Death has been a possible companion ending dating back to the First Doctor era, where short-term companions Katarina and Sara Kingdom are both killed during the events of “The Daleks’ Master Plan.”  But in general, that’s not how it usually goes.  Companions decide to go home, or they fall in love and decide to get married, or they decide to stay somewhere else to help the people deal with the fallout of their final adventure, or they decide it’s all gotten to be too much for them, or tragic circumstances make the decision for them and force them away from the Doctor.  Very few companions die.

However, that number has definitely increased in recent years – with caveats.  During Moffat’s tenure, the go-to exit has been “death, but…”  I suppose it should’ve been obviously early on, what with the many deaths of Rory Williams, but looking back now on Moffat’s time on the show, Rory was just the beginning.  In fact, nearly all of Moffat’s major companions have exited the show via some qualified form of death. 

First, of course, is Amy and Rory.  They’re the most “definitely dead” of the bunch, although their deaths are the least traumatic – both are sent back in time by Weeping Angels and die of old age before the present.  So, they both lead long, apparently fulfilling lives together, but as it now stands, they’re both dead.  Then there’s Clara, killed by a quantum shade as a result of her hubris.  It’s a harsher, more painful death, with a long build-up as she realizes what’s going to happen and that there’s no way to stop it.  Of course, two episodes later, the Doctor does just that, sort of, getting the Time Lords to pull her out of her timestream at the moment of death.  She and the Doctor go their separate ways not too long after that, and while she’s still technically dead (for her, time is frozen before her final heartbeat,) she’s also capable of traveling anywhere in time and space with a TARDIS she happened to acquire and is also maybe kind of immortal(?) until she goes back to her moment of death.  Finally, we have Bill (this one is at least slightly tentative, since we don’t know what may be happening at Christmas and possibly beyond.)  Despite having the most horrific death yet – getting a hole blown through her torso and then being converted into a Cyberman – hers is also the most blatantly undone.  In the eleventh hour, Heather shows back up with her sentient-engine-oil powers (I have to describe it that way every time, because it gets no less insane) and completely handwaves away Bill’s Cyberness.  As it currently stands, Bill is definitely not dead, but she’s also not precisely human anymore.

(All of these, by the way, are prefaced by strong foreshadowing, either in the same episode, the previous episode, or a good chunk of the season leading up to their death.  By the time Bill’s the one saying, “Just promise you won’t get me killed,” it’s a wonder she’s not killed then and there by the falling anvils.)

It gets even crazier when you think about other major Moffat characters who get at least one “dead but not” experience on the show.  River is killed off in her first appearance, only to get uploaded into the Library (not to mention, most of her episodes take place earlier in her timeline.)  Strax is also killed in his first episode, only to pop up again a season later with virtually no reference as to how he’s alive again.  Jenny is murdered by the Whispermen, but Strax easily revives her, what?  Ten, fifteen minutes later?  Ashildr, of course, dies while fighting the Mire and is brought back by their medical repair technology, getting the full immortal treatment.  And Nardole’s first appearance features him getting his head cut off and attached to a giant robot, and when he shows up again, intact, in the following year’s Christmas special, there’s maybe one handwavy line about the Doctor “putting him back together.”  (There’s also Missy in “The Doctor Falls,” with her predecessor telling her she won’t be able to regenerate, and I think we all know that’s never gonna be true.)  All in all, I think that makes Vastra the only significant Moffat-era creation who’s never died or “died.”

A couple things about this.  First of all, it gets boring.  A character death, for my money, ought to be something significant, and in a show like this, used sparingly.  When nearly every character dies, it starts to feel repetitive.  There’s not a particular amount of surprise because a) again, foreshadowing, and b) that’s what they all do.  And more than that, with all this “dead but not” business, it gets pointless.  It’s the ultimate “have my cake and eat it too” narrative:  weep bitter, bitter tears over the poor, dead companion, but hey!  It’s all right!  Here they are again!  When everyone dies and then comes back, each death means less, because we know it’s not going to stick, and we may or may not even get an explanation as to why that horrible, heartwrenching, definitely-very-permanent death gets swept under the rug and completely forgotten about (not to mention, it takes away some of the specialness of the Doctor being able to come back from death through regeneration.)  With someone like Jack, who dies and is brought back, the reasons for his resurrection are made clear, and it continues to have lasting (very long-lasting) physical and psychological repercussions for him.  Here, everybody dies and comes back Just Because.

Chalk that up as another reason to look forward to series 11.  Hopefully, new showrunner Chris Chibnall (who handled Jack on Torchwood) will understand, first, that there are other ways for companions to leave the show, and second, that deaths cease to mean much if they refuse to stick.