Battles in Crimson

Okay, anybody who’s read this blog for any length of time knows what an unrepentant geek I am when it comes to Tolkien and the movies.  I still remember sitting next to a heating vent on cold December mornings before junior high school marveling at the world unfurling for me as I read first The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  When you put this fascination up on the big screen as perfectly as Peter Jackson has done over the last fifteen years then you will know that I was going to see The Hobbit:  The Battle of Five Armies as soon as possible.  That possible was last night and I was not disappointed, even my wife (who looks fairly askance at my sword and sorcery fascinations) thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

The Hobbit will always suffer when compared to The Lord of the Rings because the story is so much smaller in scope, despite Jackson’s best efforts.  I was initially leery when Jackson started making the movies because so many poor versions were inflicted upon us in prior decades.  He hooked me with the very first scene in The Fellowship of the Ring with an immense battle scene where Sauron loses the one ring.  I was a Lieutenant Colonel assigned to the Pentagon at the time and I found myself sneaking in multiple viewings by myself at a movie theater on the way home.  My wife began to wonder why my work hours seem to spike three hours later until I confessed.

I say all this to lead into a description of this latest (and last) movie that takes us to Middle Earth.  The battle scenes comprise fully half of the entire movie and are unremittingly exciting.  Jackson has come to rely a little too heavily on his CGI but seeing the five armies assemble and then go at it was worth the wait.  I think Jackson kept Thorin Oakenshield in his A-Hole stage a little too long but he also wisely went to Martin Freeman’s heartfelt Bilbo every time some humanity and common sense needed injecting. There was so much going on in so many different locations but Jackson expertly wove an understandable journey for the viewer.  I loved the movie and can’t wait to watch all six of the two trilogies in one sitting (probably have to wait for my wife to be out of town for that).  I’m probably going to be sneaking out again to see this epic on the big screen some more; told you I was unrepentant.

It’s been a couple days so you know another Travis McGee fell.  This one, Freefall in Crimson, has Travis getting back to his salvage profession after the bloody revenge he exacted in the last book.  A friend asks him to look into the mysterious death of his estranged father which leads Travis down one of John D. MacDonald’s typical rabbit holes where he finds another truly evil sociopath.  MacDonald re-connected with a number of characters from the earlier books in the series which was welcome since I’ve spent the last month with them – like seeing old friends again.  McGee might have found another lady love along the way as well and she’s still breathing at the end of the book – hope springs eternal.

As always with a McGee book I leave you with some of MacDonald’s words.  Here McGee is cogitating about returning to his adventurous “salvage “ business in Freefall in Crimson:  “I told myself I had lived in a house of many rooms, but there had been a fire, and it was all charred to hell except for a small attic bedroom.  A bed, a chair, a table, and a window.  And if anybody wanted to take a shot, I would happily stand in the window.  But you can’t cut your life back like some kind of ornamental shrub.  I couldn’t put the old white horse out to pasture, hock the tin armor, stand the lance in the corner of the barn.  For a little while, yes.  For the healing time.  It was more that economics.  I could tell myself I needed the money.  And I did.  More than the money, I needed the sense of being myself, full sized, undwarfed by my disasters.”