The Lord of the Rings - Ralph Bakshi, 1978
I hadn't seen this movie since I was a kid. I was a huge fan of The Hobbit, one of the first like... non-kids books I ever read (I know it's kind of a kids book, but not compared to the other stuff I was reading, I was literally like 6 years old). I loved the Rankin-Bass movie, and I heard there was this big ol' sequel series, so I tried reading it... and gave up like 50 pages in.But I did also watch the movie! Rented from the old Hollywood Video we used to go to every friday. Ahh, good times. I remember that I didn't like it; thought it was really weird and bad, especially the rotoscoping.
Well, I must say that my opinion has changed somewhat in the intervening two decades, this movie fuckin' kicks ass. If you just accept it as a disjointed aesthetic object that is trying out a bunch of different techniques, and not just trying to tell the story, then it really clicks into place. The rotoscoping looks great, it allows for some really nice naturalistic bits of acting to be translated into the animation in a really cool way.
Also, incidentally, it is wild how many shots from this are straight-up lifted for the Jackson movies. Like damn, Bakshi should still be mad about it, I can't blame him.
The Moon is... the Sun's Dream - Park Chan-wook, 1992
Speaking of fascinating aesthetic objects, I really enjoyed watching this one. Sure, the plot doesn't make a lot of sense, and the disjointed narrative doesn't serve much purpose, but damn it's a nice movie to look at with your eyeballs. Maybe it's just my old vaporwave partisanship, but there's just a great texture to the whole thing.The plot is a real bog-standard noir affair, though it does have some odd dreamlike elements. Hearing on the Blank Check podcast that Park Chan-wook is a huge fan of Hitchcock really brought the whole thing into focus. It's less about the specific plot than the things he's doing with the frame and sense and time and whatnot, which is a lot of film school tricks but works out pretty well, honestly.
It really has the same feel as a lot of his later work, though obviously that's much better developed and deployed to a more clear purpose.
This movie has been unavailable for a long time, but now it's just up on youtube.
Trio - Park Chan-wook, 1997
Now this one was a real disappointment. It's just a fuckin' Pulp Fiction ripoff, they were dime-a-dozen in the late 90s. Apparently Park wanted to make something more along the lines of The Professional, but the studios wanted to make it more "commercial". You can really tell his heart isn't in it.The first like... half hour or so is pretty compelling. But once the crime spree gets going, it kinda just falls apart and limps towards a non-ending. I did enjoy the wild-eyed criminal guy, but it didn't make up for how lame the whole thing turned out.
This one is also just up on youtube!
Solaris - Gus Menary, 2023
Wait, there's a new version of Solaris, which was famously adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and infamously adapted by Steven Soderbergh in 2002!?No, it's a stage play! Over at the Seattle Center's own Book-It Theatre. I've been seeing all their plays for many years now, and they're... ehh... hit or miss, especially more recently.
To back up slightly, Book-It adapts books directly for the stage, often including more novelistic elements like first person narration as part of the script. When it works, it really works, and creates a kind of hypnotic effect where you feel like you are reading the book, just with more visual elements. It's a pretty small theater, but that only adds to the somewhat intimate nature of the whole affair.
During the pandemic, they shifted to doing audio dramas, which were pretty fun. Since they came back, they've been doing more... stage-y adaptations, kind of changing their approach. Eschewing the more direct quotations from the book, and making more direct changes to the text in order to better fit it to the stage.
This is one where it really works. They did an incredibly job adapting this classic sci-fi story, I absolutely loved it. It maintains a lot of the ambiguity of the original book, not hewing closely to either of the previous film adaptations. In fact, they deliberately designed the set and costumes to resemble more 80s and 90s dirty scifi, like The Thing or Alien, presumably to chart a different course, and avoid those comparisons.
There were a few effects, mostly in the form of video diaries from a deceased member of the station's crew, but they mostly got by on old fashioned stagecraft. There's nothing quite like going to live theater, experiencing people acting in person.
Highly recommended if you live in the Seattle area.