Black Gate

Still reading and writing about Numenor, and Khazad-dum, for upcoming essays, so Talking The Rings of Power takes the week off. The Downfall of Numenor, the new book put together by Brian Sibley, is pretty good. The narrative flow works, and Alan Lee’s sketches are really nice. If you liked his Sketchbooks for The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit, you’ll definitely like the volume and quality of these sketches.

And, I switched gears a little bit and I pulled Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun off my shelf. I’d not read any of his ‘epic poem’ books before. The lecture in the front, from one of his Oxford classes, was quite interesting.

So, it’s another What I’ve Been Watching. And along with some stuff with my son, I’ve been jumping around – good and bad.

TULSA KING

Gonna start with a brand new show. Episode two aired just last night, and I haven’t even seen it yet. Sylvester Stallone is a NY gangster who just finishes a 25-year prison term in the show’s opening scene. He ‘took one for the team,’ as it were. And he’s rewarded by being sent off to set up a mob operation in Tulsa. Which is basically like being banished to Siberia. I really didn’t spoil anything for you. This is the opening setup of the show.

Stallone is TERRIFIC in the part. I had not expectations either way, and he hits a grand slam. He’s a NYC lifetime mob guy, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Yeah… There is a ton of funny in this show. Not stupid, Adam Sandler ‘funny.’ But humor within the context of Stallone taking over the town.

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The Frighteners 15th Anniversary Blu-Ray

Read Part I: The Real-Life Inspiration, and Part 2: Humor & Horror Examples + A Recap.

When I sat down to write about The Frighteners, I found myself writing around the “problem/s” with the movie. At first I thought it didn’t have enough plot, but it has plot points galore, and while every character seemed to be a trope or stereo-type, there were lots of hints about the depths of these characters and their relationships. I deleted a fair bit of what I wrote, after I realized that I wasn’t finding the problem. So I watched it a third time. It was like scales fell from my eyes. I think I understand Peter Jackson’s formula for the film, and having clued into that, I liked it ever so much more.

The Frighteners is two films sharing the same celluloid, but paying little or no attention to the other. The scary ghost story is unaware of the broad comedy, and vice versa.

In this world, average humans and average ghosts share the same locations and space, but are generally unaware of each other. The living are busy with their stuff, and the ghosts are tightly focused on their own problems (like avoiding bully ghosts). There are a scarce few ghosts, and even fewer humans, who are aware or care about what’s going on with the denizens on the other side of the veil, even if they’re standing physical elbow to ghostly jowl on the street corner waiting for the light to change.

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