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Dec. 26th, 2003
Boxing Day
Dec. 26th, 2003 12:21 pm
December 26 is a holiday in Canada, one on which many people traditionally go looking for good sales. For my family it was always a continuation of Christmas.
On Boxing Day my mother's family always gathered at Nana and Bumpa's house for its most important reunion of the year. My mother was the eldest of six children: Donna, Gayle, Carol, Tom, Janet and Nancy. While I was growing up, all of us lived within 45 minutes of Windsor, except for Nancy, who married an Army man and ended up in Nova Scotia. I had 18 cousins on that side. I was in exactly the middle position: number 10 of 19. Not only that, all but six of the cousins were within two years of my age. It must have been bedlam. Mostly we were confined to the basement. One year when most of us were about three feet high, older cousins Cathy and Brenda squeezed us all into the alcove under the stairs and told us scary stories they had learned at camp that summer. In later years, groups of teenagers would disappear to one of the upstairs bedrooms.
My great-grandparents, Dommy and Poppy, would be there, and sometimes several of my mother's aunts, uncles and cousins who I don't remember. Many of my mother's relatives smoked, so the basement would dissolve into a smelly haze of noise and junk food. The relatives held their liquor well, so although many relatives would drink, few were ever drunk. The main sign of inebriation was the rising level of noise and changing tone of humour. Several of the husbands would have a game of one-upmanship to see who could make the best fun of his wife. My father would never do that. My parents drank little and didn't smoke. Dad once admitted to me he had trouble relating to male humour. He must have spent so much time in the company of my mother's family that he thought all men were male chauvanists like Bumpa, Tom and the men my aunts married. It was a closely-knit family, still very Irish in its temperament, despite the blood having thinned in Ontario for 200 years.
Every Christmas the aunts would draw names for gifts. I was more serious and creative than most of my cousins, and my name was a favourite with Gayle and Carol, who would sometimes trade for it. I could count on receiving some great art and craft supplies. Best of all was the year Aunt Carol gave me a lizard.
Nana was a dithering, ineffectual person. Bumpa was domineering and argumentive. His three oldest daughters often quarreled with him.
My brothers were the eldest cousins by several years. As they left for university, married and started to have lives and inlaws of their own, Mom used the excuse to stop attending Boxing Day parties on a regular basis, preferring to spend what time she could with her own children. Every year Bumpa used the same guilt trip on Mom: "This might be my last Boxing Day."
Bumpa died of cancer in 1989, when most of the cousins were in their 20s and had moved away from Windsor. Aunt Gayle also died of cancer in about 1991. The Boxing Day gatherings ended. Nana is 91 and lives in her own townhouse in a seniors' community. She is fairly healthy, but I have only seen her twice in the past seven years. When I came out, Mom didn't want me to tell her relatives I was gay, so I stopped attending family gatherings. I have told Aunt Carol and her sons, Jim and John, but the rest do not know except by suspicion, and I don't care. I have little in common with them.
Today I have to write an article for Ecology at Suite101, so we're having a quiet day. The lamb bone is on the stove slowly filling the place with Scotch broth fragrance. Maybe when I finish writing, we'll find something to do.
We could even finish our game of Risk: The Lord of the Rings. This was the girls' Christmas gift to me, which they must have purchased with their own money. They know how I love board games.
For now they seem content to lounge around, Marian reading and Brenna playing quietly with Lego or making pipe cleaner figures. It is a pleasant, lazy day with sunshine at the window.
The girls and I came home a few minutes ago from ROTK, their second viewing and my first. We got into the theatre short minutes before it started and had to sit near the bottom righthand corner. I wasn't too concerned about that since they had seen it before, and I will likely see it again.
My feelings are mixed. It entertained, sometimes even provoked awe, but the story was mostly carried by association with a piece of great literature. On its own the movie fails to evoke the depths of character and psychological themes that Tolkien so masterfully explored.
Most disappointing of all is Gollum's personality. In the books he is complex, ambiguous and sympathetic, embodying Bilbo and Frodo's dark side. He has a lonely hobbit heart that craves nothing more than a life's supply of raw fisheses, but which has been overcome by the lure of power, something we can all relate to. In the movie he is nothing more than pure greed and hate.
Comparing the movie and book is inevitable, but it is also unfair. At the point where I realized Gollum had no compassion for Frodo, as he does in the book, I realized I had to stop comparing and get on with enjoying.
So I tried. But much of the movie was carried along by endless, sensational battle scenes. Several of the most suspenseful episodes were designed to exploit vertigo, a sensation which mostly made me uncomfortable. Special effects and visual thrills are great, but when the screen has nothing else to offer for minutes at a time, I resent spending so much money to take myself and my kids. Quite apart from knowing how the book goes, I would have preferred a movie that stopped the crunching, maiming and killing for even five minutes and instead gave the cast more time to act out complex and fascinating characters like Denethor and Eowyn.
Even the action itself was unimpressive compared with the superior FOTR. The scene in which Arwen and Frodo were pursued by the Black Riders was visually the most stunning action sequence I can recall from any movie. It relied on dramatic filming rather than special effects. ROTK offered nothing to compare to that. Obviously it needed to exceed the visual impact of the previous two movies, but it only succeeded in going over the top. Most of the action was digitally manipulated to such an extent that I could not for instant suspend disbelief.
ROTK has its moments. Most stunning for me was the one in which an unexpected character sings with accompanying scenes from a battle charge. It gave me goose bumps and a lump in my throat.
I doubt that a better job could have been done of translating the books to film. The big marvel is that it has even been done, evoking some of the story's richness. For the sake of that story I will probably go see the movie again. But far from being one of the best movies I have ever seen, it is an average movie, enjoyable chiefly as an interpretation of Tolkien's masterpiece.
My feelings are mixed. It entertained, sometimes even provoked awe, but the story was mostly carried by association with a piece of great literature. On its own the movie fails to evoke the depths of character and psychological themes that Tolkien so masterfully explored.
Most disappointing of all is Gollum's personality. In the books he is complex, ambiguous and sympathetic, embodying Bilbo and Frodo's dark side. He has a lonely hobbit heart that craves nothing more than a life's supply of raw fisheses, but which has been overcome by the lure of power, something we can all relate to. In the movie he is nothing more than pure greed and hate.
Comparing the movie and book is inevitable, but it is also unfair. At the point where I realized Gollum had no compassion for Frodo, as he does in the book, I realized I had to stop comparing and get on with enjoying.
So I tried. But much of the movie was carried along by endless, sensational battle scenes. Several of the most suspenseful episodes were designed to exploit vertigo, a sensation which mostly made me uncomfortable. Special effects and visual thrills are great, but when the screen has nothing else to offer for minutes at a time, I resent spending so much money to take myself and my kids. Quite apart from knowing how the book goes, I would have preferred a movie that stopped the crunching, maiming and killing for even five minutes and instead gave the cast more time to act out complex and fascinating characters like Denethor and Eowyn.
Even the action itself was unimpressive compared with the superior FOTR. The scene in which Arwen and Frodo were pursued by the Black Riders was visually the most stunning action sequence I can recall from any movie. It relied on dramatic filming rather than special effects. ROTK offered nothing to compare to that. Obviously it needed to exceed the visual impact of the previous two movies, but it only succeeded in going over the top. Most of the action was digitally manipulated to such an extent that I could not for instant suspend disbelief.
ROTK has its moments. Most stunning for me was the one in which an unexpected character sings with accompanying scenes from a battle charge. It gave me goose bumps and a lump in my throat.
I doubt that a better job could have been done of translating the books to film. The big marvel is that it has even been done, evoking some of the story's richness. For the sake of that story I will probably go see the movie again. But far from being one of the best movies I have ever seen, it is an average movie, enjoyable chiefly as an interpretation of Tolkien's masterpiece.