Peter Jackson

I appreciate artful film making. The clever shot, the subtle camera work, all these thing contribute to making a good movie. But sometimes even the most artistic director can go overboard. And in my opinion, no modern day film maker is guilty of this than Peter Jackson.

I understand that the Lord of the Ring books were extremely detailed, and that to overlook any of them was to risk alienating a portion of the movie-going audience. It's the same problem that any director responsible for adapting any staple of pop culture, be it book, video game, or anything. But like the 'Harry Potter' movies, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet in order to keep your movies watchable.

The Lord of the Ring movies were not horrible. They had great shots and a script that bore a remarkable resemblance to the original work. But they weren't perfect, and not especially deserving of the Oscars they were awarded. Each had their own particular problems, but the one they shared was length. Cutting even 30 minutes from each of the films would have sped up the pace and made the films more engaging, more exciting, more invigorating. Instead, the first one moved so slowly that I fell asleep in the middle of it, not once, not twice, but five times before a friend of mine had to jab me in the shoulder with a pencil to keep me awake.

'King Kong' kept my attention much better - at least, for the first hour and a half. It had some corny and often contradictory dialogue ("an island never before seen by man; the ruins of an ancient civilization." If it's the ruins of an ancient civilization, then obviously it was seen by man at some time or another.) In spite of that, I hardly noticed that so much time had gone by (the pairing of Jack Black and Colin Hanks just has that effect on me.) But then the film would go through spurts of indulgent special effects followed by empty lags that seemed to last forever. By the time you get to Kong on the top of the Empire State Building, a scene which Jackson said made him cry when he saw the original (made in 1933), you want to cry too - of boredom. By then, the film has ceased being about the plot at all, and is rather all about the special effects. The underlying theme of fearing and hating what we don't understand has taken a back seat to whatever magic Jackson can put on the screen. And the effects are certainly spectacular. But they're not enough to sustain a movie for three and a half hours.

Every time I hear Jackson is directing a new movie, my first impulse is to get excited. After all, the man is an artist who can make a camera shot look as picturesque as a Monet. But I always have to temper these thoughts with what Jackson has proven to me to be his fatal flaw; overindulgence. If any singe moment in the film can be overdone, stretched to the breaking point and drained of its feeling, Jackson is sure to do it. A part of me can't wait for 'The Lovely Bones' to come out (tentatively scheduled for March 13, 2009 release). Another part of me knows that seeing it might ruin the story for me forever.