Extended Edition

Ahem: Movie Geek Rambling To Follow. Proceed At Your Own Risk.

I have just finished watching the extended edition of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. For those of you who haven’t been paying close attention, the Lord of the Rings movies were released in the theatre and on DVD in one version, and then later re-released in an “Extended Edition.” In the case of the first movie, “extended” means “thirty minutes longer,” bringing the total run time up to a whopping three hours and twenty-eight minutes.

I’m always interested in the various choices that are made in the theatrical release and subsequent director’s cut or extended editions of movies. The basic assumption in releasing the extra material is, I assume that the director’s true vision didn’t make it to the screen in its full manifestation because of the marketing-based concerns of various studio big-heads who think that the public isn’t going to put up with a 208 minute movie. Three hours is stretching the general public’s attention span, so why push it? I think that was probably the case with “The Fellowship of the Ring.”

I thoroughly and completely enjoyed the extended edition. I’ve seen the regular size several times, so I know it pretty well, and I was able to tell what had been added back on for the jumbo version. In this case, the difference between the two movies was incredibly simple: the extended edition added more depth, detail, and background to almost every aspect of the story, and I loved every addition. None of the extensions changed the nature of the plot or the depiction of any of the characters, but simply seemed to bring the movie even closer to the book. As such, this brief recommendation comes down to just that: If you enjoyed the theatrical release and would like to see thirty minutes of additions sprinkled pretty equally throughout the whole movie, definitely check it out. If the land of Hobbits and Elves and such was fleshed out about as well as you cared about in the shorter version, skip the epic edition.

On a note related to “The Fellowship of the Ring” but not to its length or version, I think that the scene in which Sam follows Frodo into the lake and nearly drowns is one of the best-earned tear jerking moments in a big budget action/adventure movie, ever. We’ve watched these two on this unexpected, terrifying, violent, and relentless trek, and despite of the epic weight of their journey, the thing that grabs you is the commitment of one person (okay, Hobbit) to another: “I made a promise, Mr. Frodo. A promise. ‘Don’t you leave him Samwise Gamgee.’ And I don’t mean to. I don’t mean to.” Gets me every time. It is certainly one of the most powerful moments in the trilogy.

This alternate version of “The Fellowship of the Ring” is in sharp contrast to two other movies that I own, “Apocalypse Now” and “Blade Runner.” In the director’s cut of “Blade Runner,” which is pretty much the only version you can find any more without a great deal of effort, the biggest and most dramatic change is the removal of the voiceover narration provided by Harrison Ford’s character. I used to recommend that people see the non-director’s cut version first because the subtraction of the voiceover left people in the dark regarding background details of the plot that made the film more accessible. Then, a few months ago, I caught part of the original version (with the voiceover) on TV and realized that I had been wrong and director Ridley Scott had been right for wanting to remove it. Ford’s character simply tells us in words what the movie is already telling us in action and image, so much of what he has to say comes of as either patronizing or beating us over the head with a metaphor that would otherwise come off as a subtle touch. So in retrospect, hey, you’re pretty smart, so see the director’s cut of “Blade Runner” and not the original.

As far as “Apocalypse Now” goes, I think the original was better. “Apocalypse Now, Redux,” is a whopping forty-nine minutes longer than the 153-minute original, and unlike the extended edition of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” most of the added material comes in a few extremely long scenes. While they certainly fit with the overall tone and message of the movie, “Apocalypse Now” is about a boat trip up a river, and the two major deleted storylines are essentially distractions or pauses from that journey. I’m not convinced that they really add much. I think that Coppola decided that since about a gazillion dollars was spend on making the movie and that the process nearly killed several of its stars, he was at some point going to get damn near every foot of film in front of the general public. I’d say skip “Redux” unless you were absolutely bonkers about the movie, in which case you’ve seen the long version already.

The Kiddo

Today's ten minutes will cover the subject of my 3.5 year-old nephew, with whom I've spent quite a lot of time over the last few days. In a world where not a whole lot of 3.5 year-olds are fantastic, he is fantastic and then some.

For Christmas, my sister and I gave him a pirate outfit, which included an eye patch, pirate bandanna with skull-and-crossbones, striped sailor shirt with glow in the dark skull-and-crossbones, and a belt with which to carry the pirate sword that he already owns. Oh, and we also got him a hook for his hand, complete with a black collar to go over his hand so it looks like he really has just the hook. Don't worry: it's a hook of soft construction, approved by paranoid parents and lawyers everywhere.

On Christmas morning, my sister and I were waiting for him to arrive so he could open his present and the cuteness and hilarity could commence. When he got there, he was already sporting a Christmas present that Santa had given him: a cowboy outfit. Mini-10 gallon hat (10 cup hat, perhaps?), cowboy boots, and - and for me this was the kicker - a brown faux-leather duster. Santa had skipped the boring, overdone cowboy vest, and had gone for the floor-length duster. Freaking awesome. Santa had completed the deal by providing about fifteen feet of soft rope with a lasso tied in one end. I was quickly captured and taken to the back bedroom, which I had no idea was a jail.

The cowboy outfit was set aside once the pirate present was opened. He geared up and commenced to use his hook to open the remainder of his presents. Later in the day, my sister and I got in a sword fight with wrapping-paper tubes, and the nephew, who was playing Hungry Hungry Hippos at the time, could not run off fast enough to get his pirate sword and join in the fray. At first his approach to battle was just to stand in between my sister and I and swing his sword wildly over his head, trying to connect with either of our weapons. After a bit of that, however, he enlisted my brother (who is apparently a pirate as well) and the two of them chased my sister and I all over the house. It was a pitched battle and several wrapping-paper tube swords were destroyed, but in the end my sister and I had no choice but to submit to the pirates. They are tough types.

Later, the nephew and I found some treasure (in an empty Crate and Barrel box, who knew?) and buried it in the closet in the back bedroom, which I had no idea was a pirate cave. After hiding it, we made a treasure map so that our loot would not be lost. I was very clear that "X" had to mark the spot. After that, we polished up our pirate vocabulary, adding "Yo ho ho!" and "Ahoy, matey!" to his already well-practiced "Arrrrrrr."

I hope there is a kid in your life somewhere who is helping you to do extremely silly and joyful things.

How About This Weather?

Here's the thing about the weather:

In my experience, people are absolutely obsessed with weather. It matters to just about everybody what the temperature is going to be tomorrow, and what if anything is going to be falling from the sky. This need for information frequently extends beyond the reasonably guessable twenty-four hour window and off into the absurdly distant future. Nobody, for crying out loud, has any idea what it is going to be like ten days from now. And ten days from now, nobody, for crying out loud, will remember what it was supposed to have been like according to ten days ago. And yet there is persistent, massive, and wild speculation. Not only is there an obsession with the weather of the future, but the weather of the recent past and often immediate present is probably the single most common topic of small conversation, often in the form of statements so obvious ("Sure is cold out there, isn't it?") that they could only be topped by observations that a four-year old would be ashamed to have uttered ("Sun sure came up this morning, didn't it?").

And here's the thing about all of the weather-obsessed people of the world: they're right.

I could argue in broad, sweeping statements, about how weather is vitally important to human society, and etc. etc., but instead, I offer you the following account of the events and meterology of my December 25th:

12:15 a.m.
My family and I emerge from the 11 p.m. Christmas Eve church service to a damp, chilly, foggy, soul-sucking evening. The warm Christmas atmosphere does not completely desert us, but it does feel like someone has thrown a few soaking blankets on the evening. Things are good, but also wet and muffled.

8:00 a.m.
I awake to forty and rainy. The sky is spitting heavily on the earth. It is Christmas morning, and yet I actually consider going to sleep for another hour instead of driving the twenty minutes to my mom's house to open presents. I arrive with typical morning drowsiness, but also carrying a damp chill that only fully leaves me after two cups of coffee, fun with family, and a solid session of tearing open presents.

11:30 a.m.
Drive the five blocks from mom's house to dad's, reacquiring the dank heavy feeling. It is chased away by more presents, more family, and a plate full of turkey/mashed potatoes/gravy/etc. roughly the size of Montana.

1:30 p.m.
Presto change-o! Heavy, mean raindrops transform into heavy, perfect snowflakes! White Christmas! Outlook improves, despite the onset of food coma of epic proportions. Life feels more Christmasy. Not that it didn't before, but suddenly Christmas becomes Christmas. The fire is warmer. Bing Crosby sounds Bingier. Turkey is turkier. Eggnog, noggier. The family mood jumps a bit, the day turns a corner.

3:30 p.m.
Hats and coats on! Out into the snow! It has accumulated. Not much, sure, but it is still coming down hard and any covering of white is cause for first person experience. The snow is ridiculously slushy, making for excellent slip-sliding and deadly snowballs. A thirty minute walk yields many street signs pelted with projectiles, soaking wet gloves, a football thrown about, and the pure joy of strolling about in a heavy snowfall. The way that the persistent onrush of flakes brings a dynamic texture to the normally empty air never fails to amaze me. I can't look at it hard enough. I think there might not be many things more beautiful.

Way One vs. Way Two, Concluded.

This business is getting right out of control and possibly a bit boring, so I'm going to amputate and cauterize with the following summary paragraph:

The point is that there is a careful balance to be found between controlling and accepting the wide variety of items that life throws at you. The key in finding this balance lies not in looking around and seeing how other people do it, but instead figuring out what fits your nature as a person. Procrastination can be a weight, but it can also free up time to do some pretty freeing things. Can you compartmentalize? Can you allow some manageable piles to build up while you accept the unexpected items that are tossed your direction in a given day? Some people honestly cannot do this, and that is fine. For them, control is paramount, and while they will miss out on some fun, they won't ever have that weight that the procrastinator knows so well.

As for me (and really, this is all one big excuse to talk about myself for a minute), I'm working on accepting both ends of my personal spectrum. I am not ever going to be a No Piles On My Clean Desk person, and I should probably stop holding myself to an unattainable standard. This is not to say that I'm going to end up a homeless person who carries in his shopping cart the piles of bills he never paid. I'm going to, as I always have, get the job done. There will be, as there always has been, cycles of boom and bust in my personal accomplishment economy, and I might as well get comfortable with that fact. There are avenues for some improvements, certainly, but striving for the ideal has got to get chucked right out the window. You simply can’t live a pure Way One without sacrificing many of the vital pleasures of Way Two. Find the balance.

And at last, before I go to bed, I wish you a Merry Christmas. May all your presents be fantastic gifts of wonderment and joy, may your family be loving at best and hospitable at worst, and may the spirit of the season grab a hold of you for at least some of Christmas Day.

Way One vs. Way Two, Continued

The big point with these two different approaches to life is that I think that many people idealize the organized, disciplined, steady, non-procrastinating style of living. We look at the piles in our lives and think, "Really, it is ridiculous that I let these items pile up. I am a slacker. If I had any backbone whatsoever, I would institute some sort of uber-organized system of scheduling and prioritizing that would replace all of these piles with clean counter/desk/dashboard/bathroom counter space. With all of that space, I could really get some things accomplished." It's not that this isn't true, per se, but more that it is neither possible nor ideal for most people. Piles, junk drawers, half-finished home improvement projects, and impossible eight page to-do lists are the simple and unavoidable facts of having a rich and complicated life. Unless you want to miss out on the possibilities and surprises that life will drop on your head, you had better find a way to make yourself available, and a regimented lifestyle leaves little room for this. If your crazy friend from college shows up out of the blue with backstage passes to the U2 concert tonight, the answer is not, "Well, I'd love to, but my calendar has me paying two bills right now, then working out for an hour and a half, then I've got to fix dinner and at 9:15 I'll be dusting the bookshelves. But say hi to Bono for me. And see if you can find out how bald The Edge really is. Ask him to take off that beanie for a second." The answer is to grab your coat and get the hell out the door.

Of course, if you're always running off to see U2 at a moment's notice, the piles get pretty large in a hurry. I've always looked at this as a financial analogy: You are either making deposits on your future or you are borrowing from it. You can put things off, but you're going to have to pay the bill someday, and the procrastinator's weight is the interest on the loan. There is absolutely nothing wrong with borrowing from the future, especially if that currency is well-spent on drinking Jamison with Bono until dawn after the show, but if you're letting things pile up while you watch reruns of "Mythbusters," you've got to ask yourself if there might be a better approach.

Again, got to go to bed. More tomorrow. Hope you're not bored with this clumsy line of philosophizing. If so, check back in on Sunday or Monday. I should be through with it by then.

Way One vs. Way Two

Okay, so here's the thing, and I'm still trying to fit this all together, but it (the thing) is something like this:

There are two ways to approach life. These two ways exist not as the absolutes that we often think in, but rather on either end of a variable spectrum. Absolutes are achieved only by the mentally ill or otherwise freakish persons of the world, while the variable spectrum takes care of the rest of us. Thus, anyone saying "I am [this way]" is lying. They are actually 63% one way and 37% the other way, or they are a combination of fourteen of the traits of one end of the spectrum and sixty-four traits of the other end of the spectrum, or they are some other way of stating this: in between. This in-betweenness, which yes, is now officially a word, leave me alone about it, is where the truth of life can be found.

But before your heads spin off into space trying to diagram and disect the above paragraph of abstractosity, let me get back to the two ways. Here they are:

Way One: You are an organized person. When a bill arrives in the mail, you take it inside and pay it immediately. You have stamps and an envelope in the proper place and in sufficient supply on your desk. If, one day, you run out of laundry detergent, this is not a problem because you have already purchased a second containter of detergent in anticipation of the first one running out. You exercise a regular number of times a week, every week. If you have a project to do that must be completed four weeks in the future, you schedule appropriately so that you spend consistent amounts of time during those four weeks working to finish the project in a timely and rational fashion. Your car payment makes sense. You vacuum your carpets weekly. You call your friends on their birthdays and send cards at christmas. Meals are planned a few days in advance.

Way Two: When the bathroom mirror is so dirty that you can't see to shave without nearly slicing off your nose, it is probably time to go to the store and buy some windex and paper towel to clean it off. This will take a while, though, because the gas light in your car has been on for so long that you probably can't make it to the grocery store without first going to the gas station. When you get home, you might actually remember to check the mailbox, which you haven't done for three days. The six bills you find in the mailbox will be added to the eight already sitting on your desk, resulting in the mysterious critical mass number (fourteen, this month, for some reason) that causes you to finally sit down and pay them all, and your rent, too. After that, you'll have to work for nine straight hours to finish the project which you've been putting off for four weeks. You will finish in just the nick of time to go turn it in, but will be forced to wear dirty clothes to work because you've neglected to go to the dry cleaners for the last two weeks. Later that day, when your doctor informs you that your cholesterol is 285, you will sign up for a membership at the local gym. You will work out every day for a week, then once a week for two weeks, then not at all until your next doctor's appointment.

Right. So these are basic ends of the spectrum, and we all want to be closer to Way One than Way Two, I suspect. But, likely as not, there is one hell of a lot of Way Two in all of us, like it or not, because we are not robots.

More on this tomorrow. I have to go to bed. That, for the record, was fifteen minutes.

Attention Christmas Cynics:

[Having noticed nearly a month long gap between posts, I have resolved to do another week's worth of ten-minute writings. To recap: Seven days, one post per day, written in ten-ish minutes, with relatively little forethought and edited with reasonable but not exacting vigor.]

This is for all of the Christmas Cynics out there:

You are wrong.

The holiday season is not merely an excuse for a vomit-inducing orgy of capitalistic consumer frenzy. Christmas is not simply a corporate-driven event designed to raise profits at the year's end. Hearing the same fifty or so Christmas songs in every store you enter is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. Placing Christmas lights on the exterior of your domicile is definitely worth getting a bit chilly and is definitely not some expression of your sublimated desire to keep pace with your neighbors. Taking your kids to see Santa at the mall is a good idea. Nativity scenes are good. "It's A Wonderful Life" is good. Eggnog is really good. And for crying out loud on a stick, going out and buying a real live Christmas tree is an absolute necessity unless you are allergic to them.

See, here's the problem: if you are an intelligent person, you tend to be cynical about certain things, and you should be. This is because you are not a mindless sheepheaded idiot. You will find a great deal of sarcasm in your soul when you hear that people care whether or not Ashley Simpson has done blah blah blah lately. Or that the U.S. Government is still finding new ways to bury the country in blah blah blah. Much of life is very ridiculous, and as a person with an above-average IQ, you notice these ridiculosities, whereas the everyday moron embraces them as though they mattered. This is not an entirely bad way to approach certain areas of life. In fact, it is such a reasonable approach to the world that it has for many people become the default reaction, which makes it not nearly as intelligent as it used to be. That is: It used to take a keen intellect to observe and report sarcastically on the ironies of life, but if you've over-honed that sense, it is actually significantly more difficult to put the sarcasm down and enjoy things such as blatant sentimentality, tradition, and beauty.

And that's the thing about Christmas cynics: they're missing the point. Yes, you are allowed to be a mite annoyed when you hear "Baby it's Cold Outside" for the fifty-third time while shopping for sixty-dollar picture frames at Pottery Barn, but that's not the point. As an intelligent person, it is your job to refocus your cynically-trained mind on the real point of the season, and embrace a little holiday beauty and sentiment. To wit:

The way white Christmas lights illuminate freshly fallen snow.

The smell of food baking when you walk into the family Christmas.

The fact that Tony Bennett has the perfect voice for singing "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town."

The pure, unadulterated joy of Christmas morning when you were a kid.

A blazing fireplace.

The guy down the block whose light display can be seen from a low earth orbit.

The quiet beauty of a candlelit Christmas eve church service.

Presents! How can you not love presents?

The way a snow-covered woods looks after a day-long winter storm.

Every ornament on your family tree that you made by hand between the ages of three and thirteen.

The familiarity, comfort, and love of family.


So. Just let go for a while and simply enjoy it.