Response to The Hobbit

I liked The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien SO much more than I thought I would! In the past, I'd had bad experiences with Hobbit-related things, so I had really low expectations for the book. For example, when I was in elementary school, I tried reading it because my dad told me he thought I'd like it... I found it really boring though, and I never finished it. Then, when The Lord of the Rings movies came out, I tried watching those and also found them even more boring. Then the two Hobbit movies were released. I watched the second one, The Desolation of Smaug, with my dad, and I still found it super boring. However, it was available as an audiobook, and I figured it would be easier to listen to the book than actually read it because then I could listen to it while I worked on menial tasks and kill two birds with one stone. So I decided to give it a try. I was really glad I did because I loved this book! I wouldn't say it's in the top five books of all time, but it was really good. The vibe of this book seemed completely different from the second Hobbit movie. This book was adventurous and had a good vibe of camaraderie. The movie was really lacking the heart that the book had. I've never read the Lord of the Rings books, but I saw parts of the movies, and The Desolation of Smaug movie reminded me too much of the LOTR movies...in a bad way, because they were super drawn out with boring characters who lacked personality. I think they did this on purpose to make the story more manly so that they could appeal to people who like manly action movies, which is tons of people. Like maybe if the movie had too much cutesiness it would only appeal to really dorky fantasy reading people. But I would have liked it better this way! I kept falling asleep during the movie. The book was super interesting! The only part of the movie that I liked was the barrel scene, even though it was really different from the barrel scene in the book, which wasn't crazy and action-packed like it was in the movie. I found a fun video about how they made the scene, if you're interested. It looks like the most fun scene to film ever:

Anyway, like I said, the parts of The Hobbit that appealed to me, and the parts of The Hobbit that appealed to the movie director were completely different I guess. For me, I really liked the parts with the character interactions and descriptions of their feelings and personalities. I loved the descriptions of Bilbo. He was adorably polite, like in the very beginning when people kept coming into his house, and he would serve them food and drinks and try to be really polite, while in his head he was worrying that he would run out of food. He ended up serving them the little cakes that he had been planning on eating later that day for lunch. Little details like that were my favorite parts of the book. 

To me, the funniest part of the book was in Chapter 7, when Gandalf, Bilbo, and the dwarves went to Beorn's house, but they didn't want to upset Beorn with all the people, so Gandalf told the dwarves to enter two at a time, every five minutes, and say something along the lines of "We are pleased to be of service to you." But it ended up not really working out that well and just being really awkward. I didn't describe it in a funny way, but in the book it was super funny! 

On many occasions, Tolkien did that thing where he kind of breaks the fourth wall and says something like, "But that's another story that we won't talk about here." I remember at one point, there was a chapter that ended with something like, "But then the hobbit realized... this part of his story had to continue in the next chapter!" I thought these things were cute. I had seen them a lot in other books, but the other books I saw it in were more recent, so it made me wonder if Tolkien was the first to do this or if he had just seen it in other books too and decided to adopt it. 

I'm sure that people already know about this and are tired of hearing about it, but I guess I may as well bring up the fact that this book is strongly reminiscent of the hero's journey. There are tons of stories that have it (e.g. Harry Potter and The Lion King), but it seemed to be even stronger in this book. I didn't mind this. It's not a boring plot structure and the actual events and characters were original. It kind of reminded me of The Lego Movie because Emmett was like Bilbo in some ways. They were really simple people who weren't particularly strong or amazing but still lovable because it made it easier for us commonfolk to relate to them.

In conclusion, this book had such a good vibe to it that the movie was totally lacking. It gave me a similar mood to the mood that I get around Christmastime, or when I go on the (now gone!!) Maelstrom ride at Disneyworld, or when I watch Labyrinth, or read the first few Harry Potter books. It made me feel like baking cookies and bread, and watching claymation movies, and building blanket forts, and going out to enjoy nature. I'm pretty sure this is really different from how a lot of people feel when they read the book, considering the nature of the movies. Maybe I should give the animated movie a try!

I think this scene would have been even better with this song!

The Witches in Aunt Maria

Aunt Maria by Diana Wynne Jones was a pretty interesting book. As I was reading it, I could totally see it being made into movies. The first half of the book felt like it could be a Miyazaki movie. It had all the Miyazaki trademarks: wind, cats, kids, old people, beige houses by the ocean, goblin-reminiscent forests, spirits, shopkeepers, people saying "Good afternoon!", and a wolf, particularly one that was originally a human but then turned into its animal state. It had a mixture of parts that were calm, thrilling, mysterious, supernatural, and quirky. To me, the writing style was reminiscent of the early Harry Potter books. It was kind of children's book-ish and whimsical, but still exciting. Towards the end of the book, the pace of the story picked up and it got weirder. It wasn't until almost halfway through the book that we found out Aunt Maria was a witch. It was here where things got a bit suspenseful, because Mig knew that Aunt Maria had turned Chris into a wolf, but she wasn't supposed to know, and if Aunt Maria realized that Mig knew, Mig would probably receive an equally bad fate and then she wouldn't be able to help herself or anyone else. While the first half of the book felt like a Miyazaki movie, the second half felt like it could be a Laika movie. It dealt with the supernatural a lot and had a wide cast of peculiar characters and circumstances, with an epic, mostly-happy ending. I really liked this book overall; I liked the tone of the story and the diction of the writer. It felt a bit nostalgic and innocent, like a breath of fresh air. I think I remember getting this feeling from Diana's book Howl's Moving Castle, although I read it so long ago that I don't totally remember. I guess from the diction of the writing, I got the sense that the author cared a lot about the feelings and processes that Mig went through, and that made me care too.

The witches in Aunt Maria weren't exactly straight-up witch stereotypes, but I did feel like I'd seen similar characters in the past. One that came to mind was Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter series. Like Aunt Maria and the Mrs. Urs, she was bitchy despite appearing to be a sweet old lady at a distant first glance. She would shroud herself in pink and cuteness, which seem like something a helpless, nice little old lady would do, but she had a power complex and was sometimes cruel. Aunt Maria was very similar in this way. She didn't seem to be strongly guided by morals. She mostly just bossed people around and bothered them. For example, even though she was capable of buttoning her corset, she made other people do it for her. She also made Mig's mother buy and cook food for her. When Mig's mother bought a cake instead of making one herself, Aunt Maria was really mean and snotty about it. The other Mrs. Urs were too, to varying degrees. From the start, one could see that Aunt Maria was mean and frumpy and lazy and obnoxious. However, she seemed more like a stereotypical old lady with dementia than a stereotypical witch who is thin and warty with a black hat. She would often invite a group of friends over for tea and dessert, and her friends were pretty similar, some nicer, some meaner, and some crazier and some saner, but all were kind of similar. Elaine was the meanest one, and came over the most frequently. As the story went on, it turned out that Aunt Maria had more power than we knew about originally. On page 72, Aunt Maria turned Chris into a wolf because he was badmouthing her and accusing her of murder. This was the first time that Aunt Maria actually showed her magic, and it was revealed that all her friends could also do magic. They weren't like stereotypical witches who were constantly doing magic in their day to day lives. It seemed like something that was only done out of necessity, and generally was kind of a weird roundabout way of solving the problem. I wasn't quite sure, for example, why Aunt Maria made it impossible for Mig's mother to realize that Chris hadn't been home, but she didn't make it impossible for Mig to realize. Either she was really smart and knew that even if Mig did notice, she wouldn't be able to do anything about it, or Aunt Maria was just being her weird self. I guess the biggest non-stereotypical thing is that generally there's not a group of crazy old stuffy ladies running a town.

Favorite quotes:

"Oh dear. I think Hester Bayley may be as dotty as Zoe Green
underneath. Or she doesn’t know better. Mostly the pictures were
of fairies, little flittery ones, or sweet-faced maidens in bonnets, but
there were some that were so queer and peculiar that they did
things to my stomach. There was a street of people who looked as if
their faces had melted, and two at least of woodlands, where the
trees seemed to have leering faces and nightmare, twiggy hands.
And there was one called ‘A naughty little girl is punished’ that was
worst of all. It was all dark except for the girl, so you couldn’t quite
see what was doing it to her, but her bright clear figure was being
pushed underground by something on top of her, and something
else had her long hair and was pulling her under, and there were
these black whippy things too. She looked terrified, and no wonder.
‘Charming!’ Chris said."

"Really it is difficult having a martyred crusading saint for a
mother sometimes. "

What is "Weird"?

For this week, I watched the movie The Cabin in the Woods and I read Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk, two works that fit into the critical category of "weird."

The word weird has so many different meanings, depending on who you go to. It is a word that is thrown around casually to describe people and feelings. It's become a really casual term, like the word "love." Also, like someone said in class earlier, it's become popular these days to braggingly call yourself "weird" or "quirky," kind of like how it's recently become popular to ascribe various mental illnesses to yourself. It's been in fashion lately for people to try to stand out more, but stand out in a way that's still socially acceptable. There are certain mental illnesses that people over-diagnose themselves with, and others that people shy away from. There are certain "weird" and "quirky" attributes that people will try to absorb, and others that people still have stigma toward. This has become so popular it has a meme now!

It seems like people are always trying to decide which level of clichéness they're okay with for themselves, and they judge whoever is on a lower level of clichéness. But they also judge some of the people who are on a higher level, and some of the people who are on the same level, like they feel like what they're doing is more genuine than what other people are doing. In general, though, I think this trend is nice for kids because I think it might decrease bullying a little, and nice for people in general because it makes you feel a little safer to reveal parts of yourself that you normally wouldn't.

To me, the term is something that is more of a feeling that we apply a word to than a word that can be easily described. It's easy to call something weird, and know when something is weird, and if someone else calls something weird, you can usually agree with them. I think that it's not as easy to pinpoint exactly what makes one decide that something is weird, though. Sometimes if you look at two different things that you truly believe are both weird, it can still be hard to find a connecting line between them that originally made you decide both of them are weird.

The word weird also has a dictionary definition.
1) involving or suggesting the supernatural; unearthly or uncanny:
a weird sound; weird lights.
2) fantastic; bizarre:
a weird getup.

The dictionary definition gets closer to my interpretation of the critical genre of the "new weird." I had actually never heard of this genre before my introduction to it in this class, but I think I can see what the meaning of the term encompasses. I was never sure what a book like Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk would be classified as. I probably would have lumped The Cabin in the Woods into the horror genre, but there is definitely more to it than a normal horror movie. "New weird" makes sense as a genre for both of these works. They both take something that we've seen before, but put a spin on it that makes it really unique. Both The Cabin in the Woods and Lullaby are based in the horror genre, but they're done in a unique way.

A side fact is that in high school I was really into Chuck Palahniuk. I read Fight Club, Diary, Haunted, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke and part of Pygmy (though I didn't finish it because I didn't like it). It was actually just as I was about to start reading Lullaby, which was next on my list, that my parents said, "Hmm, we see that you have been into this Chuck fellow lately. Let's see what this is about!" As you might already know, Lullaby was influenced by the brutal murder of Palahniuk's father and girlfriend. So, my parents were really disturbed by this and decided to ban me from reading any more of Chuck's books. So I finally read the book that I had initially set out to read about four years ago! Lullaby was definitely very similar in writing style to Chuck's other famous books. It had the same use of short choppy sentences and repeated phrases and lack of certain types of punctuation. One difference in the writing was that this one alternated between past and present tense. Also, this was the first horror genre story I'd read by him. Diary had supernatural elements too but this one had them more strongly. Other parts of this book reminded me of Invisible Monsters. Though I don't remember Invisible Monsters super well, I remember there was a group of weird characters who went on a sort of road trip. Lullaby also featured a weird cast going on a road trip, though their road trip had more of a purpose. They also both had nonlinear structures.

From Lullaby and The Cabin in the Woods, I think it might also be safe for me to gather that works in the "new weird" genre have their own unique, satirical tones. Lullaby's tone is witty, meticulous, and dry. The Cabin in the Woods' tone is rather tongue-in-cheek, comedic, and heavily satirical. At points in the movie, it also had a shallow tone, which was intentional. They used this shallow tone for the parts where the "gamemaker"-type people putting the movie together were working or talking or partying afterward. They were disconnected from the feelings of the people in the movie and were very business- and money-oriented. Their shallow lack of empathy added to the satire feeling of the movie because it was shown back-to-back with characters in sheer terror and confusion. It trivialized the feelings of the people in the movie-within-the-movie. It was very different from the tone of a normal horror movie.