If part 1 plodded, then part 2 flies. But in what directions! And, quite possibly, asunder. Read more of my review of my BoingBoing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Tolkien & other nerds: I recently had the pleaure of nerding out about The Hobbit (and the new Desolation of Smaug trailer) and other Tolkien, D&D and fantasy topics with the Tolkien Professor, aka Corey Olsen, and Noble Smith (my collaborator over at Dungeons & Dorkwads)
The Tolkien Professor chats with authors and uber-geeks Ethan Gilsdorf and Noble Smith. Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Noble Smith is the author of The Wisdom of the Shire: A Short Guide to a Long and Happy Life.
You can find them both at the webpage Dungeons and Dorkwads.
Download this episode here, or subscribe to The Tolkien Professor on iTunes.
Let the dork-offs begin!
Announcing Dungeons & Dorkwads, a site for all things D&D, nostalgia and bad jokes. In our first post, Noble Smith and I geek out about a 1970s Smaug the Dragon miniature figurine and its resemblance to Pinky Tuscadero, the Fonz's +7 Motorcycle of Shark Tank Jumping, and a hobby shop called Unicorn Castle where they had girls for sale.
What are we trying to accomplish? We’re not sure. What is our mission statement? We don’t have one (yet). But what is this site all about? Dorking-off.
What is a dork-off, you ask? Noble and Ethan, we are not-so-youthful dorks, with an unhealthy attachment to the role-playing games of our glory years — D&D especially — and assorted fantasy, science fictional and pop cultural artifacts. Here at Dungeons & Dorkwads, we exhume and celebrate these lost relics, be they worn dice, faded hand-drawn maps, broken lead figurines, beat-up Tolkien boxed sets or Hoth or Happy Days dioramas. (We’d like to see one that combines both universes.) Then, we geek out about them.
What stories do they unleash from the Tomb of Memories? What did it all mean to us? Were those years in the dungeon a complete waste? We think not. Along the way, we let these dork-offs take us in whatever direction that pleases us. Expect side trips to the lands of Tatooine, Middle-earth, Gilligan’s Island, Lego, and Loni Anderson.
- See more at: http://www.dungeonsanddorkwads.com/whats-a-dork-off/#sthash.unqTcAjf.dpuf
NATICK — Sometimes, the world can seem overwhelming. Overbearing. If only you were tiny enough to build a house out of cards and climb inside, or escape to a miniature treehouse suspended between stalks of broccoli.
Or better yet, just fly away. Fold a giant paper airplane, then grasp its thin fuselage for dear life and sail across a field into summertime.
Such is Zev Hoover’s fanciful photographic take on reality. His arresting images evoke a wonderland of imaginary environments, built from f-stops and pixels, and hinting at characters with secret stories to tell.
Hoover’s work, which he posts on the photo sharing site Flickr using the handle “Fiddle Oak” (a play on “Little Folk”), has caught fire across the Internet. He has been profiled in the media and on design and photography blogs. On Monday, he will fly to New York to appear on ABC’s “Good Morning America Live” webcast.
One post touting his “surreal photo manipulations” has received 108,000 Facebook likes.
“Maybe a million people saw it,” said the slightly stunned Hoover, who is only 14.
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COLM O’MOLLOY FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
“He’s enjoying this little ride,” said his father, Jeff. “But he’s familiar with Andy Warhol’s idea of 15 minutes of fame and realizes this may be transitory.”
The skinny teen deadpanned, “If I was older, it wouldn’t make as good of a story.”
But it’s Hoover’s talent that has captured imaginations. A film production company contacted him about designing a movie poster. He has been approached by a publisher for a potential narrative photo textbook project. Nikon World magazine asked him to contribute a photo. A lens manufacturer sent him a free lens, saying only: “Take some pictures with it.”
No doubt he will. Plenty of his peers would be happy playing soccer or video games, but not Hoover. He needs to be creating. “I get anxious if I’m not doing something,” he said, sitting outside his family’s Natick home this week. “What’s next?”
His series of “Little Folk/Fiddle Oak” images began during a walk in the woods with sister, Aliza. He remembers thinking, “Oh, wouldn’t little people be cool?” Crouching near the ground, he imagined seeing the world from their perspective. He felt the miniature genre had never been done in photography — “at least not very well.”
“There’s a fine line to walk between having it be too abstract and having it be too cheesy-obvious,” he said.
He performs his sleight of hand in Photoshop, which he taught himself via Internet tutorials.
Read the rest of the front page Boston Globe story. For a photo gallery of Zev's work, look here.
The death of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen raises questions about the future of special effects, writes Ethan Gilsdorf. In the good old days, it did not take so much to trick the eye.
"There comes a point where people will reject digital effects and want movies where we actually did something in real space, and real time.”
That's a quote from a film director perhaps the least likely to decry computer-generated special effects: Peter Jackson. Interviewed for the 2011 documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan, Jackson said, essentially, that as digital special effects in movies become increasingly advanced, we'll crave the real even more. Real, as in "real" fake -- physical puppets of gorillas and T-Rexes, Medusas and animated statues, not ones made from pixels. Real, as in physical models manipulated by hand and filmed one frame at a time, not rendered in some fancy computer program.
But Jackson's comment about a movie being something that happens "in real space, and real time" feels surprising, if not ironic. The director most known for creating miniature models and sets (and so-called giant miniatures, or "bigatures") for The Lord of the Rings, and seamlessly mixing them with digital trolls and elves, later turned away from the "real" miniatures he used in that trilogy. In his last film,The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Jackson finally and fully embraced digital effects. It's a film in which nary a miniature or puppet exists.
Now, the death on May 7 of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen poignantly brings these issues of real and fake, analog and digital, info focus. Harryhausen's passing represents the end of an era. It closes a crucial chapter in special effects history. It's also a kind of turning point in film technology. From here on out, it's too late to return to the analog.
If you don't know who Harryhausen was, you've probably seen his work. The master animator is best known for breathing life into giant, writhing serpents, sword-wielding skeletons, and marauding dinosaurs in such fantasy adventure and monster movies as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad(1958), Mysterious Island (1961), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and Clash of the Titans (1981). Harryhausen was an innovator, and in many ways the father of the modern special effects craft and industry.
Harryhausen's trademark action sequences featuring animated model figurines -- always pictured interacting with, or more often, fighting with human foes, or crushing them, or biting them in half or flying away with them -- might seem clunky and old-fashioned when measured by today's standards. But in their day, the effects Harryhausen pioneered were cutting-edge. He painstakingly filmed his "creatures" frame by frame. The process was exhausting: The 4 minute, 37-second skeleton and human fight sequence from Jason and the Argonauts reportedly took four and a half months to photograph and Harryhausen had to readjust and film around 184,800 movements of the puppets.
Then, using his patented "Dynamation" technique, those skeletons and serpents could interact on screen with actors in a remarkable realistic way. The Dynamation process combined foreground and background footage by photographing miniatures in front of a rear-projection screen. Sometimes, he shot sequences through a partially-masked glass pane. Live footage would later be superimposed on the masked portion of the frame, and voila, the creature or creatures seemed to exist in the midst of "real" human-scaled action, or even appear to move in front of and behind "live" elements. Harryausen also carefully controlled lighting and color balance to make sure the image quality of his animated sequences matched the quality of the live action. His effects were more convincing than the standard use of optical printing and mattes. This was before green screen, folks.
Time traveling adventurers in Time BanditsA travel guide to imaginary realms
How do you get to Narnia, Neverland, Oz, or Hogwarts? The way to these parallel other worlds that sometimes intersect with ours is not always obvious. All you need to know is the secret. Here is a brief guide to common tropes and modes of transportation. When in doubt, try a dash of fairy dust.
Natural (or Unnatural) Phenomena
In “Epic,” it’s a magic flower bud, or “pod,” as well as the spirit of a dying queen, that transports M.K. to the land of the Leafmen. Tornadoes also do the trick, as in “The Wizard of Oz.” Or a whack to the head works, too, like the one the kid in “The Pagemaster” suffers before the fantasy world of the library comes to life.
Tunnels, Caves, and Dark Spaces
Slither into a tunnel or cavern (“Pan’s Labyrinth”), fall down a hole (“Alice in Wonderland”), or explore the back of your closet (“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”). By means of this reverse birth-womb experience through the darkness — paging Dr. Freud — you’ll reach that hidden world.
Portals and Hidden Places
What's down that rabbit hole or in that wardrobe?: ‘Epic’ follows tradition of children’s fictions bridging earthly, fantasy realms
In the just-opened animated adventure film, “Epic,” a teenage girl named Mary Katherine (voiced by Amanda Seyfried) has effectively been abandoned. She arrives in the country to reconnect with her harebrained dad (Jason Sudeikis), a nerdy scientist obsessed with finding a woodland kingdom of miniature creatures. Grieving the loss of her mother, Mary Katherine, or “M.K.,” needs her father more than ever. But her dad’s belief in a secret world makes him all the more distant. “I’ll be right here,” M.K. huffs. “In reality.”
Naturally, M.K.’s ideas about magical realms are about to change. Stumbling into the woods, she snatches what looks like a glimmering leaf as it drifts down from the trees. The “pod” glows brighter in her hands, and then, KA-POW! our heroine is transported (and shrunk) to the hidden land of the Leafmen. There, she finds her purpose among a race of tiny people who, armed with bows and swords and mounted on sparrows and hummingbirds, protect the forest from the baddies in, yes, an ongoing battle between the forces of good and evil.
Movies about worlds disconnected from our own are commonplace. Think of the many science fiction and fantasy narratives that lie along the “Star Wars” to “The Lord of the Rings” continuum. These separate realities are filled with orcs and wizards, siths and spaceships. Humans may live there, but we Earthlings can’t visit them. No magic door leads from Boston to Tatooine, no trip down a rabbit hole or along the Red Line arrives in Middle-earth.
“Epic” belongs to a different but equally longstanding tradition of fiction that bridges our world to other realms. Via some gateway, a journey is made to a kind of Neverland or Narnia. The trope is as old and dark as the burrow in “Alice in Wonderland” and Dorothy’s twister in “The Wizard of Oz.” You can follow these tunnels from “Labyrinth” to “Pan’s Labyrinth,” through “Harry Potter” and “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief” and beyond to every story that maps that liminal space between us and some parallel place.
As sophisticated and tech-savvy as we’ve become in the 21st century, apparently we still need to believe in hidden worlds that coexist with the real world. In fact, we might need them more than ever. As we get more attached to our digital devices, our traditional spells don’t work anymore. Satellites have mapped every square inch of the planet; Google conjures an explanation for everything. We’re disconnected from witchcraft, nature, and the mysterious. Myth and fairy story gain no purchase on our daily lives.
Consequently, as we’ve galloped from industrialism to post-industrialism to digitalism, we’ve seen an explosion of fantasy and adventure movies in the last 30 years — from “The Goonies” (1985) to “The Golden Compass” (2007) — which reconnect us to these concealed worlds. We cling to old stories, newly enhanced by advances in special effects whose verisimilitude makes these worlds feel more convincing than ever.
Read the rest of my story at Boston Sunday Globe
[originally appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe, MARCH 24, 2013]
Angelina Jolie in "Maleficent," due in theaters next year. (PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER KRAMER/AP/NBC)FEE-FI-FO-FUM,I SMELL THE BLOOD OF A HOLLYWOOD TREND.
After nearly a century of fairy-tale films targeted in large part at kids — starting with Walt Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — there’s another, edgier treatment on the rise. Last year, moviegoers saw two versions of the Grimm Brothers’ Snow White story in Mirror Mirror with Julia Roberts and Snow White and the Huntsman with Kristen Stewart. Next year, Angelina Jolie will star as Sleeping Beauty’s nemesis in Malificent, and Disney is looking to release a live-action version of Cinderella directed by Kenneth Branagh. We’ve recently seen movies like Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Jack the Giant Slayer in theaters and Grimm and Once Upon a Time on TV. The list goes on and on. What accounts for this boom in adult-sized fairy tales?
Part of the answer is that the stories and themes of the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen never really left cineplexes — they’ve just been in better disguises. Working Girl, Pretty Woman, and Maid in Manhattan all borrowed heavily from the rags-to-riches Cinderella story. Snow White, so concerned with beauty and aging and jealousy, can be seen in countless mother/daughter rivalry plots. “We use bits and pieces of fairy tales all the time to fashion new stories, but often in ways so subtle that they escape our attention,” says Maria Tatar, chairwoman of the Program in Folklore & Mythology at Harvard University. Even Quentin Tarantino’s bloody Django Unchained, Tatar points out, draws from theSleeping Beauty tale.
The trend can be partly explained by practical concerns. After years of fantasy-themed bombs in the ’80s and ’90s (remember Legend with Tom Cruise?), the wildly successful Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies — which both started appearing in 2001 — convinced Hollywood that audiences were once again willing to suspend disbelief and embrace worlds of wizards and goblins. But with cash cows like The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien already spoken for, studios began looking to mine gold in older stories. (And since fairy tales tend to be in the public domain, they offer a bonus: no pesky author estates with which to negotiate film and toy rights.)
But I also think something deeper is going on. Maybe it’s that these sexier action-packed tales — with epic plots and gloomy themes — are finally returning to their roots.
Once thoroughly dire and dark, fairy tales were re-imagined as entertainment for kids in the 19th century. “They were moved like old furniture from the parlor into the nursery — that’s how Tolkien put it,” Tatar explains. With the arrival of the movies, the yarns became “cartoon versions of what adults once told around the fireside.” Disney, in particular, made a point of leaving out the nastiest stuff — the child abandonment, the cannibalism, the incest. “Today,” Tatar says, “we are back in touch with the darker elements in the tales.”
And yet those terrible stories projected up on the screen can also be comforting, if only because we know their endings in our bones. The land of Real Life, located just outside the darkened theater’s doors, remains a fairly bleak place of taxes, political gridlock, and climate change. A realm of chain mail, swords, and magic spells will always be more enchanting than that.
“Fairy tales give us a burst of melodrama,” Tatar says, “confronting us with worst-case scenarios and reassuring us that there will be a happily ever after.”
In fairy tales, the evil and greedy get true punishment, not just a slap on the wrist from Congress, and the hero always overcomes his or her travails to emerge victorious, albeit a little traumatized, from the experience. With the help of his sister, Hansel managed to escape getting eaten by a witch. Compared with that, doesn’t digging out from under a mountain of credit card debt or dodging a looming foreclosure seem like child’s play?
Ethan Gilsdorf, a frequent contributor to the Globe Magazine, is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
[this originally appeared in the Boston Globe]
by Ethan Gilsdorf
Who are Viggo Mortensen’s heroes? Ask him, and he doesn’t hold back. That’s what we learned when, after a recent interview, we sent the actor some follow-up questions via e-mail. Here are his responses.
[this originally appeared in the Boston Globe]
by Ethan Gilsdorf
Who are Viggo Mortensen’s heroes? Ask him, and he doesn’t hold back. That’s what we learned when, after a recent interview, we sent the actor some follow-up questions via e-mail. Here are his responses.
1) Who were your heroes growing up as a child, and who are they today?
Okay, you asked for it...
As a child — say, before age eleven — I suppose they were my father, my mother, various horses and dogs, soccer players for San Lorenzo de Almagro (a club founded in Boedo, Argentina, in 1908 by Salesian priest Lorenzo Massa) like “Lobo” Fischer, “Loco” Doval, “Bambino” Veira, “Sapo” Villar and too many other legendary players from that club to mention — Viking Leif Eriksson, fictional gaucho cowboy Martin Fierro, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Odin, Thor, Jesus of Nazareth, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, the character Don Quijote, his horse Rosinante and his trusty servant Sancho Panza, Achilles, Odysseus, Theseus, Joan of Arc, explorer Roald Amundsen, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, Thor Heyerdahl, Roger Bannister (the first man to break the four-minute mile barrier), marathon champion Abebe Bikila, Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Pelé), long jumper Bob Beamon, Jesse Owens, Bob Hayes, Emil Zátopek, Wilt Chamberlain, Cassius Clay, swimmers Don Schollander and Dawn Fraser, Peter O’Toole’s impersonation of T. E. Lawrence, the crew of Apollo 11, the recently-deceased rock legend Luis Alberto “El Flaco” Spinetta, Carlos Gardel, Bela Lugosi, Greta Garbo, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Edith Piaf, Beethoven, Mozart ... I could probably name more, but surely that gives an idea of how and where I dreamed back then.
Although as an adult I have come to see that no human being is perfect, I now would place at the top of the list the many unheralded people whose small acts of selfless kindness and courtesy, of grace under pressure that we come across every single day are there to be noticed and emulated if we simply pay attention. In terms of individuals who are relatively well-known, I would single out Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Helen Caldicott, Dennis Kucinich, Baltasar Garzón, Aung San Suu Kyi, Julian Assange and anyone who speaks truth to power, stands up against injustice and cruelty regardless of any consequential risk of ostracism or personal physical danger. Of course, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mark Twain, my father, my mother, and some of the others previously mentioned, are still heroes to me. I can also add, among other diverse sorts of heroes, my son Henry, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Sabina Spielrein, Heraclitus, Kierkegaard, Lao Tzu, Epictetus, writers Marguerite Duras, Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Albert Camus, Jonathan Swift, E. E. Cummings, Julio Cortázar, Mario Benedetti, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Juan Carlos Onetti, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Francisco Quevedo, Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Haroldo Conti, Oscar Wilde, Knut Hamsun, Saxo Grammaticus, Schopenhauer, Ludvig Holberg, Anton Chekhov, Anna Akhmatova, Johannes Ewald, Euripides, Stanley Kunitz, Theodore Roethke, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad, Osip Mandelstam, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Seamus Heaney, Oscar Wilde, Cormac McCarthy, Edgar Allan Poe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, William Burroughs, Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Campbell, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, directors Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, David Cronenberg, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Luis Buñuel and Yasujirō Ozu, actors Richard Jenkins, Sandy Dennis, Geraldine Page, Meryl Streep, Maria Falconetti, Ghita Nørby, Ariadna Gil, Jessica Lange, Paco Rabal, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Dirk Bogarde, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Federico Luppi, Montgomery Clift, and Robert Duvall, stuntman Mike Watson, sculptors Bertel Thorvaldsen, Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, painters Giotto, da Vinci, Juan Gris, Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Andrei Rublev, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Utagawa Hiroshige, Minerva Chapman, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Diebenkorn, Per Kirkeby, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and photographers Jacques Henri Lartigue, Jacob Riis, André Kertész, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Julia Margaret Cameron, Martin Munkácsi, August Sander, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Frank, Ansel Adams, Garry Winogrand and Dennis Hopper, tennis champions Rafael Nadal, Björn Borg and Guillermo Vilas, skiers Bill Koch, Juha Mieto, Jean-Claude Killy and Bjørn Dæhlie, newer San Lorenzo players like “Beto” Acosta, “Ratón” Ayala, the heroic 1982 San Lorenzo team that came back from the club’s only descent to Argentina’s second division breaking national attendance records along the way, Guy Lafleur and the great Montréal Canadiens teams from the 1970s, the 1969 and and 1986 New York Mets, Tom Seaver, “Doc” Gooden, New York Knick stars Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, Bernard King, Oscar Reed, Patrick Ewing, Larry Bird, “Magic” Johnson, the U.S.A. 1980 Olympic hockey team, the ’87, ’91, 2008 and 2012 New York Giants teams, Danish soccer stars Allan Simonsen, Michael Laudrup, Peter Schmeichel and Denmark’s 1992’s soccer cinderella-story European Champion team, Johan Cruyff, Mario Kempes, Diego Maradona, Real Madrid’s/Schalke’s Raúl González Blanco, Leo Messi, Gonzalo Higuaín, Zinedine Zidane, Bob Dylan, Ada Falcón, Leonard Cohen, Chet Baker, Gustav Mahler, Arvo Pärt, Carl Nielsen and so on...
Sorry to give you such long lists. Could have been even longer...
2) What are your favorite films, or films influential on your career, and/or what actors do you admire, and why?
Movies, to name a few: The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Godfather I & II, A Separation, The Fog of War, The Conformist, Los Santos Inocentes, The Deer Hunter, Casino, Lawrence of Arabia, Tokyo Story, Autumn Sonata, Sunrise, Andrei Rublev, Citizen Kane, A Place in the Sun, City Lights, Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Greed, The Night of the Hunter, The Third Man, Gallipoli, Mother and Son, Stalker, Ivan’s Childhood, Red River, Taxi Driver, Frances, Network, Grand Illusion, L’Atalante, Throne of Blood, The Seven Samurai, The Sword of Doom, Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy, Carnival of Souls, Solaris (Tarkovsky’s original)...
Actors, to name a few: Montgomery Clift, Maria Falconetti, Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Richard Jenkins, Sandy Dennis, Ellen Burstyn, Geraldine Page, Robert Duvall, Anna Magnani, Peter O’Toole, Toshiro Mifune, Dennis Hopper, Jessica Lange, James Dean, John Hurt, Dirk Bogarde, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Glenda Jackson, Vanessa Redgrave, Barbara Stanwyck, Mary Pickford, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Bergman, Gérard Depardieu, Jean Gabin, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, Ulrich Thomsen, Max von Sydow, Bruno Ganz...
3) Did you read much fantasy or science fiction as a kid? Did you ever play Dungeons & Dragons or know anyone who did?
Never have played “Dungeons and Dragons.” As a kid I read Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and a few others. As an adult have admired Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and notebooks.
4) We talked a little about your work as an actor, painter, poet and musician. They all seem linked by story. So I’m wondering what you think is the significance or power of stories? Why are they so important?
We are the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories we tell about others, the stories we read about everyone and every thing.
Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at www.ethangilsdorf.com
[this originally appeared in the Boston Globe]
He’s best known for inhabiting a haunted and reluctant hero-king. But he’s also been a trailblazing thinker, a vigilante family man with a dark past, a Russian mobster, a swoon-worthy traveling salesman, and one of the last men alive on earth, determined to make sure he and a boy survive.
[this originally appeared in the Boston Globe]
He’s best known for inhabiting a haunted and reluctant hero-king. But he’s also been a trailblazing thinker, a vigilante family man with a dark past, a Russian mobster, a swoon-worthy traveling salesman, and one of the last men alive on earth, determined to make sure he and a boy survive.
Starring in these movies - the “Lord of the Rings’’ trilogy, “A Dangerous Method,’’ “A History of Violence,’’ “Eastern Promises,’’ “A Walk on the Moon,’’ and “The Road’’ - actor Viggo Mortensen assumes the shape of outsiders. His characters drift, wander, and resist the status quo. They eschew the spotlight. They forsake the obvious path to their fates.
That the actor is attracted to these roles - quiet, contemplative, often loners, men who conceal secret doubts, identities, and rages - “probably has something to do with who I am,’’ Mortensen says on the phone from Madrid. “I suppose I am conscious of being drawn to people who are a little different. Or who think for themselves.’’
On Monday, Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre will honor Mortensen for his independent outlook. Its Coolidge Award annually recognizes a film artist who “advances the spirit of original and challenging cinema.’’
Mortensen, 53, says he simply craves “connections’’ and “experiences’’ - two words that frequently punctuate his drawly, meditative speech (as do ruminations on art and mortality). Guided by a thirst for off-kilter adventures, he seeks projects that make him feel alive.
“I just try to choose things that are interesting, that are going to challenge me, that are going to make me a little nervous,’’ says the soft-spoken, gravelly voiced actor. “Because I know what makes you nervous, what makes you afraid. It’s usually things you don’t know anything about.’’
Example: Mortensen recently relocated to Madrid to perform in a Spanish-language play called “Purgatorio.’’ “[I was] afraid I wasn’t up to the task as an actor,’’ he says. Yet he discovered, “as usual,’’ that the work with the most emotional challenges ended up being the most enjoyable.
That kind of risk-taking is what the Coolidge is rewarding. Denise Kasell, executive director of the Coolidge, cited the eclectic, courageous choices of the actor, who also paints, writes poems, shoots photos, sings, plays piano, and runs his own small publishing house. “He’s a very accessible gentleman. He’s an artist himself,’’ Kasell says. “He really understands and gets what we are all about.’’
“And he said yes,’’ Kasell adds. “It’s that simple.’’
This week, the Coolidge has been mounting a retrospective of Mortensen’s films, which continues through Sunday with a rare marathon of the extended editions of “The Lord of the Rings’’ trilogy, followed by a Monday afternoon screening of “Eastern Promises’’ - the David Cronenberg film that earned Mortensen a 2007 best actor Oscar nomination - and a post-screening Q&A with the actor. Then comes a sold-out award presentation Monday night.
Asking Mortensen about his ideals can elicit passionate responses. When questioned in a follow-up e-mail, “Who were your heroes growing up as a child, and who are they today?’’ the actor sends an astounding 800-plus word answer, listing childhood heroes that range from “my father, my mother, various horses and dogs’’ to Mahatma Gandhi, Thor, Jesus of Nazareth, Odysseus, Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Pelé), Jesse Owens, the crew of Apollo 11, Greta Garbo, Louis Armstrong, and Mozart, plus adult heroes including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Anna Akhmatova, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, Luis Bunuel, Matisse, Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Leonard Cohen, and Gustav Mahler.
Mortensen’s passion extends to his commitment to his roles. To get under Aragorn’s skin for “The Lord of the Rings,’’ he wore his costume even while not shooting, and kept his practice sword always close at hand.
But fans who know the actor only from his Middle-earth orc-slaying may be surprised to learn that he’s been acting for nearly three decades. He made his film debut with a small part in 1985’s “Witness.’’ In those days, he would do “anything, something, anything’’ for acting experience, and to pay the rent. Which explains his journeyman gigs in TV’s “Miami Vice’’ and a couple of ABC “Afterschool Specials,’’ as well as in horror films such as “Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III.’’
Whenever possible - “anytime it was really up to me and not the landlord,’’ he says - he chose parts that pushed him as an actor. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, he had supporting roles with indie directors such as Jane Campion (“The Portrait of a Lady’’), Sean Penn (“The Indian Runner’’), and Gus Van Sant (“Psycho’’), as well as a few mainstream films such as “Young Guns II,’’ “Crimson Tide,’’ and “G.I. Jane.’’
Directed by a relative-unknown at the time, Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings’’ felt like a gamble. “While we were making it, no one had any idea it was going to be a huge smash hit,’’ Mortensen says. The success quickly cemented his status as a leading man and introduced him to the fun-house world of celebrity life. “Walking down the street in any town or city in the world and having people look at you and start talking to you, convinced that they know you as well or better than they do members of their own family, that’s just an odd phenomenon,’’ he says. “I wouldn’t say it was a bad thing. It’s interesting.’’
Mortensen could have leveraged his “Lord of the Rings’’ fame into a parade of action-adventure paychecks. Instead, he’s largely championed diverse roles in smaller movies. How many fantasy heroes would go on to play a Russian mobster in “Eastern Promises,’’ and dare to let it all hang out, buck-naked, in a steam-room fight scene? Next up for Mortensen: playing the William S. Burroughs character in an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.’’
The idea of a career trajectory hasn’t crossed his mind. “Maybe I would have been smarter to have written down in a notebook, ‘Well, I’m going to play this part and this part before I’m too old to play this part,’ ’’ he says.
He views acting as “an extension of childhood play,’’ Mortensen says. “You have to just go for it. Just let yourself go and let yourself believe.’’
And each role is a chance to learn something new: “Each time I’m looking at the world or a part of the world from a point of view different than my own. Sometimes radically different. Sometimes from a point of view I would never care to have or identify with. But that’s the job.’’
Such a job has its own internal rewards, Mortensen emphasizes. “You can wake up feeling so-so about the world, and then because of what happens as soon as you get out of bed, something happens. You connect with someone, something, a book, and something happens that’s bigger than just you. It’s a connection with nature, a connection with people, a connection with a story that you are part of telling. . . . That’s what’s great about it.’’
But loyalty to indie cinema is a double-edged sword. Mortensen has at times grown frustrated with “irritating, dishonest, disappointing’’ people in the business, he says. He’s even contemplated quitting, but never has.
He harbors strong feelings about the Hollywood movie-making machine - its “frenetic quality,’’ the “money at stake,’’ the “hyping of the product,’’ the “award shows and prizes.’’ He complains that Cronenberg has never won an Academy Award or Golden Globe. “He deserves it way more than many who have won and more than half of those who get nominated every year,’’ Mortensen says. “I know he’s in the pantheon of greatest living directors, unquestionably, and he’s never been nominated.’’
Yet isn’t that the fate of those who take the road less traveled? They want recognition, they shun recognition. Yet they still hold out hope.
“Every once in a while, every couple of years, there’s one or two movies that really surprise you, because there is innovation,’’ Mortensen says. “Or people just do such honest work. Or such pure work or such interesting, original work every once in a while that it is the real thing. And it makes you hopeful.’’
So what if the expression is a cliché? For one small-town kid suffering from a disease, dreams — even medieval-themed dreams of knighthood, chivalry and adventure — do come true.
As reported by WMUR, a New Hampshire TV station, a 12-year-old boy with a rare disease called desmoid fibromatosis was made king of his domain this week.
The back yard of his house in a small N.H. town called Epping now includes a castle.
For some five years, David Morasco has been fighting the disease, which causes abdominal tumors that can grow into and even destroy adjacent tissue, organs and bones, and are often treated with chemotherapy.
The Make-A-Wish Foundation of New Hampshire made his day — and possibly his life — when it pulled out all the stops to create this impressive and possibly impenetrable gift.
As it turns out, the project happened to be the foundation’s 1,000th wish granted to a N.H. kid. Not bad.
“It’s mind-blowing,” the 7th grader was quoted as saying. “It’s more than I could have imagined.”
The 24 foot by 24 foot formidable fortress, which took several months to build, has many of the features you’d want your real or fantasy castle to include: heavy double doors; crenelations, or battlements, at the top of a curtain wall (made of wood); four towers; staircases; a courtyard; two rooms; and a great hall. A catwalk behind the merlons winds around the structure. It’s even made of stone (stone facing, anyway).
The unveiling was a big enough deal to attract N.H. Gov. John Lynch, who showed up, took a tour and stayed around for castle-shaped cake. (Coincidentally, young Morasco lived in the town adjacent to where I grew up, Lee.)
“The anticipation of all this when he’s been through the dark periods, this is just something that’s really raised his spirits so much,” said David’s father, Mike Morasco.
As for King David, he told the TV cameras, “I’ve already started planning wars and parties and stuff.”
Go David. And get out there and slay that dragon.