LORD OF THE RINGS poll (film version)

reminds me I've been meaning to watch these again... first is the best by a fairly wide margin methinks. I like all that preamble-y stuff.

Two Towers, because I like all of the Rohan stuff.

first by a seriously wide margin indeed. the others have too much peter jackson in them.

the first is the twee-est, the second is the most grungy and battle-heavy, the third is the most "epic". i choose the second.

yeah lolz maybe I like the first the most because its very Bakshi

the third one is the only one with real problems... all those goodbyes...

the second one has that shit where blomps was about to shoot that arrow then grabbed hold of that horse as it was going by and swung himself on DAMN

i feel like the last one maybe?

x-post -- That was easily the biggest 'whoa dude!' moment of all three first time through in the theater.

For all that there's so much of the story to tell after it, the first one builds up to a really stellar climax, the last few minutes just all come together on each front (editing, camera work, acting, music, etc.). So probably that if forced to choose but all of it flows together in my head.

Thought the second one was really boring, and the first one really is just a preamble...so I'll go for the third, despite the neverending endings.

o ya the endings. that was not for me.

the only problem i have with the third are the 2 or 3 scenes where the narrative pauses to recap events via a one-sided dialogue scene or a monologue but i loved the rohan shit too, + miranda otto and brad dourif and bernard hill.

sorry with the second, rather

though maybe it's a problem in the third too, i forget now

The third one because it has bad ass Gandalf and the sweeping shots of the charging Rohan are awesome

I like all the endings but I would.

From China Mieville's recent thoughts on Tolkien, a good argument I hadn't heard before on Jackson leaving out the Scouring of the Shire at the end:

The magic goes west, of course, but there's also the peculiar abjuring of narrative form, in the strange echo after the final battle, the Lord of the Rings's post-end end, the Harrowing of the Shire--so criminally neglected by Jackson. In an alternate reality, this piece of scripting would have earned talented young tattooed hipster video-game designer Johnno Tolkien a slapped wrist from his studio: since when do you put a lesser villain straight after the final Boss Battle? But that's the point. The episode concludes 'well', of course, so far as it goes, but in its very pettiness relative to what's just been, it is brilliantly unsatisfying, ushering in an era of degraded parodies of epics, where it's not just the elves that are going: you can't even get a proper Dark Lord any more.

I think they strained to do that more in the second one because they were truncating a lot of events and jumping around constantly - they felt (perhaps wrongly) that they needed to constantly be reminding the audience of the sequence of events, what was happening concurrently, etc. Which seems really stupid - that's something you can just SHOW, no narration required.

x-posts

Fellowship. I like all the sneaking around.

I was totally pissed that they opted for all those tearful goodbye scenes rather than the Scouring of the Shire, which is a great counterpoint/coda to the central story

The first takes more than an hour to get started, and if you're not a part of the cult (as I am proudly not) it's a serious drag. Then the Black Riders appear, and my heart starts to beat. They're in these films far too infrequently.

I voted for The Return of the King because even a non-cultist like me felt his jaw tremble when the Ring finally melted and during 12 of the 16 resolutions. Also: the big battle in which Ornaldo Bloomps kills those elephant things real good damn is awesome.

i think the presentation of those scenes was okay and while i watch them i feel like it plays more along the lines of one of those "and this is how heavy the burden now is" moments, but their intent is still obvious.

the first one focused a lot more on establishing the atmosphere and showed them walking around the NZ countryside a lot. i find myself putting it on just for the ambiance.

i'm just gonna say this- fuck orlando bloomps surfing down an elephant. fuck him real hard.

mmm yes

Second bcz Frodo was just a statue with giant eye pools in the third and it srsly stresses me out to see Samwise have to deal w/the whole situation.

i ageee with everyone that the scouring of the shire should've been included -- it ends the book's main narrative on such a powerful, creepy, bitter note.

the first one had a way bigger effect on me than any of the others because it totally brought back that heady feeling of reading the books as a pre-teen, when they seemed like the most awesome books ever -- and i still remember sitting in the theater when it suddenly hit me, 'wow, they're really gonna do this RIGHT.' but i'd have to watch these again before i could say which was really 'best.'

mark s (who doesn't seem to post here anymore, sadly) has a great theory about how gollum is the secret hero of the saga, since all the action necessarily revolves around him (hence making him the actual, ahem, "lord of the rings").

the battle in the second one is the most memorable part of any of the three, but yeah probably the first one has more charm.

the third is great too but jesus christ I can remember shifting in my seat through interminable "this feels like the end" scenes, about 20 in a row.

i was always confused with sauron's relationship to the other rings shown in the first film's preamble, maybe a LOTR stan can shed some light?

one ring to rule them all dude. it was a trap.

is it that he made them and gave them to the "MEN" and then he was able to control them as a result with the one ring? that's how I remember it but could be wrong.

x-post yeah

all of these films are incredible. i downloaded the first one on vcd (!) from some ftp site. it was 4 discs and i used to fall asleep with the first disk playing in the background pretty much every night during 2002. so that.

including the scouring of the shire would have been awful.

he created them to bind the leaders of men, dwarfs & elves to him using the secret and powerful 'one ring'? quick recollection.

i still remember sitting in the theater when it suddenly hit me, 'wow, they're really gonna do this RIGHT.'

^^^this. it is very very rare for me to get that rush from any film adaptation.

(particularly one I had always fantasized about as a young'un)

i figured that was the case, just needed to confirm!

Ha yes -- when Sauron's helmet crashed to the ground in the first prologue was when I was fully sold. What a start.

coming on the heels of the star wars prequel it looked even better. and then it kinda made the subsequent matrix flicks look even worse in comparison.

as far as fanboy fodder went

I hate to say it but this thread is missing a little bit of Morbz' haterade

i could make up a batch, tbh

;_;

i was going to say "i don't think morbs has seen these films" but then i remembered it never stopped him before.

Ha yes -- when Sauron's helmet crashed to the ground in the first prologue was when I was fully sold

i mean, this feeling lasted all the way up until the council of elrond, fully halfway through the first of three movies! what an achievement!

Well, I don't give a shit about the mythology, but as far as these kinds of films go they're the best of their kind.

only cos willow doesn't have any sequels, tbh

i keep thinking about the bullet dodged w/r/t the stuart townsend as aragorn casting.

well we still got agent johnson as elrond, to be fair.

yeah Viggo's some perfect casting, they lucked out with him. Actually they lucked out with most of the casting really, I can't recall anyone who's certifiably bad. John Rhys Davies maybe.

blanchett!

i don't think there's a single bad performance in the trilogy. gimli could have been played as more than what he mostly was (comic relief) but considering everything he was fine.

aragorn in the rankin/bass 'return of the king'

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/ROTKTVAragorn.jpg

Just imagine if John Rhys Meyers instead of John Rhys-Davies had played Gimli.

blanchett!

no way she's perfect - her freakout at the magic mirror scene is awesome

Denethor kind of sucked in the third movie, he should've been more like how he is in the book

her freakout at the magic mirror scene is awesome

i defend to the death your right to say it, etc etc but this was cringeworthy overacting.

i think the cringey shit was more special effects-based.

(with that specific scene)

Denethor kind of sucked in the third movie, he should've been more like how he is in the book

Showing him already collapsed rather than on the verge of it was a telescoping for sure. (There's the bit in the extra footage of Two Towers that's as close as we'll get to that.) But John Noble did pretty well with the part as written, and the whole dismissal of Faramir/obsessive eating/"Can you sing, master Hobbit?" part is on point, as was that last defiant sneer and flinging of the torch onto the pyre. All of which was sadly undermined by the 'I can flyyyyyyyyy!' bit, admittedly.

i liked sean bean basically reprising his role from ronin

i felt there was more of his trevlyan from goldeneye in it, tbh. but he was pretty good, surprisingly.

i dunno, the whole "big man on campus in over his head" thing is straight outta ronin imo

along with the couple of scenes where he's sonned by the elder, cooler compatriot

it's straight outta sean bean in hollywood, imo

i just ambushed you with a cup of mead

The first one because it has the least egregious use of Liv Tyler and her non-acting pout.

I spent a weekend a few months ago watching the extended versions of all these, back to back, and I want to do it again. These are SO GOOD.

I think they threw in Liv Tyler to give moviegoers an opportunity for safe bathroom breaks.

I've seen Fellowship and The Two Towers a good amount and prefer Two Towers. I only saw Return of the King once...I need to see it again soon. I'm totally in the mood for a Lord of the Rings-a-thon right now!

i liked the third one the best

i think the first is the best, the riders hunting the hobbits thru the shire and its outskirts is terrifying, and also the fucking Balrog!

the second has the awesome battle but i got tired of watching the rohan dudes, looked like smelly heavy metal guys and the acting of the king was kinda lame

first one = best
second = very good
third one = those fucking pirates gahhh

No they are all garbage option?

Second is probably the least boring though.

but which one is the best

in the spirit of morbs, but without the artistry i'm afraid
xpost

xp The one I saw in Paris Christmas Eve where the entire audience was either sleeping or laughing.

like they were all having funny dreams

christmas in paris? what are you, unamerican?

i broke my vegetarianhood on christmas in paris

I don't really have much invested in LOTR and haven't seen any of these more than once, but the second was the only one I enjoyed watching.

"like they were all having funny dreams"

Possibly they were dreaming about seeing a good movie.

possibly they were trying to avoid the ugly american in the room

back when they came out i probably woulda said the third one cuz it gave me, like, emotions - NOOOO MISTER FRODO ;___; - but in retrospect the first one is the most memorable so idk. mixed feelings about the second one - omar's right in that the rohan stuff kinda owns what with brad dourif and all those cats but at the same time it feels really out of place to me, like something snipped from the fucken 13th Warrior or somethin. i never read the books so i have no attachment to any of this shit, they probably could've just made one REALLY bitchin movie out of all that material tho

d*mn sean bean owns too

btw what is the scouring of tha shire

In brief: in the book, Saruman and Wormtongue are left isolated under the watch of the Ents but eventually are let free by Treebeard. They end up going to the Shire, where Saruman's been corrupting some of the populace, and take over the place with some leftover half-orcs/hillmen/thugs, and pretty much wreck it (the bit in the movie in the Mirror of Galadriel showing that the Shire's been trashed is Jackson's nod to this). Frodo and company return and inspire an uprising against all this and win, though Frodo's pretty wearied by the war already and doesn't directly participate. Saruman and Wormtongue die kinda like in the movie (no Legolas) after Saruman tries to kill Frodo, and the Shire is eventually restored.

And yes, that was in brief.

what is going on with that hobbit movie?

scouring of the shire is like some bizarre afterward and is a total letdown dramatically, thank god it wasn't in the movie, it had enough endings as it was

what is going on with that hobbit movie?

Fully underway, Guillermo del Toro directing and Jackson producing, filming starts next year, two films being planned (it'll be the story covered over both films, but with various things supplementing it drawing on the rest of what was happening at around the same time via Tolkien's retconning of the background in later years). http://theonering.net will have everything you need to know.

i think I'm just gonna ask you about it, okay, cuz I don't want to get sucked into theonering black hole

Two Towers, easy. it really blew my mind the first time i saw it and how well they pulled off Gollum.

i think I'm just gonna ask you about it, okay, cuz I don't want to get sucked into theonering black hole

Wise man. (Even I'm not going to completely obsess over the filming this time around -- ten years back I think I was already checking the site daily.)

scouring of the shire is like some bizarre afterward and is a total letdown dramatically, thank god it wasn't in the movie, it had enough endings as it was

agreed.

I probably like Two Towers the least, for how they portrayed the Ents and Faramir (or whatever the fuck his name is)

My wife had never read the books and didn't know it was all one story in three parts. She was so pissed when we walked out of the theater after the first one, raging about how she'd been waiting for three hours for them to get rid of the damn ring and then suddenly the movie just ended.

We bought a new TV last Christmas and watched all three extended editions over a three day period of utter sloth and it was the best. I've got to go with the Two Towers, though the Moria / Balrog stuff in Fellowship was probably my favorite segment of any of them.

i think two towers, for sort of the same reasons it was my least favorite of the books. in longform, it has the shortcomings of a middle chapter -- it just feels like it's getting you from one place to another, and it doesn't have the excitement and discovery of the beginning or all the grandeur and significance of the end. but in the movie, that means it's just like wall to wall action, with minimal thomas kinkadey elfin pastoralism. and the battle of helm's deep is A+ stuff.

plus there's the great wizard of oz nod at the black gate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuhSRGYyBJU

I need to see the long versions of all of them. But only the third one brought actual tears to my eyes. It's the triumph that gets me, not the deaths.

Fellowship one is the only one that's not a travestied fucking betrayal of the books.

First one for me; it's an adventure film, rather than a war film, and that really sucks me in. The camaraderie maybe?

Fellowship one is the only one that's not a travestied fucking betrayal of the books.

except Tom Bombadil is missing.

first one is my favourite anyway, the introduction of Aragorn, Bree, the Shire.

I never understood why they cut Gandalf versus the Witch King, the scene at the Black Gate with the Mouth of Sauron and the death of Saruman from the theatrical cut of the third movie. That really pissed me off, it only would've added about 10 mins to the running time.

The first one, definitely. Nick is right that the second one is a war film, and the battle of Helm's Deep is amazing, but I'm just not that into it. And the Ents are rubbish.

(However, I AM in it! My friend was an animator on the Golumn team, and they had to do a lot of Golumn without Andy Serkis as a reference as they'd changed the shot or whatever. I went to visit while he was out there, and we acted out a scene with me as Golumn and filmed it and he then used my movements. It's where Golumn has Sam by the throat and Frodo threatens him with Sting. Just one shot, so about a second and a half. Also, the Mirror of Galadriel was done by a different animation house, and when they had a screening for the Weta animators, they booed, apparently.)

Thinking more about this, The Two Towers might be the best of the theatrical versions, but Fellowship absolutely kills in the extended release.

The breaking of the fellowship is one of the best bits of the book, and they do it really really well. The psychology of Boromir in that scene, and the ring as a symbol of how power corrupts, is excellent.

Then you have Gandalf's "I am a servant of the secret fire. You shall not pass." bit with the Balrog, the "drums in the deep" stuff, the first appearance of the black riders.

that means it's just like wall to wall action, with minimal thomas kinkadey elfin pastoralism

lmao i was just talkin about that master of light shit w/someone the other day, those movies all look like paintings u would buy at a comic convention

i forgot about helm's deep tho, that owned

something else that owned - KKK grand wizard gandalf leading the charge against a bunch of savage hottentots in Rotk, i swear some of those shots were straight out of birth of a nation

fuckin' helm's deep, man. was only about 13 pages in the book. took up the entire movie. shield surfing bullshit.

welp the books sound p gay tbqh

thank christ for ledge. i felt like i was gonna draw all the SB action on this thread. also- OTMFM.

challopsin here but the movies are wayyyy better than the books

Jeez, are these still not out on BluRay? :-/

http://www.amazon.com/Rings-Trilogy-Extended-Editions-Blu-ray/dp/B0026L7H20/qid=1239958479

i never read them, but i tried to read the hobbit when i was a kid and i didnt get far because it was boring and dumb, i'm sure the lotr books arent as good as the movies so why bother

I never understood why they cut Gandalf versus the Witch King, the scene at the Black Gate with the Mouth of Sauron and the death of Saruman from the theatrical cut of the third movie.

Agreed, although the version of the death of Saruman that Jackson filmed has such stilted acting and staging.

One thing that was a bit annoying in the books and not in the movies = the alternating chapter structure sometimes. (e.g. I seem to remember The Two Towers being: what happens to hobbit a & b / what happens to hobbit c & d / what happens to hobbit a & b / what happens to hobbit c & d / what happens to hobbit a & b / what happens to hobbit c & d / what happens to hobbit a & b / what happens to hobbit c & d - other examples too: history / adventure / history / adventure / history / adventure / history / (etc) )

Also: very much OTM, IMHO:

The Two Towers might be the best of the theatrical versions, but Fellowship absolutely kills in the extended release.

― EZ Snappin, Friday, July 24, 2009 1:16 PM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm sure the lotr books arent as good as the movies

you're incorrect

Agreed, although the version of the death of Saruman that Jackson filmed has such stilted acting and staging.

True, I remember it being a lot more awesome in the book. There was a great moment on the commentary of the extended edition though with Christopher Lee talking about how Jackson was trying to tell him how to act when he gets stabbed and he was all,'Peter, i KNOW what it's like when someone gets stabbed', because he did a bunch of secret work for the government or something. It just made me think that Christopher Lee was a real badass who could take down anyone.

"what happens to hobbit c & d / what happens to hobbit a & b"

Been a long time, but I'm pretty sure the Two Towers book is just split half down the middle.

first time around in the theatres i remember 'fellowship' being the only success of these. thought 2 & 3 were boring as hell.

second time around, i re-watched them (the extended versions) this past march. totally changed my mind - they're all pretty awesome, and i think 'two towers' is prob the best. the rohan shit was awesome and really well done.

whoever said rohan looked like smelly heavy metal dudes was OTM, but i thought that was a good thing! rohan was some serious black metal shit right there

i havent seen these since they were in the theaters but i want to get them when they come out on bluray and have the longest hangover (new year's day?) session ever

two towers (book) does flip back and forth a lot, but that's classic creative writing 101 "how to maintain tension".

i havent seen these since they were in the theaters but i want to get them when they come out on bluray and have the longest hangover (new year's day?) session ever

― julien schNAGL (s1ocki), Friday, July 24, 2009 9:24 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

these are so perfect for that

"two towers (book) does flip back and forth a lot, but that's classic creative writing 101 "how to maintain tension"."

It doesn't flip between the hobbits though. Hobbits C/D are in the first part and Hobbits A/B the second. Hobbits C/D flip with Human A/Elf A/Dwarf A a lot though.

still remember sitting in the theater when it suddenly hit me, 'wow, they're really gonna do this RIGHT.'

^^^this. it is very very rare for me to get that rush from any film adaptation.

― girlish in the worst sense of that term (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, July 23, 2009 11:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Thirded.

the third one brought actual tears to my eyes. It's the triumph that gets me, not the deaths.

"My friends... You bow to no one" is the bit that does it to me.

Fellowship absolutely kills in the extended release.

Yeah, the extended edition is the only one which is a significant improvement. None of the added scenes feel superfluous or nerd-pandering.

i havent seen these since they were in the theaters but i want to get them when they come out on bluray and have the longest hangover (new year's day?) session ever

― julien schNAGL (s1ocki), Friday, July 24, 2009 9:24 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah I watched all of these back to back on a day I was really sick last winter. It was a pretty good time except for the occasional vomiting.

Fellowship in its extended form adds depth to what was in the theatrical version; Two Towers and Return add shit that was cut for time.

Must heavily disagree with chap/EZ re: the extended version of Two Towers -- Faramir's character/motivation is much more fleshed out/less immediately capricious (important given the alterations from the book) while the Ents don't seem as, well, dumb. Return's additions are less crucial but there's still a couple of good parts.

The Two Towers aka the Dumbing of the Ents. That was what pissed me off the most. Grr.

I really didn't like that in the theatrical version. The extended version places the burning of Fangorn as having just started, so Treebeard's ignorance of it makes a *lot* more sense, even if the end result is still rushed.

the first one for me. i like beginnings/the sense of novelty and it's got fewer boring bits imo.

I like the Faramir scenes, but they don't add depth; they're entirely new constructs that completely rework his character from the theatrical versions.

What I was trying to get at with my shorthand was that the Fellowship material doesn't add new characters and sequences as much as make existing moments longer and more meaningful. For example, the trip from Bree to Weathertop is in both the theatrical and extended versions, but in the extended you get a longer, tougher slog and more insight into just how new and strange this was for the hobbits. In the Faramir sequence of Two Towers, you get an entirely different character from the theatrical edition. The same with the Ents; they're not the same characters with all the additional footage.

I greatly prefer the extended versions of the two later films as they are better movies with the additional scenes. But the changes and additions make them more like different films than is the case with Fellowship. The first movie in its extended form is a better version of the same movie; the later two extended versions seem more like different takes (see Faramir) on the material.

I think the 1st one mainly for the Moria stuff. That was always one of my favourite parts of the books.

Although Ornaldo Bloomps did take down that elephant hardcore.

Dang?

In the Faramir sequence of Two Towers, you get an entirely different character from the theatrical edition. The same with the Ents; they're not the same characters with all the additional footage.

And thank goodness for it! I see your point but I think it's an improvement that's fully validated (secondarily, in neither case are they more like the book as a result -- it's a question of having them work in the adaptation as put together, and Faramir's compromised, and more detailed, back and forth is of a tone with Theoden's own frustrated anger at Gondor in the same film; everything feels much more on edge).

I've never seen any of the extended versions. I ought to really, I'd probably enjoy them.

And thank goodness for it! I see your point but I think it's an improvement that's fully validated (secondarily, in neither case are they more like the book as a result -- it's a question of having them work in the adaptation as put together, and Faramir's compromised, and more detailed, back and forth is of a tone with Theoden's own frustrated anger at Gondor in the same film; everything feels much more on edge).

I totally agree with this assessment. I don't think we're actually disagreeing on the essence; I just was too short and glib to make my point from the beginning! Jackson made some poor choices with the later two movies that are somewhat rectified in their extended versions. I don't think he made as many missteps, either conceptually or as a director/editor, with the first.

Should be noted that David Wenham as Faramir brings more to the material than is written. The supporting players in this series don't get enough credit.

I'm going to knee-jerk say "The Two Towers" based on the idea that the second movie in a series is always the best one.

faramir's character is excellent in the extended version, since his conflict and change of heart make much more sense

Should be noted that David Wenham as Faramir brings more to the material than is written. The supporting players in this series don't get enough credit.

True, and that role did make me into a fan of his. My other favorite part he's done I've seen so far was in The Proposition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fve7pjMZvE0

I liked him in Van Helsing which is one of those movies I recommend if you are stuck at home and are in search of something funny/entertaining on basic cable.

Why is it that everyone always mentions how Tom Bombadil or the Scouring of the Shire was left out the of the movies, but no one says a word about Ghân-buri-Ghân, who was also cruelly discarded by Jackson? Poor Ghân-buri-Ghân, he's like the Jar Jar Binks of LotR!

One thing I never liked about the movies is how they rely on digital FX to show a character being corrupted. When Bilbo is being affected by the Ring in the beginning of the first movie, and later on when the same happens to Galadriel in Lorien, and when Theoden is under Wormtongue's influence in the second movie, Jackson uses these corny special effects to emphasize how corrupted they've become. This is especially true with Galadriel, the scene where she goes "evil" is so over the top it's ridiculous! All three characters were portrayed by fine actors, so Jackson should've relied more on their ability to show the corruption by, you know, acting, instead of those stupid effects.

There was one crucial thing I was hoping Jackson would have changed compared to the books, and that is Gollum's fatal fall in RotK. I always thought it would've made more sense if Gollum hadn't just stumbled and fell to Mount Doom, but instead he would've (at least semi-consciously) jumped there by his own will. That would've made more sense regarding Gollum's character development, the battle between his good and evil side: in the end he finally realizes the horrible effect the Ring has had on him, and that he can never really escape its influence, so for this one time he takes fate into his own hands and does what needs to be done. This would've made Gollum's crucial role in the story more fitting both dramatically and emotionally, and Gandalf's prediction that he still has a role to play in the end would've made even more sense. But now both the book and the movie reach their conclusion because someone doesn't look where he steps, and to me that has always been terribly trivial and undramatic way to end the story.

The entire point of Gollum's character is that he succumbs to evil. His redemption failed; his entire life was all about the Ring, particularly after Frodo got him captured by Faramir. That final betrayal destroyed Gollum's last chance to be good and, from that point onwards, he is driven solely by the desire to possess the Ring.

the one with the burning vagina eye he wss a mean bad guy

That's how it goes, yeah, but I always thought the rather prosaic way the Ring ends up being destroyed was dramatically unsatisfying. Even from a thematical point of view, the only reason the Ring is destroyed is because the bigger evil (Ring-driven Gollum) wins the fight with the lesser evil (Ring-driven Frodo). Maybe that was Tolkien intended to do all along, but it seems like an odd conclusion for such an epic saga.

(x-post)

I get and kinda agree with your criticism Tuomas. Maybe the reason it's like it is in the books is Tolkien could never have had a character literally commit suicide, even if it was for self-sacrifice (a glorious death on the battle-field is another matter). Although I think the redemption ending you're talking about would have been a little broad and Hollywood.

Frodo shoulda pushed him in.

I would have no problem with a broad and Hollwood ending if it makes more sense than the "whoops, I slipped!" ending we have now.

Maybe the reason it's like it is in the books is Tolkien could never have had a character literally commit suicide

What about Denethor?

i mean he couldn't present suicide as a good choice

if you are v. religious then fighting a lost cause = fine, topping yourself = not cool

to counter Tuomas' observation:

neither Gandalf, Boromir nor Gandalf are CGI'd in their tempting of the ring.

i always sort of read's gollum's fall as at least partially, on some level, self-inflicted.

But now both the book and the movie reach their conclusion because someone doesn't look where he steps, and to me that has always been terribly trivial and undramatic way to end the story.

i think the point was that this was how God basically works in the world.

Or just how the world works. The ending of the Hobbit has a fair few convenient coincidences itself. The missing piece on Smaug's armour, Bilbo finding the Arkenstone.

yeah absolutely. not sure Tolkien's religious beliefs would lead him to think things are totally up to chance, but there's nothing stopping someone else from reading it that way. one man's chance is another's divine intervention.

I've had similar thoughts to Tuomas re. Gollum's fall. I don't think it would neccessarily be self-sacrifice that makes him jump, more "If I can't have the Precious, no one can".

Also I love Galadrial's CGI freakout, it really shook me up in the cinema.

If it was indeed Tolkien's religious views that made him write the scene at Mount Doom as it is, then it's kinda sad that his religion stopped him from writing what might've been the dramatic high point of the whole story. Though I don't really see Gollum's fall in the end as some sort of divine intervention or Will of God; throughout the rest of the book the fate of Middle Earth has always been decided by acts of men and elves and other non-gods. One central theme in the series is the freedom to choose between good and evil; several characters have to decide between using the Ring and being potentially corrupted by it, or leaving it be and remaining on the narrow path. So it would be weird to Gollum's final, random fall as some sort divine intervention, when all through the rest story the gods have not interfered in any way and it's been the choices of mortals that have decided what happens to the world.

"so it would be weird to view"

well i always took the mysterious and elusive ways that God works (ie, indirectly or through chance) to be one of the near explicit themes of LOTR, but then I'm not an expert on it so maybe that's a poor reading of it.

so yeah, and without getting into a debate over theology, we DO have freedom to choose between good and evil, that's why God is largely absent, but that doesn't prevent the tiniest bit of chance from helping out once in a while.

so, in other words, you have to put yourself in the right position, but even if you do sometimes events are out of your control.

iirc Tolkein meant to do nothing religious, overtly or covertly, in LOTR – he thought it was pretty cheap that C.S. Lewis did that in the Narnia books

also iirc the ending where the ring goes into the fire with Gollum IS different from the book, in that Sam has to save Frodo, correct...? In the book, Gollum just falls in while capering around, Frodo doesn't go over the edge with him.

i thought god guided orlando's arrows into the evil hearts of orcs.

i'm not saying gollum's death mundane death is an example of tolkien explicitly writing _in_ some "god works in mysterious ways" thing (although now i think about it, it kinda reminds me of the ending of NCFOM). i'm saying that, as a strict catholic, jrrt would be unlikely to present suicide in a positive light, even it would have been more satisfying for the grand narrative.

also, if tuomas's idea occurred to him and seemed dramatically appealing then it's not necessarily "his religion stopped him" from writing the ending. dude was a serious theologian and he held his beliefs in seriousness and after considerable thought. it's not like he was worrying about what the pope would think and threw away a great draft. tuomas's post reads a bit like "it's a pity he wasn't smart enough to agree with me about religion".

I wish I cld watch the pop throwing the stink eye over Tolkein's shoulder as he penned the manuscript. All the incense got to his brain. It was censership, I tell you!

pop=pope of course

did you know there was a draft where frodo knocked up sam, but sam got an abortion?

"Aye Mr. Frodo, ensoulment hasn't yet happened."

dude was a serious theologian

He might have balked at that description but there's no question he took questions of doctrine very seriously. Tolkien wondered in the years between WWII and the publication of LOTR whether or not all his work with Middle-earth was inherently arrogant and potentially sinful, in that by the act of sub-creation he might not be pushing a little too far towards the idea of creation, in a certain sense -- the 'Notion Club Papers' that were published posthumously explore this in depth. Various other later works address everything from the scientific bases of Middle-earth to extremely involved philosophical debates as framed by certain characters in the overarching legendarium. Only those who really want to look at his work in that depth will sense how much of a continuous internal struggle played itself out over the years; it's really no surprise in the end that those major works that did get published during his lifetime, The Hobbit and LOTR, appeared due to the alternate impulse behind their creations (his random idea for a children's story and the desire of his publishers for a sequel to it).

So Ned did he mean for there to be semi-didactic xtian elements in LOTR? (Haven't read any non LOTR/Hobbit, tho my husband has read a ton of them & they are defs sitting around the house.)

Is the r I r actually c?

He's often silent on that in terms of his notes in the developing manuscripts, from what I remember -- internally he might well have thought otherwise, but he's more concerned with the working out of the story, something which took years of revision and reconsideration as the original idea for a Hobbit II turned into something deeper. While he was clear about the work being both Christian and Catholic I suspect he thought of it more in the sense of demonstrating by example rather than spelling it out, and basically encouraging reflection if one sought it out.

I highly recommend reading his short story "Leaf by Niggle," which presents his own particular self-identity as 'sub-creator' working in the service of something grander in terms more explicitly Christian and Catholic.

for the sake of clarification, i wasnt trying to suggest there is anything didactic or even christian about LOTR. but there is a "higher power" VERY obliquely suggested and hinted at. but yeah, his religious views are highly sophisticated and i doubt he'd intend for the reader to surmise that God was simply moving chess pieces around throughout LOTR.

All this stuff you are talking about, Ned, sounds v enriching (way moreso than all the C.S. Lewis I've read, tho dude the guy's middle name was Staples = badass.)

Xpost the allegories in LOTR I believe were designed by Tolkein to be obfuscated so that the audience could read into it what they wanted while still getting a nice story of good vs. evil. Some stuff has to do with WWI, that I think has been confirmed as intentional by Tolkein.

his religious views are highly sophisticated and i doubt he'd intend for the reader to surmise that God was simply moving chess pieces around throughout LOTR

Very true. Free will is certainly one of the most tricky things about the whole story, and I like the fact that the tension is not entirely resolved.

All this stuff you are talking about, Ned, sounds v enriching

It provides alternate perspectives and a greater understanding of his deepest impulses, at the least. If I were a believing Christian and/or Catholic I'd doubtless find it even more so, but the general issues at work -- what is artistic creation? what makes the artist who he or she is? how is this conveyed? -- have a broader applicability. "Leaf by Niggle" is probably his most concise and, for all its relative simplicity in style, mature expression of it, and the moral lesson he emphasizes in it is very moving -- it's an argument against artistic obsession and solitude and against trying to get everything 'right,' something all the more striking given how much of his own life was given over to these impulses. But "Smith of Wooten Major" has a strength there too, an 'adult fairy tale' in a real sense of the word, addressing inspiration from beyond the fields we know and how age and perspective affects this, as well as social commitments and pressures alike.

Meanwhile if you just want something light go for "Farmer Giles of Ham" with the original illustrations by Pauline Baynes, which is nothing but enjoyably ridiculous Latin and English language and history jokes.

In the foreword to my edition at least Tolkien states "As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. [...] I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations".

You're right Ned, he was not a capital-T Theologian. I suppose my point was that he had a very sohpisticated approach to Christianity compared to modern popular writers.

And so, for him religion does not appear to have been this outside force which acted on him and dogmatically prevented him doing things he wanted to do (like use Tuomas's idea for the climactic scene). It was something that he took seriously and debated with others. He may not have intended to write an allegory (or actually written much Christian moral philosophy into the books), but if he was a Catholic and believed suicide was always wrong, for example, which is something reasonable people can conclude without the help of religion, then he's not going to present it as a redemptive act, which I think is what Tuomas is suggesting.

xpost -- Yeah, that was from his foreword to the revised edition in the mid-sixties. I think I linked this China Mieville piece before but I like his explanation on it:

Tolkien explains that he has a 'cordial dislike of allegory'. Amen! Amen! And just to be clear, there is no contradiction at all between this fact, and the certain truth that his world throws off metaphors, can and should be read as doing all sorts of things, wittingly or unwittingly, with ideas of society, of class, the war, etc. But here is precisely the difference between allegory and metaphor: the latter is fecund, polysemic, generative of meanings but evasive of stability; the former is fecund and interesting largely to the extent that it fails. In his abjuring of allegory, Tolkien refuses the notion that a work of fiction is, in some reductive way, primarily, solely, or really 'about' something else, narrowly and precisely. That the work of the reader is one of code-breaking, that if we find the right key we can perform a hermeneutic algorithm and 'solve' the book. Tolkien knows that that makes for both clumsy fiction and clunky code. His dissatisfaction with the Narnia books was in part precisely because they veered too close to allegory, and therefore did not believe in their own landscape. A similar problem is visible now, in the various tentative ventures into u- or dystopia by writers uncomfortable with the genre they find themselves in and therefore the worlds they create, eager to stress that these worlds are 'about' real and serious things--and thereby bleeding them of the specificity they need to be worth inhabiting, or capable of 'meaning', at all.

This is not a plea for naivety, for evading ramifications or analysis, for some impossible and pointless return to 'just-a-story'. The problem is not that allegory unhelpfully exaggerates the 'meaning' of a 'pure' story, but that it criminally reduces it.

Whether Tolkien himself would follow all the way with this argument is not the point here: the point is that his 'cordial dislike' is utterly key for the project of creating a fantastic fiction that both means and is vividly and irreducibly itself, and is thereby fiction worthy of the name.

That is a v. appealling view to me.

A similar problem is visible now, in the various tentative ventures into u- or dystopia by writers uncomfortable with the genre they find themselves in and therefore the worlds they create, eager to stress that these worlds are 'about' real and serious things--and thereby bleeding them of the specificity they need to be worth inhabiting, or capable of 'meaning', at all.

so fucking OTM and really evident in like 9/10ths of the new scifi stuff I see these days.

I suppose my point was that he had a very sohpisticated approach to Christianity compared to modern popular writers.

A contemporary like Graham Greene was seen to be a little more worldly on that front, and since his 'entertainments' ie the spy novels were set in the present day, looked more consistently at moral ambiguity, addressed blunter desires and internal conflicts, it's probably one reason why those were seen in more positive terms by many writers and critics at the time. But ultimately it's a different approach to a lot of the same issues, and where Tolkien might understate or aim for broader portraits, there's still a lot of similar things at work.

I have an important question

do orcs have genitals?

You don't need our validation to create your slashfic projects, Shakey Mo.

you wound me!

I think I'd have to vote for the first one because it's the one I enjoyed watching the most. I never read the books so maybe I'd feel differently if I had but the first one is the one that sticks with me because it was just so beautiful and new at the time.

I should watch these all again.

I watched them all recently. It made for a truly delightful weekend. (I rec maybe something to do at the same time if you have a hard time sitting still? Knitting, weed, handjobs, whatevs.)

Yeah, that's sort of what I'm picturing tbh. A marathon viewing while otherwise preoccupied.

I had some knitting + some pear cider + lots of fun!

In a way I wish I'd never have watched these. My own personal conceptions of Frodo and Legolas and Gimli are lost and gone forever.

nah, just read the books again.

Watching all 3of these in a row while getting handjobs and smoking weed sounds alternately alluring and painful.

certainly, after 10 hours there'd be chafing.

i was going to say "i don't think morbs has seen these films" but then i remembered it never stopped him before.

― "he said...all things passantino the night" (omar little), Thursday, July 23, 2009 7:37 PM

har de fucking har! No, I save my loathing for Tolkien's dreadful prose, in spite of having read about 3 paragraphs of it.

I really like the first of these, and the second is good also. I saw the third at Lincoln Center with the hobbit actors in attendance, amid rapturous fannies who applauded EVERYTHING, and seldom have I been filled with such disgust for the human race.

But all of them, and 2 of the 3 Star Wars prequels, are better than Knocked Up or Barton Fink.

The Fellowship of the Ring ***1/2
The Two Towers ***
The Return of the King **1/2

Is there a Barton Fink sequel?

Lord of the Fink: Return of the Fink

!! xpost

there was no excuse for that Best Picture Oscar tho

So, wait, The Revenge of the Sith and Attack of the Clones are better than Knocked Up? U MAD.

No, The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith are.

all junk compared to Death to Smoochy, of course.

Good to see you back Dr M. Our opinions are normally wildly at odds, but this place wasn't the same without you.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I always found the book of the Two Towers to be the least enjoyable, but the film was great.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Makes sense.

ned

Let this be the hour when we draw swords together.

n/h

Hey, I have the hair for it.

that certainly seems to have been all jackson looked for in most of his casting decisions...

but anyway good poll result.

the big battle in which Ornaldo Bloomps kills those elephant things real good damn is awesome.

― Heric E. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, July 23, 2009 4:19 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

!

So, it's happening then?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51wE7vt5bnL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0026L7H20

the second one has that shit where blomps was about to shoot that arrow then grabbed hold of that horse as it was going by and swung himself on DAMN

― "he said...all things passantino the night" (omar little), Thursday, July 23, 2009 7:08 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

THIS PART IS SO SICK

Are the 3 films on one disc or will i have to get out of my chair halfway through again?
I didn't have to get up halfway through in the cinema, i don't see why i have to in my own (rented) home especially at £51.95

my favorite blomps badass moment was in the climax of the first movie, this static shot of him just mowing down charging orcs with his bow & arrow as they're mere yards away from him - i think they had to cgi in the arrows because it was physically impossible for him to line up and notch them that fast

Hire someone to change discs for you -- if it's someone who can put in your catheter for you, you've killed 2 birds with one stone.

xp

haven't got one WmC, what made you think i had by my post?

If you're going to be getting up anyway to pee, disc-change-problem solved.

sod getting up, catheter all the way :)

Just watched these movies for the first time in years (extended versions). First two are great, third even more slack than I remembered it, but (like the Academy!) I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. In the words of a friend of mine, we really dodged a bullet with these. Without the great (perfect?) cast and dead-on dedication to Tolkien's universe via Jackson, these could have ended up three of the worst movies of all time, or at the least total failures failures. No wonder Jackson hasn't been able to get his shit together ever since!

casting is perfect but they weren't directed well in their performances.

Jackson's dedication to tolkien's universe included glow in the dark pirate battles and werewolves to break the monotony.

Wargs did exist in Tolkein's universe, the army of the dead was vague enough to interpret that way.

Yeah, wargs appear in "The Hobbit" IIRC.

i love these movies. well, i love the first two. and once you're that deep in you might as well finish up.

extended versions are by some miracle better, too.

yes they do, but not as a popcorn interlude because ohio might be getting bored

and yeah, wargs are all over tolkien. also they're not werewolves they're just big scary wolves. also these books suck so i don't care.

just stumbled across this long but really interesting 1963 letter from tolkien, which addresses some of the issues brought up by tuomas and others in the discussion upthread.

http://smu.edu/tolkien/online_reader/TolkienLetters246.pdf

that thing where 'id have done this bit differently' for 50 identical posts drives me mental about big t aka the finnlander, tho i love the guy besides

That's a very interesting letter... It shows that Tolkien did actually consider (at least in retrospect, it's not clear whether he had this option in mind while actually writing the book) an alternative ending where Gollum (or even Frodo) sacrifices himself and voluntarily jumps to Mount Doom with the ring. But he doesn't really say why he didn't choose this alternative, the only explanation he gives is the "logic of the story", which I'm not really buying. Sure, it's more dramatic to have Sam distrust Gollum, which eventually destroys any chance of Gollum siding with Frodo and Sam, but the alternative option where Gollum does side with them, and then steals the ring at Mount Doom anyway would've been quite dramatic too... And it would've lead to a more satisfying conclusion by avoiding the "I slipped" bit and having Gollum willingly sacrifice himself. So yeah, I don't think "logic of the story" is a good enough explanation, Mr. Tolkien.

i think by 'the logic of the story' tolkien meant that he had already established that the ring was so powerful that no one could voluntarily give it up. if frodo, who had been carrying around the ring for a relatively short period of time, became so fucked up by it that he couldn't bring himself to fulfill his quest, it's pretty hard to buy the idea that gollum -- who had been consumed by the ring for hundreds of years -- could suddenly overcome its power enough to destroy it. (how did gandalf expect frodo to be able to do it, anyway? didn't frodo have enough trouble dropping it into a fireplace at home? haven't read LOTR in quite a while so can't recall if this was ever explicitly addressed, but it seems like kind of a major plothole.) but it's interesting that tolkien apparently considered doing just that.

gah

i think gandalf expected sam to keep frodo grounded. i know he doesn't plan to send sam with him at the beginning but at that point he also doesn't plan to send frodo to mordor. i don't think he would have sent frodo alone (or been ok with him going off alone at the end of fellowship, which when gandalf comes back from the dead doesn't seem to worry him at all).

i like the ending because i like the idea that the ring's vague sentience (its way of slipping from one hand to be found by another) finally fails it: the consumptive adoration it inspires blinds the person it afflicts, and that's what ends up destroying it. gollum doesn't just slip randomly.

good points (as usual), DLH. rereading my last post i kinda can't believe i still even remember that much about an 1100 page book i haven't read since i was half the age i am now.

i like the ending because i like the idea that the ring's vague sentience (its way of slipping from one hand to be found by another) finally fails it: the consumptive adoration it inspires blinds the person it afflicts, and that's what ends up destroying it. gollum doesn't just slip randomly.

I think the movie is actually better in this regard, because Gollum's fall is a direct result of Frodo and Gollum fighting over the ring; that fight is a miniature version of the main conflict in the book, and the fact that the ring has such an effect on people is what leads it being destroyed. IIRC correctly, in the book Gollum just does some sort of victory dance, and then slips up and falls... Yeah, I guess you could say he was blinded by the ring, and that's what caused him to misstep, but IMO that is still a thematically weak solution, when there would've been more fitting ways to resolve the whole thing.

i think by 'the logic of the story' tolkien meant that he had already established that the ring was so powerful that no one could voluntarily give it up. if frodo, who had been carrying around the ring for a relatively short period of time, became so fucked up by it that he couldn't bring himself to fulfill his quest, it's pretty hard to buy the idea that gollum -- who had been consumed by the ring for hundreds of years -- could suddenly overcome its power enough to destroy it

This is not what Tolkien says in the letter though; the "logic of the story" part refers to Sam driving Gollum away, not to Gollum being unable to destroy the ring. Tolkien explicitly says in the letter that if the Sam thing had gone differently, and if Gollum had become friends with Frodo, he could have sacrificed himself. Here's what he writes:

Certainly at some point not long before the end he would have stolen the ring or taken it by violence (as he does in the actual Tale). But 'possession' satisfied, I think he would have sacrificed himself for Frodo's sake and have voluntarily cast himself into the fiery abyss.

So Tolkien seems to think possession of the ring is what matters to Gollum, and that satisfied he could still potentially destroy it. Note that if he throws himself into the abyss, he never loses that possession, he dies while still possessing the ring.

But if you think that Gollum's love for Frodo seems like a lame motivation for resolving the conflict, there would've been other ways to resolve it in a more satisfying manner. You could've established, for example, that once Gollum puts the ring on, he knows Sauron is soon coming to get it, and he knows there's no way he can fight against Sauron, so he's gonna lose the ring anyway. You could've written an epiphany scene for Gollum, where him attacking Frodo and stealing the ring would've made him consider all the awful things the ring had caused him to do... (If this was the alternative story version Tolkien outlines in the letter, Gollum would still consider Frodo a friend, so stealing the ring from him would be a bad thing in his eyes.) This epiphany, combined with the fact he knew Sauron was gonna get the ring anyway, could've also made him make the jump. So it would've been partly atonement for all the terrible things he had done because of the ring, partly a "if I can't have it, no one can" act of defiance against Sauron.

It would have been better if elrond had taken the ring and taken the fight to sauron and finished the whole affair without any fuss

It would have been better if frodo wore the ring all the time and was invisible then they wouldnt have needed an actor lol

It would have been better if gandalf swapped rings at the start but forgot and when gollum fell and nothing happened he could have usual suspected a flashback and dropped his cup and been all like noooooooo cos the ring was in his pocket all along

How do any of those endings fit the themes of the book?

they are more satisfying than the themes of the book, which i will also improve

and cmon that gandalf soze moment would be hardcore daaaaaaammmn

The point of the discussion wasn't "I can rewrite Lord of the Rings", it was that (in my opinion) the solution to the ring conflict is a bit weak, within the book's own set of themes and its narrative... I was only trying to point out that there are stronger potential endings that would not contradict or feel out of sync with the rest of the book.

It would have been better if Frodo had strapped into a cargo-loader and battled with a giant alien queen gollum over the edge of the precipice. And then nuked the whole site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

how would the ring being in gandalf's pocket all along contradict the themes of the book? loss, serendipity, the fading of the mental power of the istari, the worth of a task being judged on the struggle and journey and not the results? much better ending.

That doesn't make sense within the context of the book, though. When Gandalf and the Balrog fell to the pit in Moria, didn't his clothes get lost and wasn't he nude when he came back? He got that fancy white robe to replace the old robe, and the ring should've been in the pocket of the old robe, which is now deep beneath the earth. Also, Frodo should've noticed the switcheroo by the end of the first book, when he uses the ring's power to run from Boromir.

That's the true message of the book, the twist that if you act like you're invisible other people will ignore you.

ya he was well below eye level for boromir anyway i mean it's not that much of a stretch

gandalf was nude when he came back but the ring fell onto the claw of the eagle unbeknownst to all and was thither conveyed into gandalf's wizardly arse whence the eagle held him in a steely grip

jesus we're making great progress on improving one of the best loved stories of all time this was a good call tuomas my bad

now, you'll be wondering of course how the ring escaped gandalf's arsepucker upon his return as the white wizard. as all know, gandalf travelled to rohan and forged a bond with the king of the mearas, shadowfax. shadowfax was a beast of such aged and true nobility that the instant he felt gandalf's seat on his unsaddled back, he felt the ring within the ring and turned around to the great wizard and neighed there's a ring of power in your arse. but by that time frodo was long gone and they didn't have phones.

You should be writing a book with all this darraghmac, maybe pen parts 4, 5 & 6 for Jackson to make another Quattuordecillion?
Don't forget to get a percentage for your trouble.

in jackson's version they'd probably just have phones tho

Nice, but Gandalf tamed Shadowfax before the main events of LotR, i.e. long before he would've had any ring up his arse.

Also, how could Gandalf himself not notice the ring there? You'd think wizards would have at least as (if not more) sensitive arseholes than us humans? Plus any excrement that would come out of his anus would pass the ring and become invisible, you'd think invisible poo would made him suspect there's something up his butt?

And they did have phones, the Palantirs!

damn t, i'll give you this- you keep the creative dept honest

whether gandalf had previously 'tamed' (ugly word for what was essentially platonic bestiality) shadowfax would not have had any bea-ring on shadowfax sensing the concealed artefact.

wizards are essentially angels and as such don't need especially sensitive arseholes, they're mainly for decoration and indeed in one of the segments of unfinished tales lil chris t delves into an exploration of wizardly arseholes and asks if they might not have ended in a cul de sac around or about the coccyx.

this also answers the invisible poo question, but it was a good question and it shows that you're thinking.

Saruman was corrupted when he used the Palantir to call some X-rated lines in Mordor... The phone bill he netted was enormous, there was no other option than to conquer neighbouring realms in order to cover it.

(xpost)

So what you're saying is that a mere horse (no matter how noble) was able to detect the ring through Gandalf's undies and robe, where Gandalf himself, a motherfucking Maia, was not able to sense it even though there was nothing between it and his arse?!

his nerveless ass, remember that the maia were formed p much off the bat by ea early doors and as such had a lot of questionable design flaws

Okay, but if Gandalf discoverd the ring up his butt after he turned White and sat on Shadowfax, why did he okay The Black Gate gambit? He would have known it was useless.

And why did he have an exact replica of the ring lying in his pocket anyway?

Glad I bailed when I did.

The "black gate"

I keep meaning to come back to this, tuomas, apologies

I think the movie is actually better in this regard, because Gollum's fall is a direct result of Frodo and Gollum fighting over the ring; that fight is a miniature version of the main conflict in the book, and the fact that the ring has such an effect on people is what leads it being destroyed. IIRC correctly, in the book Gollum just does some sort of victory dance, and then slips up and falls...

this was a major disappointment of the movie for me actually, though not really for any of the reasons expressed in this thread. i feel like tolkien purposely designed the moment's of the ring's destruction to be this sudden, stunning, yet strangely anticlimactic moment -- like, 'oh, shit happens.' and jackson (of course) couldn't help but blow it up into this stupid prolonged overdramatic action sequence.

Tolkien later wrote that it was direct intervention by Eru, Middle-earth's version of God, that led to Gollum's "accident".

I had no problem with the "Frodo vs. Gollum" fight, because it wasn't framed as a "yeah! cool!" type of action sequence, it was a very sad scene, showing how mad the Ring had driven these two poor creatures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHoJSgq6mqc

lol at some point I will tire of these, but not today

I re-watch these movies every few years, and every single time I marvel at their achievement, how there were dozens of things that could have gone wrong but didn't. Casting, acting, script, effects - they're just such wonders, with only a few rare off beats scattered across all 10 hours or however long the sum total is. I think they've aged really well, and I didn't even mind the multiple endings of the last film this time around. Having re-watched "Star Wars" with the kids recently, too ... they were fine, but these movies, they're something else. Hope to keep revisiting them over the years.

This poll would have been more interesting had the Bakshi version been included as an option.

they are even more amazing when compared with how bad the Hobbit movies are.

The Hobbit movies are so bad that I know I didn't see the third one, but had to think about whether or not I saw one or two of the other ones, and even then I couldn't remember which one I saw.

i think these are terrific too. i remember reading a lot of sniffy articles around the time that talked about "seas of pixels", in reference to the aerial shots of a zillion orcs, but really these are such tactile movies; everything is built and solid and present and people are obviously not standing in green rooms talking to tennis balls. of the extended versions my favorite is two towers: melancholy, relatively smallscale. the white flowers growing on the barrows. in many ways it makes an action movie of the books (which some would call an improvement) but in moments like the passage between the giant statues or the helm's deep section the aging ruined world of the books comes across about as well as it was ever gonna. i also think viggo is miraculous. the role is so boring.

i never made it out of bag end in the hobbit movies.

" there were dozens of things that could have gone wrong but didn't. Casting, acting, script, effects"

Wrong, wrong, quite wrong (hard to tell with the acting tbh), right

" in many ways it makes an action movie of the books (which some would call an improvement"

WRONGEST

I freely admit the thing I most enjoyed about the Hobbit movies was the documentaries. And the three hour fan edit that turned it all into one film that actually followed the book as closely as possible given what was filmed/released.

And the three hour fan edit that turned it all into one film that actually followed the book as closely as possible given what was filmed/released.

I've been meaning to watch this, it's good is it?

If there's anything I like to see, it's Tolkien fans turning into orcs.

I like-but-don't-love most of the standard nerd film franchises (SW, LOTR, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, BTTF, etc.) about equally. They're well done and good fun to run through every few years or so but they ultimately fade from memory pretty quickly (which works in their favor once those few years have elapsed). The Hobbit films certainly weren't as good as LOTR but they were decent (if overlong and ultimately unnecessary).

I think for all their pros and cons, SW and Harry Potter are pretty pro forma, in their own respective ways. BTTF and Indiana Jones, first movies are essentially perfect, the rest are perfunctory and degrees of entertaining/unnecessary. Hobbit films worst of everything. But LOTR - darraghmac, you really didn't/don't like the acting, effects, writing and casting of LOTR? Just curious, what's off for you? Is it just that it is not what you envisioned from the book? If anything, watching any of the new Hobbit movies really underscores what the first three films achieved, since everything (acting, effects, script, etc.) is clearly a massive downgrade.

I do agree that Raiders and, to a lesser extent, the first BTTF stand above the pack (although I think I personally prefer the third installments of both franchises).

The amazing thing is that the Hobbit movies are so awful and still not as bad and tossed-off as I worried LOTR was going to be. A few really huge missteps aside, they "feel" like Middle Earth and not like some generic late 90s Hollywood production. That's a miracle IMO. See also recent discussion starting here-ish: worst movie in the IMDb top 50 . I stand by my belief that the biggest mistake was not outlining the whole thing so that Scouring of the Shire really was the ending sequence, with all the other excess endings treated as a closing-credits montage. It would also pay off the heavy, heavy use of Saruman in the first two films, which was rooted in an (understandable) desire for an onscreen, human villain figure - as much as people find the Scouring an odd sort of tacked-on thing, it could really work in a film as an OH SNAP IT'S HIM kinda moment. I dunno, I'm probably crazy though.

what's crazy to me is that there was no better director suited to the LOTR material (for that particular version of the stories at least) than Peter Jackson and he created such a lived in world, and then a decade later he's the worst director imaginable suited to the Hobbit material and basically wrecked it 100%.

I'm always amazed by Fellowship. Even in its departures from the book it gets just about everything right, eliminating some of the episodic stuff in the first half that wouldn't have worked as well in a movie, to focus on what was most exciting, evading the Nazgul and escaping the Shire. I like the sense of an expanding perspective as the hobbits journey out into the world. It makes the world feel bigger and more real, whereas in the subsequent movies, I think the world is inevitably reduced somewhat by the increasing military focus. (I don't know if that makes sense.)

No, I agree with that.

I totally agree with that, fellowship until galadriel is a frankly astonishing triumph. Everything after is beautiful but its not LOTR and its terrible.

DrC and JinC and nomar otm

looking forward to watching these with my daughter when she's old enough

this franchise shits all over the others mentioned imo (tbf I haven't seen all the HP movies - I did enjoy the Prisoner of Azkaban a lot more than I thought I would)

I would also (controversially?) add The Hunger Games to that list of franchises. Those movies were almost shockingly solid.

I saw the first two and kinda enjoyed how well made they were but I have deep issues with their politics etc.

as noted here: The inevitable Hunger Games thread

I still need to see The Hobbit 2 and 3. Jurassic World was enjoyable after five drinks, maybe the same principle will apply.

"need" is putting it a bit too strongly

We're doing The Hobbit in the Children's Lit course I work with this semester. My plan, to alleviate my reading load in the coming term (I've have two courses worth of books to read in addition to these, plus all the stuff I need to be reading for my comprehensive exam in May), is to blow through as many of the Children's Lit texts over the Christmas break as possible, and maybe use the film versions to reorient myself when it comes time to teach the texts in the course. I figure this will work well for Peter Pan or Narnia or Coraline, but it is hilarious to consider that with The Hobbit, it would literally take longer to watch all 9ish hours of Jackson's adaptation than to read the 300-something page book.

Plus, the bits of the one Hobbit movie that I didn't sleep through didn't look all that promising...

I totally agree with that, fellowship until galadriel is a frankly astonishing triumph.

http://www.theargonath.cc/characters/elrond/pictures/efotrcouncil5.jpg

I would also (controversially?) add The Hunger Games to that list of franchises. Those movies were almost shockingly solid.

Man, I cannot get with this. I liked the first two a lot, actually, but I just saw Mockingjay part 1 and I thought it was terrible. Just so boring and stupid and padded out. There's even a scene where one of those two guys sees Katniss on his video screen and he's all "Katniss? Katniss, is that you! They're coming, Katniss! They're coming to get you!!!" And then the screen goes black, and Katniss turns to the dude next to her and mutters "I think he's trying to warn us ..."

Yeah, well, duh. It also bugged me how she was the most important person in the revolution, the most prominent cog in the machine, but she's just moping around this bunker and no one so much as smiles at her or gives her a slap on the back. She's just moping, and hundreds of extras are milling around, waiting in cafeteria lines, watching TV, etc. Like, treat her with some respect, she's your savior, you morons! Vs., say, how whatshername was treated in "Edge of Tomorrow," basically inspiring awe and intimidation everywhere she went.

New Hunger Games movie was a disappointment at the box office, no?

Anyway, per the Hobbit, this made the rounds a few weeks back:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/19/9764016/peter-jackson-the-hobbit-movies-terrible-explanation

TL, DR:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQkygZdZ_Vk

Start at :58.

I'll have to see how I feel about the HG movies after a rewatch. I went in with exceptionally low expectations and expected the first one to be something like the first Divergent movie or whatever that fucking stupid thing was called (my gf has continued watching those but it was one and all the way done for me) so it's possible that I've overpraised because they were way better than I ever would've thought.

First was OK, second was good! But Mockingjay Part one was duuuuuuuuul.

"darraghmac, you really didn't/don't like the acting, effects, writing and casting of LOTR? Just curious, what's off for you? Is it just that it is not what you envisioned from the book?"

Partly that but I could allow for and forgive that, and the effects (and especially the sets etc) I could not have dreamed of being as perfect as they were.

But the casting is very very weak outside of mortensen, hobbits, wizards. Elves are clearly just fey hippie art students to p Jackson, a huge failing. Dwarfs are a punchline, a huge failing. Non human elements are treated without any weight or seriousness in general, they are a novelty factor and this is v indicative of.....something Jackson just doesn't get about the middle earth creation....that the non-human characters are as real and important and defined and established as men are- they're not defined by their interactions with men as they are in the movies.

I do genuinely think the acting (as aside from casting) is wooden and stilted, amounting to little more than "speak my wife's stilted dialogue clearly, then do the stunt".

The changes to the books are disastrous- omissions are inevitable and fair enough (Dr casino 100% otm about scouring of shire, obviously) but the addition of extra sequences kinda defy belief in a ten hour sequence. Incredible presumption to attempt it, imo, fanboy ikr, but to do it because you fancied a werewolf fight and a ghost fight and you think you get pacing better than the guy who wrote the lord of the rings eh nah I can't even

Mockingjay 1 was a big let-down for me but i haven't seen the part 2 yet and tbh because of what M 1 is i knew it was gonna suck

oh, and Peter Jackson doesn't get Tolkien is pretty obv imo

I've been meaning to watch this, it's good is it?

Yeah -- I mean, it's not *perfect* but on a technical level they did a fine job and since it leaves in all the Smaug stuff, hey, I'm good.

It's an interesting debate, how much fealty to the source material is required. I only read the LOTR books once, over the course of a few study halls in ... middle school? 6th grade? So I have't read them in 30 or so years. But watching the movies, there's nothing the jumps out at me as not belonging, short a dwarf joke or two. So I guess anyone really familiar with the books might indeed be disappointed that the films don't reach the depth or level of detail that the books do, and that's why there are books, thank goodness. To bring up Harry Potter as an (aforementioned) analogy, I've read the books and seen the movies, and the movies, even at their best, are nowhere near the books, imo - as are most of these epic children series that popped up in the series' wake - and most of the movies are merely solid simulacrums of the book experience. But even on their own, there are aspects of most, if not all, of the Harry Potter movies that are just sort of boilerplate, or run of the mill, or lacking in awe, and on their own, I don't get that from any of the LOTR films, which are full of such moments, nearly non-stop. They're great movies, made well, always character and emotion driven right up until the end. That one might think they fall short of the books in this case I'd suggest is not a fair criticism, because it's possible that a greater adherence to the books ironically might have made them worse films, however faithful.

I try to remove my distaste for the Jackson edits from my criticism of the acting, script etc tbh

BTW

short a dwarf joke or two.

Boooooooooo

the Gimli comic relief stuff is p weak/unnecessary. thankfully there's not too much of it.

love darragh's point about the elves. Wouldn't have thought to put it that way at all but it is right. I do think some of the parts work, but when they come off as just kind of... Men, But Weird - that doesn't feel right. I think a lot of this comes from building up the Arwen/Aragorn plot way way too much, which generally was too Hollywood (but at least kind of old-fashioned Hollywood) and further pushed the sense that this is Aragorn's story and not, basically, the four hobbits'. But yeah, when we have to have scenes of the father arguing with the daughter over her marriage decision and all that, and he's sort of seething in a very mannish way about how she'll be forsaking her elvishness, it doesn't convey any sense of the elves being much of anything at all special. (Maybe better than some of the alternative possibilities, mind you; in a way Tolkien's elves set off a lot of colonialist or Orientalist bells for me. This once-great race, seen as existing in a state of weird timelessness, who we admire with hats over our hearts while nodding sagely that indeed, sad though it might seem, history has dictated that these nobles shall within our lifetimes depart the stage to leave it clear for historical beings. Etc.)

Of course, my reception of all the books has always been shaped in part by heavy viewing (and LP listening) of the Rankin-Bass film, where Elrond really is otherworldly, to the extent they could muster anyway. (Thranduil, oddly, is a hunched green mutant.) I guess Jackson still beats Bakshi, where Elrond is some balding guy in a chair.

Best adaptation is the amazing BBC radio one obv.

I.....had blocked out the arwen thing. Like, genuinely.

the old bbc adaptation of the hobbit is awesome too

Still mad about what they did to Treebeard.

? I love the ents in the film

shoehorned action sequences don't really seem like real changes honestly, except as dmac fairly points out to pacing, tho obv the biggest and most constant change to pacing, and probably to the weight of the story because of the things it ends up juxtaposing and the totally different kind of appeal it makes to your attention, is the decision to interleave the hobbits' storyline with the others' in tt/rotk rather than putting them back-to-back in uninterrupted chunks.

otoh faramir being visibly tempted by the ring was a real change, and even to a tolkien apostate like me watching the movies as a big old-hollywood dramatic mechanism with terrific practical effects always seems startlingly arrogant, like they were like, well, if tolkien'd only read robert mckee...

my favorite elvish moment in the (extended) movies is sam's first glimpse of them through the trees, dying as frodo+sam are born. agree that this tone is not sustained. (maybe why it was cut.)

xp the bit where he gets tricked by those young whippersnapper hobbits into discovering what Saruman is doing to his forest. He's the oldest and wisest natural creature in all of middle-earth, he knew full well what was going on.

xpost

otoh faramir being visibly tempted by the ring was a real change, and even to a tolkien apostate like me watching the movies as a big old-hollywood dramatic mechanism with terrific practical effects always seems startlingly arrogant, like they were like, well, if tolkien'd only read robert mckee...

There's a reason for that.

http://mckeestory.com/about/

Peter Jackson (writer/director THE LORD OF THE RINGS Trilogy, THE HOBBIT) has lauded him as “The Guru of Gurus.”

And per Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McKee#Life_and_awards

In 1990, Robert McKee was brought to New Zealand by the NZ Film Commission, and delivered a three-day seminar on screenplay and story structure in Auckland and Wellington. In the audience were Peter Jackson & Jane Campion. The seminar had a major influence on Jackson, who went on to write and direct Heavenly Creatures, The Lord of the Rings, and King Kong.

lol

the guru of gurus!

elves FIND love! elves LOSE it!

The seminar had a major influence on Jackson, who went on to write and direct Heavenly Creatures, The Lord of the Rings, and King Kong.

lol wikizings

i hadn't thought about this so much before today but yeah. the filmed version of faramir is way, way less interesting both for the audience and for the actors. i really like book-faramir's kind of sad realization of what exactly happened between frodo and his brother, frodo trying to keep it from him to spare his feelings, but him knowing his brother well enough to guess. and how he's just sincerely curious, not meanly suspicious, about the circumstances of boromir's death. it's a small episode in the book, but one which sketches in this very tolkien-ish character. also one of the few humans we meet (along with Theoden and his family) who give you some hope that this coming Age of Men bodes anything good for the world at all.

in general, Gondor is a somewhat vague place to me (in the book as well as the films) - we only really see Minas Tirith and have to assume that out in the broad lands there are farmers toiling away on the soil, and little towns and things, not shown by Tolkien with the same level of detail as the sub-divisions of the Shire. like a video game where a whole medieval land is a castle and a few scattered towns with a total of 40 people you can talk to... you fill in the blanks. but it's helpful if the few people we do meet can stand in for something we relate to. faramir, and in the books beregond and bergil, are doing that work so yeah, i think treating faramir as a malleable character that could be rejiggered for dramatic tension at no consequence to the larger world-making or the stakes of the last film was a mistake. not a fatal one but a mistake.

aragorn friendzoning eowyn in favor of arwen was the least believable part of these movies, just because arwen after she was such a badass in FOTR act 1, she ended up being a gauzy deviant art conception. eowyn is such a great compelling character with a nice arc.

and eowyn with faramir should have been a lot more moving than it was, but faramir was such a lesser character, like this petulant weak mini-boromir whose redemptive arc was achieved because we felt pity for him, not bc he was particularly noble.

I guess mid century British novelists had a bigger hard on for wan Pre Raphaelite women.

we only really see Minas Tirith and have to assume that out in the broad lands there are farmers toiling away on the soil, and little towns and things, not shown by Tolkien with the same level of detail as the sub-divisions of the Shire. like a video game where a whole medieval land is a castle and a few scattered towns with a total of 40 people you can talk to... you fill in the blanks.

Yeah I admit I always would have liked to have known more there. There's the troops that arrive before the siege from all over Gondor, Aragorn's passage with the Dead Company, the small bits of Imrahil and wondering what Dol Amroth was like -- on the one hand, as we've seen too often, overexplaining something doesn't make it better, but on the other hand, even a touch more would have been interesting to read.

the actual elrond-arwen twoshot dc's talking about here--he's sort of seething in a very mannish way about how she'll be forsaking her elvishness--is as he describes, bathetic melodrama, but i do like the inserts of an unaged arwen veiled beside aragorn's leaf-covered tomb. i think that gets at elvish apartness. definitely a gauzy deviantart conception tho.

I have a distant, mystified admiration for you Middle Earthers who've finished these books.

yeah i think that "look upon your future" bit was super strong and pretty dark.

xp i loved them when i was eightish, became a militant detractor as a teenager, told everyone gleefully that the movies were better, revisited the books a year ago and became much more appreciative of the things they do that robert mckee does not do. stylistically i do still think they are more or less a trackless waste.

one of the things they do that robert mckee does not do is keep you updated on the slope of the road.

agreed with y'all, the flash-forward shot is neat, and memorable. it's just it still seems like she's a human who drank from the fountain of youth or something. it's a tragic burden to bear (as it is with superman/lois when they do those kind of stories) and it gets closer to the strangeness of elves, but doesn't quite nail it.

i love tolkien's style. maybe the thing i appreciate most as i get older and reread them every few years is the attention to the road and the landscape. and again i think fellowship, and the first part of two towers, do this very well. the one place that seems totally unreal is mordor. a little less so in the books where the differentness of its various terrible landscapes comes through a bit, but still it's kind of bizarre and hard to grasp. too big and too empty. i guess all of sauron's evil legions live somewhere else, off the map. (i know i know, he sort of calls up support armies and mercenaries from unmapped places to the south and east. but where do all the orcs live again? in the mountains? so what's he need all that empty Mordor for?)

my favorite part of the end(s) of ROTK is when Sauron falls and that eye looks around all panicky, like "ohhh nooooo"

the inexplicable dusty hell of mordor in the movies gives you a lil empathy for the orcs. of course they'd rather live in the shire. (i guess they turn everywhere they go into mordor tho--more empathy!)

Isn't there some mention of the southern part of Mordor being basically farmland? We only directly see the area around Orodruin, which is maybe too evil for anything to grow.

The hardest thing for me to understand, and to try to explain to my daughter, is that Gandalf (and Sarumon) aren't exactly human, more like angels or gods or forces of nature or something. It's easy to tell the Elves are other; they have magic and pointy ears, plus, you know, they're Elves. But the wizards are tougher nuts to crack. She asked me why Gandalf doesn't just use his magic on everything, why he's out fighting with a sword and stuff, and I had no good (or easy) answer, especially when he comes back as Gandalf the White.

I felt re-watching these that the emotional focus towards the end remains pretty firmly on the hobbits, and that Aragorn as portrayed in the movie at least fully understands he's there to support their mission to whatever end. The "you bow to no one" line, is that in the book? Because it's pretty effective in the movie (as the first of several endings).

he asked me why Gandalf doesn't just use his magic on everything, why he's out fighting with a sword and stuff

lol McKellan asked the same thing

"You bow to no one" is the one bit that always gets me a bit choked up, even just thinking about it actually.

viggo's get-serious delivery very good there too.

It's a really nice bit. Not in the books, no - the coronation is really kind of just described briefly at a distance. But there's some downtime in Gondor, and this stretch where they're making their way back to the Shire, via Rohan, Isengard, and Rivendell, and Aragorn's along for a while as the group is splitting up, so there's this more prolonged sense of the intertwining of the Aragorn and hobbit stories. I think "you bow to no one" is a fairly economical, and effective, way of making sure we come away understanding the relationship between these quests and these characters.

So why doesn't Gandalf use more magic?

considers it gauche

Like Palatine using a lightsaber?

Palpatine

I just figured, a la his celestial nature, that he could only help mortals to a degree, but otherwise had to stand at a remove and let them work things out for themselves. But it's never explained in the movies.

yeah my feeling was that he wasn't willing or able to directly intervene in things, with the interesting exception of the confrontation with the balrog (which is the kind of an equivalent being?), but i cant remember how that goes in the book.

it's not explained in the books either! the rules of magic are completely arbitrary and opaque

The Force >>> magic

He seems to use magic a lot more liberally (and usefully!) in The Hobbit.

xxxpost as they might well seem to mortal men and hobbits! i think it's pretty great that we never have a scene around the campfire where merry or someone is like "explain to us about this... MAGIC." it's this weird thing where it's special enough to be extremely rare and inexplicable, but part of the world enough that nobody is asking those questions. it's just obvious that these are higher orders of beings and there's not much more to be said. i always took it that gandalf was, angel-like, capable of intervening in certain ways but it being beyond the pale to intervene in others. i imagine most movie goers would just assume he runs low on magic power and can only cast so many spells or something. i mean nobody has a problem with how harry potter and company have infinite spells for certain kinds of tasks and warpings of reality but not others.

I have a distant, mystified admiration for you Middle Earthers who've finished these books.

Why thank you. Did I mention I have all the manuscript collections his son edited for publication and etc.

And I do like that magic-as-such has no real sense of rules in Tolkien. Some parts could be called technology, if we want to get into Arthur C. Clarke's formulation.

Did I mention I have all the manuscript collections his son edited for publication and etc.

― Ned Raggett,

Didn't have to -- I Force-scanned your brain.

I don't think it's a narrative problem really, I was just pointing out that the uses and limits of magic are not clearly delineated, even when it's clear that there *are* limits on what Gandalf can do and win. It's also consistent with his character to infer that he intervenes only under certain circumstances (known only to himself), sort of like how Roger Rabbit can only do toon stuff when it's funny.

win? when

in general the hobbits' very patchy and vague understanding of the ruined but imminently reborn world they live in is my favorite thing in the books.

so that makes Saruman Christopher Lloyd

come to think of it, it's interesting how much fantasy (or at least fantasy video games) have borrowed from the ostensibly sci-fi obi-wan-explaining-the-force scene to get you up to speed on whatever their magic system is, since obviously tolkien doesn't provide a blueprint there. great point dlh, about the hobbits. i like that it's something gandalf recognizes about hobbits too, that they have this cozy little idyll but don't realize just how big and complicated the world is. obviously this is heavily inspired by Angle-land.

haha now i'm picturing LOTR having gotten made as a wacky christopher lloyd vehicle where he plays both gandalf and saruman. you'll be "ring"ing with laughter!

Meryl Streep as Witch King.

come to think of it, it's interesting how much fantasy (or at least fantasy video games) have borrowed from the ostensibly sci-fi obi-wan-explaining-the-force scene to get you up to speed on whatever their magic system is, since obviously tolkien doesn't provide a blueprint there.

IIRC there's talk in the earliest publications for D&D -- possibly in The Dragon -- where some folks, maybe including Gygax, were a little flummoxed by magic in Tolkien for that very reason. Which is hilarious. "We need some sort of exact quantification!"

eventually they just decided to strip the parts out of vance that made it make sense

I've been rewatching a few clips. A brilliant device in Fellowship was having Saruman provide narration in the section between Rivendell and Moria, as the group is attempting different paths across the Misty Mountains. Rather than having Gandalf say why he doesn't want to go to Moria, the movie gives us Saruman's reading of Gandalf. Which is way better.

Also, that long shot in the Amon Hen fight, taking us from Aragorn's position at the top of the hill down to Boromir. That is amazing.

yes! lee really relishes it too. the dwarves delved too greedily, and too deep... shadow. and flame.

my sister put on the loooong versions of these last boxing day, I enjoyed them a lot although I drifted in and out

the hobbit otoh I only saw the first one but I still tell war stories of being in the cinema and looking and my watch and an hour had passed and the wee cunt hadn't left his fucking house yet

hahaha yeah that was my first cue that i was going to really really hate the movie. just how long they drag out the whole "and still MORE dwarves arrive! and he's still not excited about it! ho, ho!" gag. yikes.

But that's in the book! Which is basically 90% whimsy, so unsurprising the film is tonally different to LOTR. Not that I'm saying it's not garbage.

it's the first chapter, not a quarter of the book

all the dwarves present a problem for any movie adaptation that ironically isn't there in the otherwise much grandier and busier lotr: you have this insane platoon of 13 non-characters in practically every scene. easy in prose to refer to them collectively until you need them but in a movie, there they all are and they're not going away; better think of irrelevant shit for them to do. (nb this is all theoretical-- again, i never got out of the house.)

IIRC there's talk in the earliest publications for D&D -- possibly in The Dragon -- where some folks, maybe including Gygax, were a little flummoxed by magic in Tolkien for that very reason. Which is hilarious. "We need some sort of exact quantification!"

GANDALF WAS ONLY A FITH LEVEL MAGIC-USER

https://gamingbrouhaha.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/gandalf.jpg

hahahaha oh man

They could have been the 3rd level spell Firebeam described in, I believe, Alarums and Excursions #12.

love the casual extemporizing-don erudition of "i believe" here

I weirdly admire the fellow who wrote that.

geez dlh it's not like he's got the time to go back and actually dig up the issue sheesh

You don't need any more than ESP to make this work.

that is beautiful

anyway d&d magic is a banal skill practiced in-universe by tradesmen and out-of-universe by kids with high expectations, so naturally it is hugely op compared to lotr where it's something gods and aliens do.

One thing I liked about the otherwise OTT magical duel between Gandalf and Saruman, at the end of which Gandalf gets captured, is that you only see the results of the forces applied--there's no coloured light or mystical flame or anything like that. The sense is that when two celestials fight they don't fuck about trying to impress each other with special effects, they just try to obliterate each other with pure force.

Is that the fight that ends with Gandalf doing the Curly Shuffle?

james morrison otm, see also the luke-vader duel in empire (but not anything with force lightning).

The thing that's always stuck with me from the Fellowship is Mckellen's delivery at the end of that sequence before eagle ex machina
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os_moMFwSuo#t=1m53s

1.53 since ilx hates timestamps

That exchange is very Luke-Vader too.

just watched all three of these this week and damn, are these good. totally agree with the first being the best -- all the expository stuff is so well-done, and the deaths (or "deaths") are all so poignant imo -- boromir's change of heart, his "i would have followed you, brother" to aragorn -- wow.

also without question the gayest movies i've seen in a long time. kept waiting for sam and frodo to just start going at it

"nothing ever dampens your pants, does it Sam"

is a line I wish was in the movie

OG bromance?

Fellowship also has actually functional jokes too. I always laugh at "I wasn't dropping no eaves sir, I was just trimming the hedges"

i feel like they coulda cut 20 minutes out of the last one just by excising all of the "pregnant pause as sam and frodo stare at each other meaningfully" moments.

i still enjoy the hell out of these and probably watch them all once a year or so.

i think FOTR has a nice momentum and it's so streamlined, just a journey through really interesting locales and leading to a pursuit by some spectacularly realized bad dudes (speaking of gay, Saruman when he first sees the lead Uruk-hai is so evilly lustful.) i think the second has a richness to it that the other two don't, maybe. mostly due to the Rohan stuff and the proper intro of Gollum.

ROTK tries to be incredibly rousing and it's to its credit that it achieves being rousing most of the time. pairing up Eowyn and Merry, who I think are the most likable non-main characters, for their moments of glory was a good choice (i suppose it's that way in the novels too?)

the balrog scene in fotr might be my last real childlike "holy shit" movie in a theater. but then i'd been waiting to see it since i was like 10.

Lord of the Rings is one of the only properties where I kind of wish there were more film versions. There's so much possibility there. I'd love to see a live-action version in a much wilder visual style.

Eowyn/Merry is in the books and it is def one of the things they get very right in the film, including the delivery of the "I am no man" kill line which, tbh, was so gratifying to see on-screen in the largely pre-female-action-movie heroine landscape of the time

yeah the last time i watched them all (over the winter) the eowyn vs. the witch king scene still reliably raised some goosebumps.

xpost Yeah, they should get Del Toro ... oh wait.

I liked these at the time, but when my husband had one of them (FOTR?) on a few days ago I couldn't get beyond how sick I've become of choppily-choreographed large scale CGI battle scenes. Not necessarily the fault of these films that this has become so standard, but the conventions of modern action/adventure flicks is just beyond tiresome to me.

that and the Gandalf/Balrog confrontation are the best fight scenes in the whole trilogy, they have a real emotional impact

xp

damn i don't even want to think of the hobbit series. it's like p-jax decided what LOTR needed was more uilleann pipes and bouncing around jauntily, and less doom metal and clashing of swords and dankness.

heh i was going to ask whether the hobbit films were worth it...

there's that moment when gandalf blocks the balrog and it sort of rears up and does this and i was like "daaaamn"

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uPo5uvO_iB8/UIJ3047wHNI/AAAAAAAABCc/giOGSLxZ9cU/s1600/tumblr_m7q34naMo21ralt7qo1_500.gif

hobbit films are abysmal

the bloat of the hobbit series is kind of unreal.

it's almost insane, you can practically see them sweating to get another five minutes out of each already too-long scene

bilbo's dinner with the dwarves in the first one is i think actually 40 minutes long

they even included the dishwashing

For all the time's he's done it on screen, Boromir is far and away Sean Bean's best death on screen. Especially for people who never read the books, viewers think, "Oh, OK, he's done a quick heel-face turn and is going to help everyone escape" and then he takes that first arrow and it's just Oh Shit from there on out.

it's telling that ridiculous hairstyles serve as the most important identifying trait of any character in the hobbit films

the uruk-hai ready to put that arrow in boromir's face was pretty nasty touch, even if it wasn't followed through on thanks to aragorn.

i also rewatched the bakshi movie recently and it remains as batshit as ever.

the uruk-hai ready to put that arrow in boromir's face was pretty nasty touch, even if it wasn't followed through on thanks to aragorn.

this whole scene is macho porn done right imo: boromir taking arrow after arrow; the teased execution; then the camp climax as the uruk-hai forces himself chestfirst down the length of aragorn's sword to die in his face.

my favorite is still two towers, for gollum, brad dourif, the white flowers on the barrows, the rohirrim as actual visible population, the better prolonged military climax between the last two; but i never watch any of these by itself.

I only saw the first Hobbit. It's not the worst thing in the movie, but I was annoyed at the stone-giants scene. This is a good bit of fantasy prose which sets just the right tone:

When he peeped out in the lightning-flashes, he saw that across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang. Then came a wind and a rain, and the wind whipped the rain and the hail about in every direction, so that an overhanging rock was no protection at all. Soon they were getting drenched and their ponies were standing with their heads down and their tails between their legs, and some of them were whinnying with fright. They could hear the giants guffawing and shouting all over the mountainsides.

Which turns into:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XORMBIm7DX8

I also didn't see Tolkien's stone-giants as being literally made of stone, but whatever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcMkf2iq1Ac

I will be the dissenting voice that says that the Hobbit films were, yes, probably overlong but also fine. Blow through them in a day off and enjoy them for the trifle that they probably are. At any rate, I saw them all in the theater and don't recall squirming or checking the time. The battle at the end of the third was quite good, iirc. My only major objection was the doofy, comic relief villain in the fishing town whose name escapes me (the town and the villain).

They have strong moments. Freeman is a terrific Bilbo. They are not by any means good films though, a good film needs good pacing and editing. I've always been meaning to watch one of those fan edits that get them down to one (long) movie.

I saw the most recent one on telly recently, I generally avoid blockbuster films at the cinema but might watch on the tv if im at a loose end, and it was the biggest load of overlong cgi'd bobbins ive ever seen

LOTR trilogy is to the original Stars Wars as The Hobbit is to the Star Wars Prequels on multiple levels

haha yes

how far can we extend this metaphor... Dead Alive:American Graffitti? Meet the Feebles:THX113?

or Heavenly Creatures:American Graffiti lol

Jackson's pre-LOTR work (or probably actually pre-Frighteners, tbf) far outshines any of his Tolkien adaptations, imho.

i don't know about that. the lotr movies now feel like they stand completely outside of his filmography. the hobbit movies are probably more what people were *worried* he'd do when he was first announced as director. (nb: i am a huge fan of dead alive and meet the feebles.) in retrospect, i don't quite know how he pulled it off. maybe it was just nerves pushing him as hard as he could given the budget, expectations, etc.

Meet the Feebles, Dead Alive, and Heavenly Creatures is such a totally unique and bonkers run of films, they really put Jackson being handed the keys to LOTR in perspective, it was a remarkable, totally left-field coup.

Where does King Kong fit in

= willow

Nowhere

Cos he's a giant gorilla :(

i am surprised to learn both king kong and lovely bones made money. i figured they both bombed so it was a "oh shit better get that tolkien money again" moment.

Totally forgot about Lovely Bones!

And I've seen it even

I like King Kong!

Heavenly Creatures is a genuinely good film.

King Kong's opening and closing hours are fine, but the middle is insanely dragged out. Like, he could have cut out a half hour just by running all the strobing slo-mo scenes at regular speed.

Really? The opening hour is the part that needs major trimming to me.

isn't King Kong after LOTR

I never gave a shit about it

i am waiting for the 90 minute fan edit of the hobbit trilogy to come out before watching it. i bet that would probably be a pretty good movie!

The opening shot of monkeys in a zoo and the image of a writer in a cage worked for me, but you're right, it could have probably used some trimming as well. The only stuff on the island I liked were the scenes between Watts and Kong.

yeah king kong was after lotr, and that's what i mean, shakes. like i figured they were bombs so he decided to go back to the tolkien well.

xxpost

There's always the Rankin/Bass version, which somehow manages to squeeze all 300 pages of the novel into a normal running time.

watts and kong: a new police procedural coming to tnt this fall.

king kong is a good ride, for the most part. a pretty breezy film, considering everything. and naomi watts is just fully committed to giving a good performance opposite nothing but green screens and she pulls it off admirably.

Kubrick LOTR with The Beatles ftw

we recently had some good chat about the rankin-bass hobbit over here: Lord of the Animated Rings: Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings" v Rankin-Bass's "Return of the King" . it's lumpy and weirdly-paced but not in a way that ruins it as a kid's movie. but it DOES cut huge chunks of the book (beorn, the arkenstone) and treats other major sequences as basically 90-second episodes. (to be fair it's only a 77-minute special - so i do think a, say, 110-minute version could have been totally viable if you concede that most of the dwarves still won't be characters of any kind.) gollum and smaug scenes are show-stoppers, the rest is kind of a trailer for the book, but in a way that i really really like. dreamy, intriguing to a kid the right age. it leaves lots of doors open. jackson's looks worse and worse the more i think about it.

Turning the 100 minute Kong into a 3+-hour epic basically set the stage for what he did to the Hobbit, stretching a relatively simple and concise story out to a crazy length with no noticeable gain. Except King Kong is basically pretty good, with some bad bits, whereas the Hobbit is basically bad bits with some good parts. And once gain, for emphasis, the FX are inexplicably crappier looking than they are in the LOTR films.

The thing is that the CGI in the LOTR films were kind of not that consistently good either, but there weren't really as many of them, or they were used strategically in combination with real props, practical effects, and some really elaborate sets (Edoras for example).... and/or shrouded in rain and darkness. They're closer to Jurassic Park than Transformers or the Star Wars prequels. The scenes that really relied entirely on well-lit computer-generated creatures look like video games if you watch them now - the cave-troll and the wargs particularly. (I also never really thought Gollum was all that great but I think I'm in a minority there.)

this whole scene is macho porn done right imo: boromir taking arrow after arrow; the teased execution; then the camp climax as the uruk-hai forces himself chestfirst down the length of aragorn's sword to die in his face.

― le Histoire du Edgy Miley (difficult listening hour), Friday, June 17, 2016

I've thought you well

taught you too

xxpost

Gollum was always the hardest thing for me to stomach in these movies, even the first time through, which is probably why I always thought Fellowship to be superior to the others.

I also never really thought Gollum was all that great but I think I'm in a minority there

I agree with that. I'm not sure what the best alternative would have been, but I don't think Gollum actually has to look all that inhuman/unhobbitlike. He could look like Nux from Mad Max.

Or he could have just been played by Steve Buscemi.

considering that Steve Buscemi is playing Gollum these days.

xxpost

There's always the Rankin/Bass version, which somehow manages to squeeze all 300 pages of the novel into a normal running time.

― rhymes with "blondie blast" (cryptosicko)

if i had any affection at all for Rankin/Bass i might consider it

i actually like the really freaky subhuman gollum from rankin-bass, though i don't think that would really have worked for the more naturalistic feel of the jackson films. but one thing it did have was a sort of proportional kinship with hobbits - stretchy and froglike, but also round in a certain way. the jackson one is so spindley, and so far off from any of the other creatures in the films. one of the several places where jackson seems to have borrowed a bit from the bakshi film, for some reason.

Jackson generally borrowed the right stuff from the Bakshi version imo

it's incredible how many of my favorite cartoons borrowed from LOTR. Every cartoon villian had an army of Orc guards.

yeah the fish/frog gollum of the rankin-bass hobbit was legitimately scary to me as a kid. the serkis gollum definitely looks dated now, not quite uncanny valley style but more like the cgi version how the ed 209 in robocop looks like a totally obvious puppet now, and serkis's performance tips too often into overacting.

honestly the biggest lame-out for me was CGI shelob. big disappointment. i mean it could definitely have been worse, but my mental image was so much bigger, weirder and scarier. and probably also derived from the arguably pretty goofy ones from the rankin-bass hobbit so who knows what i would have come up with if i was in charge, but really it just seemed like a generic CGI creature, not a 'special' monster, last child of ungoliant, etc. the sequence might actually be unfilmable in the sense that a lot of its menace comes from the narrator giving us some sense of shelob's personality, which you couldn't really do without a voiceover, which would be terrible.

I might read these books again this summer. It's been a long time and this is all making me nostalgic.

Eowyn versus the Witch-King was my favourite thing as a kid. I drew that scene many times. Jackson's version is great, but I picture Eowyn confronting the Witch-King in a much more serene and commanding way. Tolkien's original dialogue is how Tolkien characters at epic moments are supposed to talk.

“Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!"

A cold voice answered: "Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye."

A sword rang as it was drawn. "Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may."

"Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!"

Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. "But no living man am I!”

They're all still great, the end. I am simple.

What bothered me especially about the first Hobbit film was the endless padding of the most minor things, but the night-in-Beorn's house, which is legitimately scary in the book, is just pissed away in 20 seconds.

Gave up on Hobbit pt 2 halfway through, it was just so tedious, I think when the elves were doing weightless video game gymnastics down a river with orcs.

The Hobbit was always going to be problematic, it's a children's book through and through, a million miles in tone from LOTR. The dish washing scene in the film is pretty much straight from the book, but interminable to sit through. After that Jackson dispenses with the whimsy and goes for the theme park ride school of film making, with the roller coaster scene in the orc city in the mountains and the above mentioned white water barrel ride, both of which are cut from whole cloth, utterly ludicrous, and had me heavily facepalming - but I'm not a kid, maybe that stuff is perfect for kids these days who no longer kick a ball on the street or enjoy Tolkien's gentle frivolity. But he goes all LOTR with the Gandalf/Sauron stuff, yet tempers it with Radagast and his rabbit sledge, also ludicrous, also totally invented, and and yet maybe my favourite thing in the film. On the whole though what grates the most for me is Martin bloody Freeman when Jackson thinks he can tell a better story than Tolkien, evinced plenty of times in The Hobbit and LOTR, fuck off with drowning Smaug in molten gold.

Del Toro would probably have done a better job, he does childlike whimsy better than Jackson and would likely have been properly engaged with the source material, which PJ clearly wasn't by this point.

Love the Kool-Aid Man entrance from Sauron. Tolkien was so smart in never showing Sauron directly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrFUBca9G7U

GO BACK TO THE SHADOW

I mean I did but

At some point our Tolkien podcast will get to a discussion of the movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_U0S6x_kCs

That started out so terrible and just got so much better and better and better. Thanks for posting.

watching again

some of the cgi looks so, so bad, is that a version im watching or a setting on the tv or wha

deagol swimming looks like an effect from daytime tv in 1992

otherwise, extended version special review: *based on what im.guessing is extended relevant, may be flawed

everything added about arwen is incoherent nonsense, good and all as tyler is

every additional line given to gimli/legolas underlines how dreadful the interpretation of the characters is

most of the additional around eowyn/aragorn is bad, anything developing eowyn/rohan stuff separate to this is solid

saruman better treated in extended excerpts

denethor/boromir/faramir about all that is unquestionably improved through extended editions imo

non-extended edition thoughts:

a lot of bad acting and scripting in these. i know, i know, but its worth saying again and forever.

The Mouth of Sauron from the extended version was pretty cool.

Honestly, though, I'm surprised at the results of this poll. I would put Return of the King at the top by a wide margin. I truly love these films; they have been a pleasure to share with my children over the years; but The Two Towers does drag a bit.

i dont as a rule discuss them on ilx tbh

(also to your actual post, weve not reached the mouth of sauron yet tbf)

imo the CGI here looks a lot better than the decade-later CGI of The Hobbit series (maybe because LOTR is strictly CGI w/the battle scenes when they need to juke the numbers of the combatants) and w/Gollum, whereas Jackson afaict inexplicably decided to CGI every orc in The Hobbit.

But yeah, when we have to have scenes of the father arguing with the daughter over her marriage decision and all that, and he's sort of seething in a very mannish way about how she'll be forsaking her elvishness, it doesn't convey any sense of the elves being much of anything at all special.

from dr casino some years back above- wholly agree

in conversation today i described yermans elrond performance as pretty much spiritually the same as an aulfella looking askance at a poorly installed patio

another bad actor cast badly in a badly adapted role

xp i note myself above praising the cgi above all else- i suspect my tv tbh

Wrong he was incredible in Priscilla Queen of the Desert

youve been blinded by the wig and the mascara imo

i tried to watch the extended version of fellowship recently and couldn't do it; I think perhaps the official versions are appropriately edited. but I could be wrong.

I like the extended Shire stuff. The 'departure from Rivendell' is one addition that bugs me - we already have "I do not know the way," no need to belabor the point.

Did Jackson ever explain why he decided to switch Gandalf to the other side in the argument about travelling through Moria? My guess is he worried that Gandalf would look dumb if he was pro-Moria and then died there. If he's against it then it's more obviously a heroic self-sacrifice.

dulce et decorum est

saruman better treated in extended excerpts

Having Gandalf repeat "You were deep in the enemy's council!" in the extended ROTK's confrontation scene is awkward as hell. I preferred the theatrical cut's ambiguity: Saruman locked in the Isengard tower watched by Treebeard, with Wormtongue as a pincushion.

btw I too watched the trilogy over the holiday

granted once you dont bring them back to the shire its hard to know what to do with sarumans arc anyway

lol, this is annoying.

Gollum's fall into the lava of Mount Doom was rewritten for the film, as the writers felt that simply having Gollum slip and fall was anticlimactic. Originally, an even greater deviation was planned: Frodo would heroically push Gollum over the ledge to destroy him and the Ring, but the production team realised that that would make it look as if Frodo was murdering Gollum. Instead, they had Frodo and Gollum struggle for possession of the Ring.[14]

It's not anti-climactic in the book; why think that it would be in the film?

Thanks to the cold-blooded savagery of his expresison, Frodo already looks like he's going to murder Gollum.

That Frodo outright chooses not to destroy the ring in the book says something stronger than the movie.

Occurs to me that I can now link us over at the podcast talking about all three movies in detail, since we just finished this past month with an ROTK episode:

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/33

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/45

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/57

(Our general thoughts: Fellowship the best film so long as it's the theatrical cut, Two Towers is choppy as fuck, ROTK a better effort to end with, all three have issues but we have the least issues with Fellowship.)

Go back to the shadow!

That Frodo outright chooses not to destroy the ring in the book says something stronger than the movie.

the films cannot bring us on frodos journey imo, or at least keast they dont in the way the books do

The Eye of Sauron's little double take when Frodo puts the ring on is so goofy

its awful and i was genuinely halfway through a post about just that last night but i dont post about the movies on ilx

what's wrong with the double take? It illustrates what the novel describes -- especially since Sauron had been pretty fucking stupid and wrong for most of the trilogy.

I always thought the special effects/cgi were entertaining but could not bear the overwrought Hobbit sad expressions and tears. I prefer emphasis on the journey and taking care of business which is more in line with Tolkien's way. ie - "The trilogy is mostly about leaving places, going places, being places, and going on to other places, all amid fearful portents and speculations. There are a great many mountains, valleys, streams, villages, caves, residences, grottos, bowers, fields, high roads, low roads, and along them the Hobbits and their larger companions travel while paying great attention to mealtimes. Landscapes are described with the faithful detail of a Victorian travel writer. " https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-2001

also the fact that Liv Tyler was in it at all kind of made it hard to accept for some reason

Every time Liv Tyler turns up I get "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing" coming into in my head, drowning out Enya's warbling which can only be a good thing.

it's been a long time but i'm pretty sure Sam and Frodo are mostly sad expressions and tears for at least the last third of the book

Sam cries buckets, thwarted homo love.

it wears that reading well

but its mainly about the loss of english rural aristocracy patronage after the war

. I prefer emphasis on the journey and taking care of business which is more in line with Tolkien's way. ie - "The trilogy is mostly about leaving places, going places, being places, and going on to other places, all amid fearful portents and speculations. There are a great many mountains, valleys, streams, villages, caves, residences, grottos, bowers, fields, high roads, low roads, and along them the Hobbits and their larger companions travel while paying great attention to mealtimes. Landscapes are described with the faithful detail of a Victorian travel writer. " https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-2001

At its dullest, especially in the extended cuts, Jackson does exactly this.

what's wrong with the double take? It illustrates what the novel describes

Kinda, although this moment in the novel is described over two paragraphs - Sauron realizing the magnitude of his stupidity - and it's one of the most exciting and satisfying moments in the story. In the film it's compressed to this two-second shot. Granted, I'm not sure what a good way of handling it would have been. I don't like the giant eye/spotlight depiction of Sauron to begin with.

Yeah, it's a scary passage.

However! I do like how the film implies that The Ring only melts when Frodo takes Sam’s hand and chooses him over it.

Ready for a 25th anniversary edition with extended extended editions that add 1-1.5 more hours to each of the three films

Extended Mr. Frodo-Sam coitus scene on Weathertop after a meal of crispy bacon

Turns out Frodo is more of a Weatherbottom

SHAEARE THE LOAOAD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlJgD4GuDVs

agreed with jmm the eye is corny and looks pretty rubbish

Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew

disappointed liv tyler didn't pole dance in these movies since she is so good at it in the Crazy video.

actually I think she was quite good in these films, if you're going to cast an elf you could do worse.

I have no complaints about any of the cast save Rhys-Davies, who has been marvelous in some other things.

Yeah, it's a scary passage.

To add to that, something that I think makes this passage really effective is that it’s the one time that we get to read Sauron’s thinking directly, not through other people’s reports or guesses. So at the same moment that the plan to destroy the ring is finally revealed, there’s also this visceral feeling of Sauron’s own exposure, while the ring itself is at the edge of the lava.

Why did Iluvatar allow such evil in the first place? Apparently not all powerful? How could anyone allow such a cosmology

Why did Iluvatar allow such evil in the first place?

We talking about the Hobbit movies?

why does god allow evil eh

A truly novel question eh

Free will, man

*bong rip*

Tolkien is the lord of the rings

Tolkien answers that question in the creation myth published with the Silmarillion - in short they "allowed" it because it makes the music of the cosmos richer

non serious answers only pls!

bit Manichean aint it

youve been blinded by the wig and the mascara imo

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac)

oh for god's sake, a wig and mascara doesn't make any more of a difference than elf ears do

he's just a pretty man, that's all. do i overlook his flaws as an actor because he's pretty? yes, absolutely. do i regret that? hell no. judge me if you want. i don't care.

That Frodo outright chooses not to destroy the ring in the book says something stronger than the movie.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR)

it's weird, i never made it past the first book (splitting the story into two parallel narratives was too much for me), but in my memory frodo refuses to destroy the ring in the movie too

that scene is absolutely one of the most powerful and subversive for me... what tolkien apparently called "eucatastrophe", that concept resonates deeply with me. i've had the experience of doing something that i thought was going to be a disaster and having it turn out great, of living in a world where all anybody talked about was dysphoria and experiencing euphoria. yeah. that whole thing clicks with me, a lot.

I always thought the special effects/cgi were entertaining but could not bear the overwrought Hobbit sad expressions and tears. I prefer emphasis on the journey and taking care of business which is more in line with Tolkien's way. ie - "The trilogy is mostly about leaving places, going places, being places, and going on to other places, all amid fearful portents and speculations. There are a great many mountains, valleys, streams, villages, caves, residences, grottos, bowers, fields, high roads, low roads, and along them the Hobbits and their larger companions travel while paying great attention to mealtimes. Landscapes are described with the faithful detail of a Victorian travel writer. " https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-2001

― | (Latham Green)

ohhhh yeah now it clicks with me... there's like a dramatic plot and all but there's so much in tolkien that overlaps with what in japanese media is called "iyashikei". i really do want to watch that frieren anime everybody is talking about even more now... this idea of a longer take on the post-climax coda of LOTR.

disappointed liv tyler didn't pole dance in these movies since she is so good at it in the Crazy video.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm)

ugh

by the way yes i do fucking love that the witch-king of angmar is killed by his insistence on adhering to pointlessly gendered pronouns

and yes there are imagined versions of that scene where the woman killing the witch-king is an egg and killing the witch-king is literally what cracks her egg

it's a lot easier than doing trans readings of dune. herbert's take on gender is so completely fucked-up and incomprehensible :(

Tolkien answers that question in the creation myth published with the Silmarillion - in short they "allowed" it because it makes the music of the cosmos richer

― emishi sun hack (Noodle Vague)

if you enjoy tolkien's perspective on free will you might also enjoy THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

(i do not enjoy the roman catholic church)

he did the bass parts xp

i was watching the first ova of "yokohama kaidashi kikou" with my friend and her 11-year-old daughter yesterday and i really enjoyed how bored she was by it

it's half an hour long and NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS. like there's more action in ilbard jikan, almost. it's unspeakably gorgeous and i love it so much.

if you enjoy tolkien's perspective on free will you might also enjoy THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

i'd argue something about the problem of evil being one of the most trivial arguments against religion but darragh's already told me off once

I'm all ears man im not the istari of the thread

i was just messing about tbh except for the problem of evil bit

ive always found the weaving of the dissonance back into the song a nice thought tbh, also the "now go see what ye made" attitude of eru

like all of existence was just the code compiling in real time

Good modern metaphor. (Also interesting to contrast it against Eddison's bubble universe bit, which may be my favorite moment of his in the end.)

Wait, simile, I missed the 'like'

they "allowed" it because it makes the music of the cosmos richer

tbf, this is not the RC 'free will' argument, which is wholly anthropocentric. a closer reading says the cosmos must be free to create itself. clearly evil is one destabilizing element within its ongoing creation, but creation securely yoked to stability ceases to be creative. but the whole question gets simpler if you completely remove god(s) from the equation.

in the lord of the rings we dont, altho they get yoinked off the playing board after the first set of wars ofc

https://i.gifer.com/origin/30/30334cfb490a50f45cd39da997a5d090_w200.gif

Gah, this scene. It's a small thing, but Jackson ignores what is actually cool about the feint against the Black Gates: the point is to fool Sauron into thinking that one of the defenders of Minas Tirith has claimed the ring.

you Tolkien nerds

sheesh! everyone's an exegete

im still one

Gah, this scene. It's a small thing, but Jackson ignores what is actually cool about the feint against the Black Gates: the point is to fool Sauron into thinking that one of the defenders of Minas Tirith has claimed the ring.

― jmm,

It works fine; the only problem is the DO YOU SEE cutaway to ORNAlDO BOOMPS and his "A diversion" line.

do i recall correctly that bloom broke his back playing a ninja turtle

if not why not

internet says not linked to turtles

nonetheless

i'd argue something about the problem of evil being one of the most trivial arguments against religion but darragh's already told me off once

― emishi sun hack (Noodle Vague)

the problem with evil is how low-quality it is these days, why, back in my day we had some pretty amazing evil, not like the mass-market crap that gets passed off as "evil" in this degenerate day and age

peter jackson's evil is a poorly written version with three unnecessary special effects shots

it doesn't even look like real evil at 60 fps

how could you know it was evil without a puke green light shading the face asks master director jackson

It's important for clarification, you see.

these 3 films were all pretty good tbh. mind you I've only watched the extended ones all the way through apart from the 1st one that I saw at the time, and the thing with those is you can stop them for a bit and go to the bog (just don't fall in it or the wights will get you or something) or whatever and carry on later, then it's fine that they go on for forever

ainulindalë allegorizes punk rock (melkor) disrupting and upstaging psych/prog through tortuous epochs till tortoise / radiohead / mars volta / frodo dispose of the ring and we get to enjoy the fourth age of musicianship restored, amen

Ainulindalë and pipe-weed are made for each other

“A diversion!” has led to my whole family’s saying “Thanks, Legolas” whenever anyone IRL states the blazingly obvious.

My ranking matches the poll results. The Fellowship theatrical version is a miracle. The Two Towers is very good. Return of the King is about the same, but, for whatever reason, I've never had a huge affection for it.

Hard to explain what sets Fellowship apart from the others, but so many pieces just work. The world opening up. There’s no other scene that’s more perfectly Middle-earth than the one of Gandalf leaving Frodo and Sam in that eerie dawn-lit forest, with the warning that the Dark Lord’s agents are everywhere.

the cast up until rivendell is perfect and the script advances the plot oerfectly without characterisation and exposition absolutely clunking, i dont think theres another run like it in the trilogy

My youngest and I watched The Two Towers last night. We opted for the original theatrical release rather than the nearly one hour longer extended version. It was a delight; it didn't drag as much as I remembered, and the Gollum/Smeagol bits now have the sheen of nostalgia.

OTOH, there were some Fangorn scenes that I missed from the extended cut.

rewatching two towers now and the best bits imo are all bernard hill

Well, tbf, his bits are pretty much the best throughout.

I do remember the thrill in the theater when the Nazgul appear on a fell-beast over the bog.

WRAITHS HAVE WINGS.

i like how his irritation with Aragorn is further developed in the extended editions tbh- more than it is in the books i feel?

xp wingwraiths

The part that has always struck me as odd is the scene in Osgiliath when Frodo is standing on the bridge, right in front of the flying Nazgul with the Ring in his hand, and after Sam tackles him the Wraith just . . . flies off.

Doesn't the Wraith's beast get hit with an arrow?

Yes, it does, but how does it not notice that the Ring is right there?

rewatching two towers now and the best bits imo are all bernard hill

otm

Yes, it does, but how does it not notice that the Ring is right there?

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux),

imo the films are rather uneven about explaining what the Nazgul may or may not sense. According to the books, they basically rely on instinct and are useless when fighting someone who doesn't fear them, i.e. Aragorn.

Grima Wormtongue also perfectly cast.

Those fell-beasts were grabbing and throwing soldiers, remember. Frodo was just another one.

Hill and Dourif two guys that will nail any role they're in tbf

xp Yeah, that is sort of represented when Aragorn manages to chase them off Weathertop with a torch.

I have read the books a couple of times lol. I'm going to do a third run through in parallel with my youngest, who at 13 is ready for them.

the ringwraiths and indeed every enemy faced at all being shite as soon as one of our heroes runs at the is tbf a plot failing plucked straight from the books

dourif, maybe above anyone, actually delivers a better character than the books provide

even in the books the Nazgul are conveniently short-sighted when it suits the author's purposes

xxp Plot armor for sure

the plot failing there is in painting them as so powerful besides but....then ...... what have they ever actually achieved since sauron's re awakening but chasing faramir around a little?

so again maybe its not such a galing hole so much as a 'ye have built these lads up but they shit themselves under a charge'

Tolkien is imo pretty guarded about what anyones "powers" are, certainly by the time we have come to the end of the tired and fading third age

They did manage to stab a Hobbit tbf

Break into the inn, stab up some bedding, don't bother checking any other rooms

i wonder did tolkien ever draft a scene where they turn up wet and shivering back to sauron asking for something better than horses

can't remember how many of them turn up at Weathertop but the 4 or 5 of them are not enough to take on Aragorn so them's some pretty low quality powers

i wonder did tolkien ever draft a scene where they turn up wet and shivering back to sauron asking for something better than horses

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac),

lol

nv with the hobbit erasure

ah c'mon they're running interference at best

Agree about Hill and Dourif, you add in Otto for me and I think that's why the Rohan stuff lands. It's like you've wandered into an exceptionally grounded and well acted bit of Shakespearean intrigue. It's also why the ride of the rohirrim is so incredible.

karl urban has moments but hes very stiff considering the performer he became

It's not the material he's most comfortable with but he does look appropriately fierce.

didn't he marry Nicole Kidman

xxxp

"Shakespearean" is exactly the thought I always have specifically during the scene of Theoden and Gandalf in the graveyard.

The Théoden-Éowyn relationship is the heart of the film for me

This film is less satisfying for me in part because I see Book IV as the greatest section of the novel: Frodo, Sam, and Gollum finding their way through the isolated regions of Ithilien, leading up to the painful moment on the stairs when Gollum finds Frodo and Sam asleep. I've never found the film treatment of this stretch to be as compelling. The Rohan stuff tends to be better.

i think film gollum is a shiny disaster

im not sure if i always thought it or not but i do now

Gollum should have been more reminiscent of a cave salamander.

xxp The whole Cirith Ungol section of the Rankin/Bass cartoon was traumatizing to me as a kid.

Seems kinda unfair to pick on Gollum for those qualities, the effects work was so astonishing at the time and he worked as a fully vested character thanks to Serkis. The tech was so cutting edge that he improves noticeably between films 2 and 3.
Also he looks so much like a hated ex prime minister of Aus that I get a little joy from his otherwise tragic death.

his death is good and gandalf as usual was wrong to hedge

the CGI bonus treatment they gave gollum misled a bunch of industry types about the capabilities of motion capture technology and is directly responsible for later atrocities like the polar express

these films are a bunch of guys with swords doing hero's journey for 12 hours, the scenery looks nice and I like all the gay stuff but the fight scenes are sooo boring and there are way too many of them and aragorn loses all his hotness when he takes the crown. at least they're better than the prequels

Nobody is ever gonna be given the money to make a tonally interesting Tolkien movie, if such a thing was possible

tho tbf Jackson kind of had a go, in places, before the business ate him up maybe

As far as epic power metal fantasy, this is the tone largely done right imo. I think it has its flaws in specific individual moments, and I think there was a missed opportunity with how the army of the dead was depicted (absolutely spooky leading up to the first encounter with them, and it dissipated into a Looney tunes cartoon once they were on the battlefield), but this series overall was absolutely well done. Do agree that aragorn was better suited as a character to be an unkempt solitary warrior versus being a king, but Gondor was severely lacking in a good second option.

how about a republic or is that against the rules of high epic fantasy bullshit

how's your mousse

the stollen is a little stale but still good

currently in a totally jacksoned confrontation with the army of the dead

its awful, easily the worst sequence in any of the movies and possibly in any movie

That line was broken!

an entire jackson sequence where frodo and gollum get into a fistfight

jfc

The army of the dead stuff should have been absolutely terrifying, like just a genuinely make them a horrific nightmare fuel force on the battlefield. making them the ghost equivalent of fast zombies was a mistake. Better if they were a slow lurching practical effects beast vs green CGI.

otm

Jackson did right by the Nazgul in the first film, not sure why he fucked this up.

otm

Bringing the invincible undead army all the way to Pelennor Fields somewhat devalues the battle, imo. If only they'd arrived a couple hours earlier.

They're a cheap device in the novel too but at least they have more limited utility.

In retrospect it was a warning sign w/r/t the hobbit films. I'm not saying practical effects would have saved those movies but damn those orcs looked absolutely awful.

and their smell! and their eating habits!

Tolkien is notably short on description. I have no recollection of him ever describing the appearance of an orc.

Fell something-or-other

Seems kinda unfair to pick on Gollum for those qualities, the effects work was so astonishing at the time and he worked as a fully vested character thanks to Serkis. The tech was so cutting edge that he improves noticeably between films 2 and 3.
Also he looks so much like a hated ex prime minister of Aus that I get a little joy from his otherwise tragic death.

― assert (matttkkkk)

god damn i had to re-read this, i thought andy serkis tragically died

how about a republic or is that against the rules of high epic fantasy bullshit

― Left

i mean personally i'd be in favor of an anarchosyndicalist collective but nobody who's ever seen "holy grail" is going to take _that_ seriously

The opening of The Two Towers is just... so incredibly good. Something perfect about the way the camera takes an extra second before deciding to follow Gandalf.

xp Even they had to take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.

The Théoden-Éowyn relationship is the heart of the film for me

It's something we remarked upon in our ROTK rewatch. Arguably how it plays out over the two films it's featured in is the best outright addition, or at least elaboration on fairly bare bones, to the adaptation in general.

Nobody is ever gonna be given the money to make a tonally interesting Tolkien movie, if such a thing was possible

Mm, well, we'll have to see -- in a year's time this debuts (and it will be a theatrical effort):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_War_of_the_Rohirrim

Without pretending to be expert in his work, what I've seen of Kenji Kamiyama's efforts in general has been pretty striking, and there's something much more immediately interesting visually about going this route than the attempt to clone Jackson's approach in large part in Rings of Power. Jason deMarco, who is one of the executive producers and is the key connection point between Warner's and Kamiyama and team, has been a casual online friend for many years and while he's of course not going into detail, he's mentioned that's been a heck of a lot of work on his part but that he's loved both the process and what's happened so far, and he's never struck me as the type of guy interested in hype for hype's sake. Even though it's going to be inline with the Jackson movies by default on various levels, there's room to try something more here.

fair play, that sounds interesting at least

and an anime sensibility is something i overlooked tbh

the celebration after the crowning looks *awful*

The Lord of the Gripes

The army of the dead flowing over Minas Tirith looks way too much like a Listerine ad.

My comparison for years, as redone in the podcast, was Scrubbing Bubbles.

https://x.com/JessZafarris/status/1741700613413515476

Wait lemme try that again

Denmark's Queen Margrethe II, who announced her abdication on TV just hours ago, is also known for having done these illustrations for Danish '70s editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. pic.twitter.com/1F2vcwQuB1

— Jess Zafarris 📚 (@JessZafarris) January 1, 2024

OMG those are sick as hell

They're fantastic, thanks for sharing.

If you Google you can find some other ones

thought of a new line for the two towers posters

a little from gollum a, a little from gollum b

That's pretty awesome - also imagine if you're another fan indulging in the Tolkien fantasy of being Aragorn, except you're actually royalty.

a little from gollum a, a little from gollum b

We loves it

Seriously good one