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Shibawanko posted:I don't care about the CGI or any of the technical stuff in the movies I just think they have really bad characterization and feel cheap as a result. The actors are actually mostly good, but I'll wipe my rear end with the script. Only about half the actors do a good job. Otherwise I agree. I tried and failed to get through Fellowship a couple of years ago. It's just lights and sounds and no meat or nuance. That's always been PJ's MO as a director. I think the second Hobbit might be the only film of his I could bear to sit through again. Regardless of their quality as adaptations of Tolkien they're not good films. But they made for good spectacle in the cinema (and the music's good).
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Jul 22, 2019 00:56
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Horses don't fit in Rohan because Rohan belongs to the hillmen not these straw-haired savages.
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Jul 23, 2019 00:33
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Gandalf is a hedge wizard who claims a divine mandate to get into all the cool clubs. Of course he's going to say that God was behind everything.
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Aug 13, 2019 23:46
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Wow that was a lot of garbage to scroll through.
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Dec 25, 2019 21:08
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Saul Zaentz bought the film and television rights to the Hobbit and LotR in the 70s and his company has been profiting from it ever since.
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Jan 18, 2020 01:00
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Imagined posted:The people who insist that the LotR was allegorical or symbolic of WW1 or WW2, or of Tolkien's idealized childhood, generally drive me nuts. That being said, there are definitely some points in the books where I felt like his background as a combat veteran comes out. In particular, the passages in the 'The Two Towers' where the orcs are talking to each other about the progress of the war struck me as something Tolkien might have lifted nearly verbatim from his fellow soldiers during the war. There's nothing contradictory about an author claiming his work wasn't deliberate allegory and people reading it as being massively informed by his life experiences.
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Feb 16, 2020 21:20
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Imagined posted:Is that not exactly what I said? No. You conflate deliberate allegory with symbolism, and the "That being said" implies that you do see a contradiction.
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Feb 18, 2020 16:15
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The Lion is Jesus and also here's Santa. CS Lewis lived to make Tolkien mad.
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Feb 18, 2020 23:28
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WW2 was very traumatic for Tolkien as he had to wait ages to get feedback on his drafts.
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Feb 19, 2020 21:58
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I first read LotR around the same time I was reading Chaucer (for A levels) so the idea that it's not a simple, accessible read will always feel completely alien to me.
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Apr 27, 2020 21:02
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The Book of Lost Tales version of Fall of Gondolin is my favourite non-LotR Tolkien.
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Apr 29, 2020 23:56
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Nessus posted:Denethor was a privileged man with access to the Internet and a serious case of depression, so it's understandable that many goons would empathize with him. However, I believe a close reading of the books will reveal that Gandalf was a pretty cool guy. He was a jerk who abused people who weren't immediately useful to him, and had no qualms about casting spells of rousing "fire" on people who were (like Theoden and all his riders RIP). Gandalf doesn't care about hillmen, or orcs, or other oppressed peoples, he aligns with the powerful ruling classes who can gather large armies to fight his enemies. He did occasionally show some signs of conscience but he's mostly thought of as a good person by virtue of fighting for the winning team (in a war the authors fought in, under his command). The movies also soften his characterisation by making him wrong less often. Tolkien's Gandalf thinks going to Moria is a smashing idea.
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May 5, 2020 10:48
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Heithinn Grasida posted:I enjoy your posts in this thread, but I want to point out that he wasn’t wrong. Moria was the only feasible way east out of Eriador. It was almost disastrous, but every other way would have ended in failure. It's a stretch to claim there would have been no chance of success by other routes, or that Gandalf literally dying due to his mistake wasn't a failure. God had to intervene and give him another go to try to rescue the situation, which still failed, and required another last minute push from God. That Eagles are scared of longbows is dialogue in The Hobbit. They're not invincible. Mordor has its own airforce of indeterminate size.
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May 5, 2020 13:17
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euphronius posted:Don’t know if frodo claiming the ring at Mt Doom was a failure as Gollum was exactly where he needed to be. Maybe. That was God having to produce a hail mary because Gandalf wasn't there with Frodo to "inspire" him to spike the ball.
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May 5, 2020 14:36
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WoodrowSkillson posted:The actual answer, once the ring had been found, would have been to load up Bilbo, Gandalf, and some elves on Eagles and just blast into Mordor as fast as possible and huck the ring into the volcano, cutting off Bilbos finger/hand to do it if need be. But I always assumed the basic answer was that the Eagles just said "nah gently caress you, not gonna die for your stupid war." Which is inconsistent as they are happy to meddle otherwise. Yeah a few might die but many hundreds of thousands of other lives get lost as a result of the war so that's not really a great defense when they eventually show up anyway. When you start reading a text around what you perceive to be an author's mistakes you come up with strange readings. The eagles are not the only group who refuse to commit utterly to Gandalf's crazy scheme, and the war in general. The Fellowship has token representation from a small number of allied forces, but most Men, Elves, Dwarfs and Miscellaneous stay at home until the war is on their doorstep. No one is putting themselves on the line en mass to save "hundreds of thousands of other lives" until they're directly threatened (and sometimes even then a magic spell is required). Only the survivors of Minas Tirith march on the Black Gate. The Eagles, being eagles, are especially safe and secure where they are. Individuals are happy to meddle and do favours, but that's not inconsistent at all. Every other group of people is the same. If they had tried to fly the ring to Mount Doom they would have failed. It's not a big open top cartoon volcano you can drop something into, the forge is in the heart of a mountain. Mordor is full of troops. They would be seen coming.
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May 5, 2020 14:55
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euphronius posted:I don’t know if it is simple to assume they’d even carry the ring bearer without being corrupted. Sam did it but he’s “special” You're not supposed to call them "special" any more afaik.
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May 5, 2020 15:05
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Also Gandalf manipulations are A-OK because he's doing it all for Eru. He believes that, for sure.
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May 5, 2020 18:08
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WoodrowSkillson posted:So that kinda fucks with the logic. yes its not a big cartoon volcano, the point is you can fly in, and even if some people see you, you deal with what few dudes can actually climb a mountain in the short amount of time they have to react, and do the deed, and run. Any scenario makes sense if you dismiss enough of the texts as "a mistake", I suppose.
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May 5, 2020 18:16
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Myron Baloney posted:Well Gandalf was going to have to die some time anyway because even coming back as The White he was barely up to the final steps, and that change from The Grey to The White and what it implies (that active help was coming) was important to JRRT - also it's obvious Tolkien wanted to go to Moria and bring more of the elder days stuff into the story, possibly solely for his own gratification - I forget if it was in a letter or the foreward or what but I remember him saying he'd brought them to Balin's tomb and he had no idea what would come next. The author's whim is always good enough for me, I may not enjoy it but I don't second-guess it. So Gandalf didn't make a mistake because he knew the author wanted him to die to be reborn? It wasn't a mistake to get killed by a Balrog he didn't know was there because the author wanted to talk about Balrogs? An equivalent reading would be that Sauron was no threat because it was important to Tolkien that he be defeated in the end. Maybe you should start second guessing why you're so hung up on the author's intent/whim? You might find there's a story written down somewhere. sassassin fucked around with this message at 18:40 on May 5, 2020 |
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May 5, 2020 18:24
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perc2 posted:tell you what though if a fella like Saruman came up to me from his shadowy tower, with creepy & arrogant disposition i'd perceive his designs immediately, theres no way a guy like that isn't up to no good. Gandalf is a loving dumbass The shadowy tower was built by Numenorians and Gandalf's plan involves sticking one of them on a throne.
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Jan 19, 2021 03:33
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Gandalf the Grey is all flash and theatre. See his fireworks and reshaping water into horses. Put him on Weathertop (a location intended to watch over a massive area) and of course any scrap is going to be noticeable from miles around.
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Jan 20, 2021 12:57
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"Rightful" inheritance is a social construct and the practical strength of Aragorn's claim is built on the back of some old poems Gandalf wrote, and Elvish tricks. Oh, and the army at his back. But the Witch King had one of those. The people want the good old days where a king with healing hands sent them off on foreign wars.
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Jan 23, 2021 15:21
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Reading the songs in LotR is way more important to understanding it that trawling through the appendices or the Silmarillion, and yet... How the characters see their history matters more than the "true" version of events Tolkien writes elsewhere (usually at very different times in his life or never finishing at all). Read the musical numbers, and yes, picture the dance routine.
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Jan 26, 2021 09:37
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perc2 posted:I played it with the intention of exploring each area and getting into the lore but it's just such a huge world now it takes an absolute age to make progress, and the instances are all abandoned so you can't enjoy those either. It would probably take a year of playing to get to the endgame and you have to be in some kind of hardcore mindset to get there, an effort that will be mostly lonely wandering in solitude doing extremely repetitive fetch quests. It only gets repetitive when you get into Rohan stuff which was like three years solid of releases all telling the same basic Grima plot over and over again. By Helm's Deep you had to do every quest in order so you couldn't explore off the Epic path, and the Epic path was clumsy stagings of scenes from the books with your OC hanging around awkwardly in the background. Lonely wandering in solitude through the Shire, Eregion, Moria, Lothlorien and Mirkwood from 1 to 70 is a great time.
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Jan 31, 2021 18:37
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Can't really complain about how terrible Peter Jackson's elves are considering what he did to poor Gimli. Could have been so much worse, elf fans.
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Feb 1, 2021 22:09
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Please argue about the chronology of unpublished creation myths and fables more, it's super important to get it right.
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Feb 2, 2021 06:52
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Arcsquad12 posted:I never thought about it until now but Eomer giving Aragorn two horses in exchange for Merry and Pippin's presumed death is basically paying a weregild, isn't it. He lends them horses in the hope that they will come to Edoras after finishing their search. It's only two because Gimli refuses one. Eomer talks about doing the same for both Boromir and Gandalf in the same section, it's standard custom. Only people trying to buy black horses are turned away. Unlike the films he's sure that only orcs were killed as they checked the bodies and Aragorn doesn't see any reason to doubt him.
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Feb 6, 2021 23:24
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:It's not just about destroying the subtleties in the visual spectrum, the Jackson movies also removed a lot of the emotional subtleties. I think time is going to be hard on those movies and by the 2030's they're going to be considered bad adaptations that need to be rectified. Why wait? They've been bad adaptations for years already. Good costumes good music, good landscapes, some good casting. Trash scripts. Even though it's considered the best one, Fellowship is poorly-paced and weirdly jumbled, it's changeforchangessake.txt in structure, characterisation and content. Some of the changes were good, some were needed to fit the type of film they were making. Some are just weird and make the story more confusing. Even worse some have no impact at all. It's really heavy-handed adaptation. sassassin fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 11:27
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webmeister posted:By the law of LOTR Adaptations, Elijah Wood is contractually bound to play Bilbo Give him 15 years he might look old enough to play Frodo.
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Feb 12, 2021 11:08
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Data Graham posted:Also correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't the CalArts "house style" considerably different 20 years ago? Like there was definitely a thing people referred to as "CalArts style", but it wasn't the picture above, it was more like the Dexter's Lab/Fairly OddParents/Powerpuff Girls/McCracken/Tartakovsky thing. All angles and squares and UPA-ish geometric stylization. And before that it was all stuff aping Disney Feature because that's what people went to CalArts to learn how to do. Apart from curvy:angular there's not really any difference.
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Feb 16, 2021 19:59
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I know Tolkien set certain standards when he detailed the structure and organisation of Hobbiton's postal service and Lamedon's acreage of wheatfields, but there's no reason to think elves didn't have functional, mundane societies happening off-page. They're shown to have solid houses and feasts and wine, and organise tedious meetings like everyone else. People's readings suffer for the decades of copycat fantasy/d&d baggage influencing their ideas of what elves are "supposed" to be, to the point where the lack of a written sex scene between Legolas and Gimli has them questioning if Tolkien's elves can even get horny. Of course they can, Frodo's just too much of a stuck up toff to dedicate pages to it in his book.
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Mar 9, 2021 01:32
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Baudolino posted:too tired of the world to care for vanity and fashion. Nonsense. Peter Jackson's emotionless vulcans have warped people's minds.
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Mar 17, 2021 21:23
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The rings of power created under Sauron's guidance are just magic rings that let people do cool stuff. Powerful people will want to have them. But he introduced a backdoor in their programming that he could exploit through his One Ring. So they make for fabulous gifts and a cunning trap. The aim is more to dominate than "corrupt". The Elves made three rings that he didn't know about, so he can't hack in as easily as he could with the others, but since he wrote the code they work on they're still vulnerable.
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Apr 2, 2021 00:26
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He becomes an elected mayor rather than a position of any hereditary significance.
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Apr 7, 2021 22:13
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Ginette Reno posted:Hobbits don't give a poo poo about power or wealth or any of that, so the Ring's evil is slower to work on them. Cobblers. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins was desperate for Bag End and those spoons. The miller's boy sells out to the big folk at the earliest opportunity. You can't read the memoirs of some extremely privileged young toffs (and one adoring servant) and declare all hobbits free of earthly desire.
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Apr 13, 2021 21:33
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sweet geek swag posted:True, but Lobelia's greed is really small potatoes compared to say a Human king's or an elf Lord's, never mind Saruman or Sauron. The greed of the average human or orc would be too.
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Apr 13, 2021 23:53
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quote:Philippa Boyens is consulting on the project It never had a chance.
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Jun 11, 2021 13:42
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Data Graham posted:And I'll repeat what I've said numerous times, which is that my "oh! well. This'll be okay then" moment was right at the beginning: Then he does a clumsy dive into a hug that a 5 year old would be embarrassed by. PJ could never seem to decide if the hobbits were actually children or not.
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Feb 17, 2022 22:42
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The real question is how many of Aragorn's ancestors did Elrond promise Arwen to previously?
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Jun 3, 2022 19:22
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Imagined posted:I choose to read Sam's "I'll have that slave-driving devil anyway" as implying that Sam even feels some sympathy for the orcs who are being driven along with himself and Frodo, or at least recognizes a slave-driver as even worse than a typical orc, even if he's only commanding other orcs. He's sympathetic that they don't have a kind Master to serve like he does.
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Jul 6, 2022 11:59
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