Posted on 02/22/2014 7:44:18 AM PST by Perdogg
Peter Jackson has made some remarkable movies.
Theres no denying that his sprawling Lord of the Rings trilogy was the very definition of epicfilled with massive battles, touching moments, and beautiful cinematography, not to mention a lovely score.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Possibly because places like England are in dire need of a scouring by the troops returning from fighting Muslims overseas — only to find that Islam has infested their own home Shires.
Hey...if you can’t rip-rap that Elf Yip-yap, you ain’t gettin’ none anyway.
Bombadil was originally a character in a poem that Tolkien composed prior to the LOTR books, in 1934 (three years before “The Hobbit”).
LeD Zepplin — but not “Queen”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEM-Pewisqg
In fact, I can say that for most of my DVD collection. For about a 10-year period, I collected over 200 DVDs that are now gathering dust in my basement. I had visions at one time of building a massive DVD library and building a "home theatre" of sorts in my home in which I would invite people over for a truly cinematic experience - sort of like Hugh Hefner in his Playboy mansion.
Alas, that never quite came to pass. Instead, when I am in the mood to watch something, I plug in headphones and run Netflix on my MacBook Pro and watch "House of Cards", "Breaking Bad" or "Lost" on demand. Netflix has mostly lousy movies but they have a decent collection of TV shows that don't have all those commercials.
Getting a DVD to play on the television is actually a hassle by comparison. I have to go down to the basement to find what I want to watch, then I have to insert it into the Blu-Ray DVD player (I still have yet to see a Blu-Ray DVD) and then I have to figure out what buttons on the remote control get me to the DVD and then you have to change the TV to VIDEO 2 or some such setting. Then the audio doesn't come on and you have to go to your stereo receiver and select the right channel to bring in the audio. Such a hassle.
My wife keeps telling me to put the DVDs on Ebay so I can get rid of them (some of them are still shrink-wrapped!) but I'm just too damn lazy I guess.
You wouldn’t happen to have Charlton Heston in “The Warlord” would you?
I agree.
Look at Gone With The Wind and Ben-Hur.
Long movies, both...yet audiences sat enraptured.
Ed
Here’s an interesting take on a subject... you might enjoy..
Time travellers: please dont kill Hitler
http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/feb/21/time-travellers-kill-adolf-hitler
No I agree. I bought and eventually gave away my LOTR extended DVD’s because as time went on, the more I watched them the more I realized Jackson got it totally wrong. He dissed the high and lofty for the earth hippie vibe.
Have seen neither of the Hobbit movies in the theater. Rented the first one and it just reminded me of Jackson’s LOTR on steroids. Don’t know if I’ll rent the 2nd and 3rd or not.
Well said.
And the wargs.
Bitches: (1) Viggo didn't understand the character, period, and what Aragorn actually was would have been very difficult to describe in dialogue anyway; (2) The Ents - good Lord, are we looking at Disney audioanimatronics in the middle of a CGI wonder here? (3) Eowyn / Aragorn / Faramir - here we had a feminist character written before feminism was cool (and for which Tolkien gets precisely no credit from the academic crowd) who comes to a realization of who she really is, and what we got on screen was another tiresome kick-butt action flick chick. That wasn't the actress's fault. Lastly, The Scouring - it was, actually, the point of the dramatic narrative that the small could rise from the Shire and shake the counsels of the great, and that doing so would change them forever. And with incomparable team of Lee and Dourif in the roles of Saruman and Grima Wormtongue, the potential for greatness was heartbreakingly close.
Bombadil, although I love the character, was, I think, wisely omitted. He's supposed to be enigmatic, and that isn't very satisfying to a movie audience there to see some serious smiting. A literary cottage industry has developed around speculation of what he really was and that's the way Tolkien wanted it.
For The Hobbit I am less enthusiastic, which is, if I understand it correctly, the point of the article. It wasn't told in the same epic voice of LOTR at all, it was a gentle, humorous, avuncular fireside story. LOTR began that way, and one of its most stirring moments for me was when the Black Riders first showed up and the pretense was dropped, and all of a sudden the reader gets a sense of real evil that was nowhere to be found in The Hobbit, a sense that the silliness was done and the waters had just gotten very deep indeed. It was brilliant writing set up by the gentler Hobbit.
But there simply isn't three movies' worth of material in that slender volume, and the padding is done by lesser pens. Just my $0.02.
Gone With The Wind had an intermission break when I saw it in 75.
Well exactly. Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings are going to be divorced, because hes run out of books to make films of. I suppose you could do bits of the Silmarillion - the tale of Beren and Luthien come to mind, but thats about it.
The problem with the scouring of the shire is that, in spite of how important it is (not the least because it emphasises our own much more limited fight against evil) on screen it would appear as an anticlimax after the destruction of the ring. If Jackson's epic had been a 13 part TV series rather than three films it would have been ok, but its not.
Yes there were too many endings.
I disagree. I know its not Tolkein’s vision, but I think Jackson was right to portray Aragorn like that. Its much better cinematically.
I completely agree with you about the scouring. Its as if, in PJ’s perspective, the Hero Hobbits went back to their daily lives in the Shire. Tolkein tells a much different ending, albeit it takes some time to tell. The Hobbits were changed, externally as well as internally, emotionally as well as spiritually. JP’s ending addresses the grief and sadness at Frodo’s departure, but it doesn’t begin to address the Heroes role in the Shire at the Scouring, the rebuilding and the ongoing past 1420 SR.
Because the filmable stories are now "in the can".
Well, almost.
This guy here is eagerly awaiting the closure that will come with the "H:BotFA" extended edition this fall.
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