Posted on 12/10/2001 2:57:51 AM PST by maquiladora
Tolkien's house in north Oxford. 20 Northmoor Rd.
Your quote: Personally it's my view that while quite a few women do appriciate JRRT, and even greater number don't have the mental acumen to grasp it. "The Hobbit" was about as far as their attention span allowed their interest journey.Had I waited, a better example that some males may also not possess the mental acumen to "grasp" Tolkien would appear in this very thread:My Reply: This is such obnoxious drivel. There are a lot of people who fit that category. I guess you have never heard a football player interviewed.
And the screwiest thing about the LoTR hype is that people aren't just talking about it as a movie. They constantly present it as some kind of mystical experience, the battle of good versus evil...
HEY -- it's a kid's story about monsters and magic, people! Get real! Look out the window! There are no monsters in real life. There is no magic in real life.
-MarkWar
So...let me get this straight: fiction is automatically for children? And it's impossible to show any real life values through fiction, it's just for entertaining the kiddies? Uh...OK. Whatever.
I think you can remove the "H". Humble you ain't.
I think lots of people, especially women , have no desire to expose their kids or themselves to orcs and Raiths, and all the other dark creatures of Middle Earth. HP was about as deep as they'd willingly go into that forbidding realm .
But from what I've heard from the Mom's and other women in my area, not to mention not just a little input from listeners at the woman oriented radio station where I work, quite a few don't care a whit about JRRT, LOTR, or anything of that genre. Instead they're ready for a "Fried Green Tomatos ".
Personally it's my view that while quite a few women do appriciate JRRT, and even greater number don't have the mental acumen to grasp it . "The Hobbit" was about as far as their attention span allowed their interest journey.
Are you a complete moron or are you just trying to incite a riot among women on FreeRepublic? A large part of my masters degree was spent studying classic mythology and philosophy. (For your clarification the classics predate JRRT by a few thousand years...but I managed to get my simple little female brain around it.
If the "Mom's and other women" in your area really think like the way you say they do then you should move. You're obviously far too smart to work in the company of such dolts.
Posters like yourself make me quite ill.
Card's Ender's Game appeals to a certain audience - smart, lonely children and those who remember being smart, lonely children - ie most science fiction writers. I have to conclude that you either did not understand the novel or you sniffed too much glue in sixth grade and have forgotten what it was like to be a child. I do not like most of Card's works; Ender, Speaker for the Dead, Ender's Shadow, and Shadow of the Hegemon are the exceptions. And since he's won both the Hugo and the Nebula for the Ender books, and they're bestsellers, I think your opinion is a minority.
I won't argue over Dune. They got really odd. Frank Herbert was on some drug, I think.
And Tolkien is obviously not for everyone, but for some, it touches something deep down. You may not like our choice, but don't come here and say we're infantile, please.
Fried Green Tomatoes was okay, but I certainly wouldn't have paid to see it.
Give me Bruce, Arnold, or Carrey anyday. ;)
Last movie I watched more than once - Pulp Fiction. I could watch it 100 times and still pick up something new. That's my idea of entertainment. :)
I did in fact see full Metal Jacket and thought it a great film. I enjoy movies quite a bit but prefer to read because my feeble female mind is far superior in creating the characters and the scenes than most Hollywood film makers can rival.
For the record...I did see Harry Potter with my hubby yesterday and thought that it was wonderful. My nephew is too young now but I'll collect the books for him and give them to him when he's old enough for us to read them together.
[laughs] Good ones. But, you know, Full Metal Jacket was "made-up stuff" too.
I hate to mix threads, but since you brought up the title "Paradise Lost" in your reply to me, have you seen the movie "Scream 3?" One of the characters in that movie is named "John Milton." And, as the characters attempt to puzzle out all the plot difficulties, one of them observes, "Milton's the key to all this!" (If you've visited my thread inspired by my _first_ post to a LoTR thread (Movie Subliminals -- The Rate of God (Accident? Purposeful?)) , SCREAM 3 is the movie that begins with a character named Christine being killed by a character named Roman... (For lurkers who don't know "Paradise Lost" it's a rather absurd attempt to re-tell sections of Genesis in the "style" of the Illiad.))
Anyway, back to this thread, I didn't think my point was too obtuse or very strained. There are widely accepted notions for what passes as "adult stuff" and what passes as "kid's stuff." Unless nobody told me, there are no hard and fast definitions of such things, but hard and fast definitions are not needed.
I only mentioned Full Metal Jacket as an example of _real_ adult stuff to contrast it with the attempt to pass off LoTR as adult stuff.
Mark W.
Ummm, have you actually read the books?
Its about good vs. evil, and not the cheesy Hollywood version of good vs. evil either. The setting is almost besides the point.
I'm sorry but from your comments it sounds like all you know about LOTR is what you've seen on those Burger King comercials. This ain't Willow on a grander scale.
LOL
Now prisoner6 is another animal all together. He's the "I like my women barefoot and pregers" type. Probably make the little woman wear an apron with her pearls like June Clever. That way he can imagine that he's a real man like Ward instead of the little guy like the Beeve.
Ummm, it's tempting to say that ANY TIME you have characters who are intrinsically evil (i.e., monsters of any kind) -- as opposed to people who are evil by choice -- then you're talking about cheesy Hollywood stuff or one-dimensional kid's stuff. I wouldn't offer that as a hard & fast rule -- Dracula isn't really kid's stuff and it's not cheesy, yet he's a monster -- but it's a good guideline and, in the case of LoTR, I think it holds up.
Mark W.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.