I think that before anyone makes a LotR movie, they need to read Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-Stories.
Tolkien was very fond of a concept he dubbed eucatastrophe — that is, a “happy catastrophe”. Yes, everything works out in the end, but, at the same time, your life has been turned upside-down.
Maybe you can go back to the place home used to be, but you can’t go home again after a eucatastrophe: you’ve changed, and the place itself has changed, and you just won’t fit in the same way that you used to.
I could live with them cutting out Tom Bombadil (although giving his lines to Treebeard in the Extended Edition was a low blow), and even having Faramir tempted by the Ring (though that dulled the whole point that Faramir was the better man). However, by cutting out the Scouring of the Shire, and just having the hobbits return home with nothing more than a sneer at Merry and Pippin (who, as a Took and a Brandybuck, probably got their fair share of sneers before they left), it yanked out the whole concept of eucatastrophe, which was a great disservice to Tolkien.
I think that the movies are visually stunning, and quite enjoyable, but, without the Scouring, I can never think of them as “true enough” to the books.
I got obsessed with this particular performance after seeing a clip of her practicing in a dance film about ballet in Russia. I watched every variation of that piece that is out on YouTube and the way she moves her arms and legs is so birdlike. She does not even look human with her arms when she is on the floor. It’s like her arms are detached and are actual wings. Glad you also appreciated it!
Sadly, from what Jackson’s said, it was purely a time issue. There’s simply so much material to cover, and when he tried to fit in the Scouring, he found that it’s such an intense, dense chapter of the book that there was no real way to trim or simplify it. To do it justice would have added another 20-30 minutes onto an already nearly-four-hour film and add another ‘ending’. I agree that I’d love to see it, and that Saruman’s death seemed very goofy. But we probably would’ve needed a “RotK part 1” and “part 2” for it to be feasible.
The LotR films are a great example of movies that people already had in their head before they saw them. For people who wanted to see film versions of Alan Lee/John Howe drawings and who went in knowing Peter Jackson’s sense of whimsy, they were wonderful. But I think a lot of people had exactly what kind of movie they wanted to see in their head, going in, and when elements were missing from that vision, they wrote the movies off.
My award for “Stinky Mega-Blockbuster” goes to: The Matrix trilogy. I confess I did enjoy these, but I remember walking out of the first one, still high, laughing at how bad (but equally entertaining) this movie was. The Wachowskis seem to have a particular talent for making visually stunning tripe.
“Most Unworthy Sequel”: The Godfather Part 3. Some may argue that this only looks bad in comparison to the first two, and it isn’t really all that bad a film if taken on its own merits. Sure, if you ignore minor details like writing and acting.
Worst reboot: (Abrams + Star Trek) x 2 = -∞.
For “WTF Were the Critics and/or Academy Thinking?” I nominate The Town, with runner up Argo. I just don’t get, at all, what anyone likes about Ben Affleck’s acting and directing. Seems so wooden and contrived to me. I remember rolling my eyes and/or laughing derisively all the way through The Town. Argo admittedly is not exactly terrible, but were it not for the patriotic angle it would just be a nice bit of Saturday afternoon fluff. Best Picture? Seriously? Plus, it offends me as a Canadian.
Almost so bad it’s good, but not quite: Freddy Got Fingered. What do you get when you give a Hollywood budget to a gross-out comedian who rose to stardom via cable-access TV? This… this… thing. Runners up: Every Adam Sandler movie ever, except Punch Drunk Love and Funny People.
Worst movie by a superstar man-child that’s supposed to demonstrate his ability to be serious for a change: Punch Drunk Love.
Worst beloved holiday classic: It’s A Wonderful Life. I just can’t sit through this one more time.
So bad it’s wonderful: obviously, The Room. Cool story.
Honestly, I can see both these things. There is lots of love and respect for Tolkien’s world to be found in those movies, mostly in the form of lovingly crafted details. The over-all structure, though, diverges more and more from the tone and nature of his stories. For instance, not only is nimelennar right about the scouring of the shire, but between that and the ghosts-do-it-all battle I’d say the whole nature and point of the victory has become entirely different.
If we care about the opinion of Tolkien scholars, well, here is one of the finest:
But while I understand his view, it’s still not mine. Like nungesser’s scholar friend, I really am fond of the first movies, especially The Fellowship of the Ring. Sure, it may be a question of just good scenes and actors, but they were more than good enough to win me over. I’ll especially second Boromir for being a great reading of the character, more subtle than most people I know had noticed from the book. If that’s just fooling me into liking it, well then, well played.
From there, though, the incoherence and point-missing really does build. By The Battle of Five Armies I think Abe may actually be overly generous – to me it was only “not the worst” in the most literal sense. By which I mean, it was one of only two trilogies I couldn’t quite finish, but I’d say the other one still does come closer to this title.
Oh yes! I so want to see that one. I have seen Machine Girl and Karate-Robo Zaborgar. Noboru Iguchi makes super crazy bad and fun films. Anything from Sushi Typhoon can be a fun viewing Alien Vs. Ninja I got on a whim from the library and just giggled as the absurdity of it the whole time. These could get old if you marathon watched them but if you like over the top crazy action/gore they are quite fun.
I cannot take Jackson’s “there wasn’t enough time” proclamations seriously when he took the battles that were ~5% of the book and made them into ~50% of the movie.
The BBC radio adaptation fit the whole thing except Bombadil (including the scouring) into 13 hours well enough. I think this is one of the things that annoyed me about Jackson’s films. I get that it was an adaptation, but I wanted more of Tolkien and less of Jackson. And I will always hate his Faramir. Irritates me to no end that he nailed the look and scope of the film then messed around with and added stuff that didn’t need it.
And I still prefer Peter Woodthorpe’s Gollum to Serkis’s (both in the BBC and the Bakshi version).
…which took, what, three seconds?[quote=“daneel, post:381, topic:78302”]
The BBC radio adaptation fit the whole thing except Bombadil (including the scouring) into 13 hours well enough.
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The BBC radio adaptation didn’t include the battles, because audio of war doesn’t really play well as a radio drama. Neither do lengthy descriptions in text. But in a film, an epic battle can be done justice to. I can’t imagine many filmgoers would’ve been happy if after all the buildup to the huge conflict it’d happened nearly entirely offscreen and referred to in the past tense.
I prefer Brother Theodore’s Gollum to Andy Serkis by a mile.
I wasted no time acquiring a BluRay of Fury Road. We rented it as soon as it was available and watched it 3 times in those 2 days. I’m right there with ya.
I found Kentucky Fried movie to be incredibly unwatchable and IMO it fits your manifesto. I got maybe 5 minutes in and decided that whatever cult cache it has wasn’t worth the effort to discover. Sooo bad.
Oh, I know. That’s why I acknowledged that it had to be an adaptation. “Show, not tell” and all that. But I get really bored by overly extended action scenes these days - and I didn’t like the way Jackson changed who was fighting in them, to boot.
Had to look him up. I’ve never seen those adaptations. Maybe I should.
But at least he tried. And he did advance the genre of all-duck cinema (which has to be a feather in his cap). The Terror of Duck Town may have started the ball slowly rolling, but without Kubrick’s Spruce Goose we never would have gotten Beyond the Valley of the Ducks, Airport 1978, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Duck, You Sucker! (also known as A Fistful of Feathers), Rollerduck, Mallard’s Song, Spielberg’s aquatic horror Duck, Jodorowski’s cult classic El Pato, or the massively popular 1980s all-avian prime-time soap-opera Duck Dynasty.
