The Desolation of SUCK.

Yeah, that's my review. I never worry about anyone agreeing with me, I'm just giving you my take on it, and I won't be upset if you change your mind when you're rested.

NOTIFY: N  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

11 Facts About The Hobbit You Probably Didn't Know

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/01/03/mangling-a-myth-ctd-2/

Charm is an essential secret to The Hobbit, and to some extent The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s myth depends on the response of ordinary creatures to horrific threats against their comfortable lives. The hobbits prove uncommonly strong and resistant to harm because they carry the warmth of their home inside them, and they repeatedly summon its charms in the darkest times, while facing the most dangerous foes.

Jackson’s Lord of the Rings conveys the very English charm of the Shire and its inhabitants beautifully and consistently. It helps that Jackson’s own love of his New Zealand home continually comes across in those movies. In contrast, the first Hobbit movie unsuccessfully tries to pack most of its charm into the first dorky meal with the dwarves, and the second film is practically bereft of charm. In trying to fashion a more epic Hobbit, he lost the basic warmth at the heart of Tolkien’s work.

People talk about how The Hobbit movies are horrible but the LOTR movies were great. Yes, they were lovely to look at, and the visuals were nicely done and accurate, and film isn’t print, accommodations for the different medium, blah, blah, blah. Fine. But Jackson was so obviously tone-deaf about what Tolkien was trying to do in his creation of a faerie land that he misses the really important things for the sake of his own grandiose vision of mayhem in Middle New Zealand. Three simple for-instances:

1) Faramir. For Tolkien, Faramir is the explicit anti-Boromir. Two brothers. One wants to wield the ring for himself; one refuses to touch the ring. Two brothers with different approaches, different relationships with their father, and different ends. It’s an important contrast in the novel that Jackson doesn’t merely elide, he actively destroys by making Faramir the same kind of ring-stealing power-monger as Boromir. Egregious assassination of an important moral compass point so that he can slip in footage of Osgiliath.

2) Aragorn. For Tolkien, Aragorn is a pure hero cut from the Anglo-Saxon cloth of Beowulf (of whom Tolkien was an eminent scholar). Remember Beowulf? “Hey, I hear you have a monster problem. I have the strength of 30 men. I’ll fix it for you.” So Tolkien’s Aragorn–a hero who never doubts his heritage or his calling, who takes the palantir to issue a direct challenge to Sauron, who wins and is crowned king. “I am Aragorn, son of Arathorn, heir of Isildur. I will claim what is mine by right.” Contrast Jackson’s maudlin, conflicted, postmodern, wimpy man. Every orc in the trilogy has more balls. Heck, his girlfriend has more balls.

3) Elrond. By the blazing flames of Sammath Naur, how do you cast Agent Smith as Elrond?! I mean, what the hell? If you want a scary psychopath, why not cast Jack Nicholson? Does Jackson have any idea who this character is? “He was as noble and as fair in face as an elf-lord, as strong as a warrior, as wise as a wizard, as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer.” He’s not a bitter, racist, computer virus, that’s for damn sure.

The Hobbit movies, by contrast to LOTR, at least have the characterization mostly right. I can live with interpolated ass-whuppins and all the Hollywood if you respect the characters. The Hobbit is a simpler story with simpler, less noble characters and so suffers less from Jackson’s depredations.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

Quote:

---

Faramir.

---

I was actually okay with that change. In the story it didn't actually make sense that one brother couldn't resist the ring and one could. The ring makes it near impossible for anyone to resist without a supreme effort of will.

Quote:

---

Aragorn.

---

Lolwut? Yes, angst is sometimes annoying, but it hardly qualifies as wimpy, and since when is a mary sue more interesting than someone with internal conflict?

I hear people make this exact same argument about Malcolm Reynolds, ferchrissake. Real people have problems, sometimes emotional, even for the toughest guy, and they DEAL with it in various ways.

Quote:

---

Elrond.

---

He wasn't playing Agent Smith. He was playing Elrond. Playing different characters is something actors do. For example, Jack Nicholson, who was mentioned in that utterly inane rant, has played both a man gone murderously crazy in The Shining as well as characters in friggin' romantic comedies.

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

Quote:

---

Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
He wasn't playing Agent Smith. He was playing Elrond. Playing different characters is something actors do. For example, Jack Nicholson, who was mentioned in that utterly inane rant, has played both a man gone murderously crazy in The Shining as well as characters in friggin' romantic comedies.

---

Your experience of Hugo Weaving ( Agent 'Elrond' Smith ) did not match mine. Weaving did not convince me that “he was as noble and as fair in face as an elf-lord, as strong as a warrior, as wise as a wizard, as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer.” He did speak his lines with slow dignity and followed directions, so he deserved to be paid for his good-enough acting. Many actors could have done as well. Maybe Jackson could have cast somebody else?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

I thought it was a decent movie. It definitely changed a lot from the book but I expected that. So, it's not the end of the world IMO.

The only part I really thought was bad was the chase/fight with Smaug. I mean he's supposed to be smart and cunning. The movie Smaug fell for "hey over here!" like 3 times when he was like one stride away from killing a handful of dwarves. Not to mention the silly gold statue. That whole action scene was a mistake IMO. Still I can let it slide and call it a good movie.

NOTIFY: N  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

Quote:

---

Charm is an essential secret to The Hobbit, and to some extent The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s myth depends on the response of ordinary creatures to horrific threats against their comfortable lives. The hobbits prove uncommonly strong and resistant to harm because they carry the warmth of their home inside them, and they repeatedly summon its charms in the darkest times, while facing the most dangerous foes.

---

It's not a myth though, but how people work - children who have been treated well stand up far better and surer than those who have been deprived, denied and mistreated, BECAUSE they have that "warmth of home inside them", which makes the whole doctrine of subjecting them to privation, denial of their selfhood and suffering not only invalid, but a form of abuse that cripples them.

Case in point, Gollum wasn't treated too well, and that became self-fulfilling prophecy even before he fell to the lure of the ring, cause that's HOW it got its hooks into him so damn fast in the first place.

Quote:

---

Elrond. By the blazing flames of Sammath Naur, how do you cast Agent Smith as Elrond?! I mean, what the hell? If you want a scary psychopath, why not cast Jack Nicholson? Does Jackson have any idea who this character is? “He was as noble and as fair in face as an elf-lord, as strong as a warrior, as wise as a wizard, as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer.” He’s not a bitter, racist, computer virus, that’s for damn sure.

---

Erm, Elrond was a massive hypocrite and something of a racist towards men, in large part because he was too damn arrogant to admit his own responsibility in letting Isildur walk out of there with the Ring - he plays it off nice, especially in public, despite ALSO being a pompous, overbearing ass (which is true to the character, hell, MOST elves kinda were) but privately he was extremely bitter towards the race of men, perhaps because he blamed the human half of him for letting Isildur merrily trot off with the Ring like that.
Of course, he misliked Aragorn for far more direct and obvious reasons, which while petty are a bit more understandable.

In fact showing Elrond as complex, conflicted and flawed as he was, that was IMHO one of the things the movies did right.

I concur that Faramir totally got the shaft though, and you know who else did, to my ire cause the poor bastard's been shafted by *EVERY* interpretation but the original ?
Glorfindel.

Seriously, he's like the Rodney Dangerfield of elves, when it comes to adaptions of Tolkiens work, no respect at all.

-Frem

PS. I am of the mind that Peter Jackson jumped the shark somewhere around the middle of Two Towers, so I wasn't expecting to bother going to see anything after that.

NOTIFY: N  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME