The Tolkien Mega-Thread

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CRKrueger said:
It's ok. Steve is actually a published author contemporary to Tolkien who happens to still be alive, so his response is understandable.
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Nah, I was just being sarcastic.

As forthe LotR movies, almost all the issues with Two Towers and RotK stem from the choice to not include the Scouring of the Shire. That means a bunch of side quest crap in Osgiliath had to be added, rather than the awesome cliffhanger than now comes midway through the third movie.

Gigli became thw comic relief because John Rhys Davies turned out to be allergic to the glue used for his prosthetics. This meant he couldnonly film every second or third day. So he got consigned to comic ad libs.
 
I've been reminded of this scene in Cannery Row multiple times during this thread. About 20 seconds in, but also one of the greatest dance scenes in movie history if you hang out for the whole clip.

"Who cares who all those bozos are, this music is for dancing, it ain't for memorizing."

 
Fenris-77 said:
It might pain you to realize that LotR is also, in great part, also for people who read comic books. Just saying...
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Oddly enough, Lord of the Rings was published in 1954, which was also the year that the Comics Code Authority was established. Comics were considered by many “esteemed” folks at that point in time to cause juvenile delinquency. A dark era for comics.
 
Endless Flight said:
Oddly enough, Lord of the Rings was published in 1954, which was also the year that the Comics Code Authority was established. Comics were considered by many “esteemed” folks at that point in time to cause juvenile delinquency. A dark era for comics.
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That's an interesting factoid! Wouldn't want unleashed imagination to get anyone thinking, eh?
 
Fenris-77 said:
That's an interesting factoid! Wouldn't want unleashed imagination to get anyone thinking, eh?
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Comics to me have always been about visual storytelling. As a kid I always got more out of comics than reading books because that’s just how I was, and still am, wired. I just think back to how many awesome comics that we didn’t get because companies went out of business due to that fearmongering.
 
Endless Flight said:
Comics to me have always been about visual storytelling. As a kid I always got more out of comics than reading books because that’s just how I was, and still am, wired. I just think back to how many awesome comics that we didn’t get because companies went out of business due to that fearmongering.
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Yeah man. I'm with you. I teach comics a little, and have done a bunch of academic work on sequential art on my own dime.
 
Stevethulhu said:
Gigli became thw comic relief because John Rhys Davies turned out to be allergic to the glue used for his prosthetics. This meant he couldnonly film every second or third day. So he got consigned to comic ad libs.
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Question. Why did he need prosthetics? There is nothing in the book or the story that suggests that dwarves are Brothers-Hildebrandt grotesques. See also: hobbits' feet are hairy, not large.
 
I'm wondering if part of the weaknesses of the second and third film is that they need to take a more expansive view of the setting and narrative and therefore it is approached less through the hobbit's eyes.

But also just that the style of Fellowship of the Ring somewhat overstayed it's welcome in the later films, once it was not just about a band of travellers making a journey.

I think I can see why Jackson added so much dreadful humour to the later films as without it the films would have been stodgy and humourless (they still are because the humour doesn't actually offset any of the seriousness, it just sits alongside it, and the seriousness never really ascends to an epic mode.). The humour is in a sense, a replacemet for the aspect of the books where the less approachable epic characters tend to be seen through the hobbit's eyes. It's no accident that Pippin is present for Gandalf's interactions with Denethor, for example.

The realist Hollywood style just doesn't work for the film. Jackson doesn't really know how to film the books in an epic style, let alone how to merge that style with something more approachable. The more human Aragorn we get in the Fellowship film works well in that film, but has little real place in the latter two films as they follow the story that Tolkien wrote.
 
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Agemegos said:
Question. Why did he need prosthetics? There is nothing in the book or the story that suggests that dwarves are Brothers-Hildebrandt grotesques. See also: hobbits' feet are hairy, not large.
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I have no idea why. For the same reason they gave Gandalf a prosthetic nose?
 
Stevethulhu said:
But it's not like Ian McKellen has a small nose.
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He has a nose that I would have said was long enough, for all it matters. But if someone says they think it’s not long enough, well, that’s a matter of degree.

The text doesn’t say that Gimli has a grotesque lumpy face at all.

And McKellen’s prosthetics didn’t give him trouble with allergies, nor force changes to his character.
 
Agemegos said:
He has a nose that I would have said was long enough, for all it matters. But if someone says they think it’s not long enough, well, that’s a matter of degree.

The text doesn’t say that Gimli has a grotesque lumpy face at all.

And McKellen’s prosthetics didn’t give him trouble with allergies, nor force changes to his character.
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Nor does it say that hasn't got a weird face. But helmets, hairpieces and other postiche can make normal human features look odd on a cinema screen. Which forces choices upon the director with regards to makeup and prosthetics.
 
I wonder why they didn't just change the fucking glue. Like, is there only ONE brand:shock:?
 
It's not like Legolas has much more lines in the films than Gimli. Even if Gimli's close-up screen time is limited, it didn't need to be completely given over to stupid jokes.
 
TristramEvans said:
Brian Blessed, if not a dwarf, really should have played Tom Bombadil
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Funny I was also thinking he would have been a great Tom Bombadil, he has the proper over the top presence needed for the character. He would of course make a great dwarf, but they did do a good job in casting Gimli.

Casting is one area where they did an excellent job in general. Elrond is my only real issue and that is simply type casting on my part, I just can not separate Agent Smith from the actor. The casting makes the Hobbit all the worse because they had a cast worthy of a much better done movie. So unfortunate because the Hobbit films are not actually bad, just inappropriate. If they had simply been a generic D&D action fantasy film I would have enjoyed them much more. They are just a poor adaption of The Hobbit.
 
Toadmaster said:
Funny I was also thinking he would have been a great Tom Bombadil, he has the proper over the top presence needed for the character. He would of course make a great dwarf, but they did do a good job in casting Gimli.

Casting is one area where they did an excellent job in general. Elrond is my only real issue and that is simply type casting on my part, I just can not separate Agent Smith from the actor. The casting makes the Hobbit all the worse because they had a cast worthy of a much better done movie. So unfortunate because the Hobbit films are not actually bad, just inappropriate. If they had simply been a generic D&D action fantasy film I would have enjoyed them much more. They are just a poor adaption of The Hobbit.
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The Hobbit didn't need to be a trilogy. Two movies, sure, I can see that. But three means way too much Peter Jackson Padding.
 
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Toadmaster said:
Funny I was also thinking he would have been a great Tom Bombadil, he has the proper over the top presence needed for the character. He would of course make a great dwarf, but they did do a good job in casting Gimli.

Casting is one area where they did an excellent job in general. Elrond is my only real issue and that is simply type casting on my part, I just can not separate Agent Smith from the actor. The casting makes the Hobbit all the worse because they had a cast worthy of a much better done movie. So unfortunate because the Hobbit films are not actually bad, just inappropriate. If they had simply been a generic D&D action fantasy film I would have enjoyed them much more. They are just a poor adaption of The Hobbit.
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I like Viggo Mortenson, and I think he did a fine job in that role, but he really doesn't fit how I picture Aragorn from the books at all.
 
TristramEvans said:
I like Viggo Mortenson, and I think he did a fine job in that role, but he really doesn't fit how I picture Aragorn from the books at all.
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I agree. I always pictured Aragorn as a bigger guy than Viggo, and maybe a little more worn and tanned rather than chiseled. He was good though. Sean Bean I thought was a good fit for Boromir though, pretty close to my head cannon.
 
I also pictured Aragorn much more aloof and naturally regal. Viggo's interactions with Eowyn, the attempt to shoehorn in an unecessary love triangle into the film, always kida rubbed me the wrong way too. Like, I dont picture Aragorn flirting with Eowyn.
 
Was it stated that Aragorn was the greatest swordsman of the Third Age?
 
It just seems like he is without peer in the movies. I was wondering if that was inferred from the books. I haven’t read them through so I don’t know.
 
Toadmaster said:
Casting is one area where they did an excellent job in general. Elrond is my only real issue
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I'm not so keen on the casting of Frodo, Merry, and Pippin. Book-Frodo was a well-preserved fifty, and should have seemed about thirty-five. Casting a very young-looking eighteen-year-old changed him from the charismatic, mature, and scholarly "best hobbit in the Shire" to something very bland. And I don't think much of Elijah Wood's acting going back to The Ice Storm, or since Rings, really. I find him insipid. Billy Boyd and Dominic Monahan might have been very good, but Peter Jackson thought that doing posh accents threw their comic timing off, and then that their natural accents couldn't possibly belong to young aristocrats, so he demoted them from the eldest sons of the rulers of the Shire to comic turnip-thieves. Then the decision to cut the Conspiracy and Fatty Bolger, rather than the Long-Awaited Party and Odo Proudfoot, meant that there was nothing left of the thing where Frodo understood that this was a horror story and felt protective towards his naïve young cousins, which was the main emotional through-line up until the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. Also, Pippin's and Merry's relations with Denethor and with Théoden and Éowyn (respectively) lost a bit of zing without the echoes of young noblemen doing service to overlords in two distinct earlier stages of society. Perhaps Monahan and Boyd could have done the thing where their characters are 20th-century aristocratic youths who discover themselves in Anglo-Saxon epic and mediaeval chanson, but Jackson didn't have faith in them to do it and therefore should not have cast them.

But don't mind this aging Tolkien fanboy: Jackson's work demonstrably worked superbly well for about a hundred million audience.
Toadmaster said:
Casting is one area where they did an excellent job in general. Elrond is my only real issue and that is simply type casting on my part, I just can not separate Agent Smith from the actor.
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Heh. Agent Elrond:, "humans are a virus".

I have lots of problems with the script. One of them was making the son of Ëarendil go on a racist rant about how humans are unreliable trash.
 
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Agemegos said:
Heh. Agent Elrond:, "humans are a virus".
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You're making it sound like this is a bad idea. Elrond returning to wipe out humans with only Gandalf to stop him has to be part of Silmarillion Reloaded.

*Rumbling of Mt. Doom*
"You hear that, Mr. Gandalf? That's the sound of inevitability, that's the sound of your death, goodbye, Mr. Gandalf"
"My name...*grunt*...is Olórin"
*Backflips as lava consumes Agent Elrond*
 
Endless Flight said:
It just seems like he is without peer in the movies. I was wondering if that was inferred from the books. I haven’t read them through so I don’t know.
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In Appendix A, relating the twenty-eight years that passed between when Aragorn fell in love with Arwen and when he proposed to her:

Tolkien said:
"Thus he became at last the most hardy of living Men, skilled in their crafts and lore, and was yet more than they; for he was elven-wise, and there was a light in his eyes that when they were kindled few could endure."
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TJS said:
I'm wondering if part of the weaknesses of the second and third film is that they need to take a more expansive view of the setting and narrative and therefore it is approached less through the hobbit's eyes.
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It's a huge and very complex work, and in different parts of it Tolkien follows different points of view. Frodo to the Rauros at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, Gimli and Merry through Book Three, Sam through Book Four, Pippin. Merry, and Gimli through Book Five, and Sam through Book Six. In the books the story and the world are mostly seen through hobbit's eyes. They are basically put there to see it, and to see it as outsiders. The problem is that Jackson changed Frodo, Pippin, and Merry from the characters that Tolkien designed to see each part of the story in the particular way he imagined it into different characters who could not see it that way. The viewpoint characters of most of the second and third volumes got reduced to comic relief.

TJS said:
But also just that the style of Fellowship of the Ring somewhat overstayed it's welcome in the later films, once it was not just about a band of travellers making a journey.
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I think it was a mistake to convert The Fellowship of the Ring into a movie about a band of travellers making a journey. The book is about a group of privileged young men from a peaceful country going to war. There is a strong sense through until the Bridge of Khâzad-dum that Sam, Merry, and Pippin had no idea of what they were letting themselves in for, and that Frodo knew and was trying to protect them, as was Elrond.

I think it ought to have been filmed as a horror movie, like 1917. Tense, not exciting. Relieved by moments of safety and beauty, not humour. That's probably why I am not a movie producer.

TJS said:
I think I can see why Jackson added so much dreadful humour to the later films as without it the films would have been stodgy and humourless (they still are because the humour doesn't actually offset any of the seriousness, it just sits alongside it, and the seriousness never really ascends to an epic mode.).
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Jackson undertook a daunting task, and I feel bad about sniping at him from the sidelines. Lord of the Rings is 1,100 pages: probably enough material for twenty hours of screen time. Back in 2000 there were no three-season series of Netflix Originals — it was what Jackson achieved with the LotR movie franchise that went on to make the funding available for Game of Thrones, which is in the format that would have allowed room for a more complex and thorough treatment. He had to simplify the heck out of it, and that was always going to disappoint and annoy people who loved the heck.

That said, I think it was a fundamental mistake to simplify LotR to an epic adventure with excitement relieved by humour. The core story is Frodo's, and that is not an epic. I think it ought to have been filmed as a thriller edging into horror, with the tension being relieved by moments of epic excitement, grandeur, and spectacle, and pointed up by moments of tragedy.

TJS said:
The humour is in a sense, a replacemet for the aspect of the books where the less approachable epic characters tend to be seen through the hobbit's eyes. It's no accident that Pippin is present for Gandalf's interactions with Denethor, for example.
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And Merry to witness Éowyn's epic heroism.
 
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