The Hype of the Rings 626
With the Fellowship of the Rings just around the corner, the Slashdot Submissions bin is overflowing with stories about the
film since it premiered in the UK already for you lucky brits. If you don't mind a little spoilage, here is
the guardian's review, the BBC review, the telegraph review, some pictures from the premiere, and one last review. Also, Scifi.com is reporting that
the film has already been pirated. The reviews have their nitpicks, but on the whole its looking good. M : LOTR tattoos!
And on your local television station... (Score:2, Informative)
It opens next Wednesday -- wanna try to /. a movie theatre???
Corrected URL (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the text of the Guardian review is here. [guardian.co.uk]
Re:Corrected URL (Score:3, Informative)
You'll hate it (Score:2, Informative)
Nazgul chasing hobbits on a dock
Probably at the ferry after they leave Farmer Maggot's house.
Re:Please, let's not spread the DivX (Score:2, Informative)
The tattoos (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just one question (Score:1, Informative)
Secondly, Hobbits are somewhat resistant to the ring's power.
Re:Why the earlier opening in UK? (Score:4, Informative)
Elijah Wood - American
Ian McKellen - British
Viggo Mortensen - American
Sean Astin - American
Liv Tyler - American
Cate Blanchett - Australian
John Rhys-Davies - British
Billy Boyd - British
Dominic Monaghan - German
Orlando Bloom - British
Hugo Weaving - Nigerian/Australian
Sean Bean - British
Ian Holm - British
Christopher Lee - British
The characters aside, this is a very British film. The rights to the films were sold in 1969, but the Tolkien family/estate still has a lot of influence.
New world foods (Score:2, Informative)
So are poatatoes and tobacco.
Lord of the Rings (Score:2, Informative)
Ash nazg durbatulúk,
ash nazg gimbatul,
ash nazg thrakatulûk
agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
Interesting that they've had some serious linguists working on the film though - here's [elvish.org] the discussion site for their languages.
I gave up waiting for their merchandise, and just had the ring poem printed on some of my own-design T-shirts. Much cooler than having corporate-inspired stuff!
I am very tempted by the replicas of Sting [bytheswordinc.com]. Unfortunately they weigh far too much to fight with, and they're really easy to dint. Oh well...
maegnass ess nin, dagnir yngyl im (my name is Sting, I am slayer of spiders)
Lovely links (Score:2, Informative)
p.s I thought the Bashi film was terrible.
Entertainment Weekly review - "A" (Score:2, Informative)
Download the fonts! (Score:5, Informative)
http://home.earthlink.net/~darrenv/tolkein.html
It dosen't look quite as cool as the guilded cursive elven runes on all the merchandise, but what do you want for free?
Funny snippet for those with AIX 4.3.3 (Score:2, Informative)
"I cannot read the fiery letters," said Frodo in a quavering voice.
"No," Said Gandalf, "but I can. The letters are Elvish, of course, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which I will not utter here. They are lines of a verse long known in Elven-lore:
Re:$300 Million (Score:3, Informative)
Tsk tsk. The studio has already secured the money. Big studio films are pre-sold to theatre chains years in advance, often just on the basis of one big name or even (gasp) the budget. Films with a budget of $20 million+ don't lose money any more, ever.
The LotR trilogy will already have made its money back for the studio. The actual box office take/DVD/VCR/Book-of-the-film/collectible figures/card game of the film are just gravy.
A Sucker for Anything Tactical (Score:2, Informative)
Normally, I could give less than a damn for Games Workshop, authors of generally schlocky games that are remarkable mostly for their steal-your-wallet market strategy. ( Literally hundreds of expansions, miniatures, all at insane prices. ) But, I've been in need of something new, so I picked up the game for $40 at my local Barnes and Noble.
That's the first shock. Wargames, at national retail outlets. The second shock, was that this game, unlike GW's other forays, has a certain measure of dignity to it. Gone are the gonzo tactics and arms race mentality of Warhammer 20,000.
The second shock is the rulebook, itself. The book is easy to read, and provides everything a novice could ever need, including extensive information on how to paint plastic and metal miniatures, and pictures from the movie on every page. A spoiler warning, the scenarios are taken right from the movie's screenplay, it seems, so, if you don't want to know how the director visualized, say, the Battle at Roundtop, don't buy this game, yet.
Of course, with such a low cost, there is a drawback.. The initial box set's miniatures are comprised of plastic. With a generous coat of painting, and delicate handling, however, they do quite well. I had wondered why the box was so light when I picked it up.
From a more cynical point of view, I noticed the expansions for LoTR have already started coming out, done entirely in lead-free metal, at the usual insane costs. $40 for eight miniatures depicting the principal fellowship of the ring, for example. It is admirable seeing that Games Workshop has done an excellent job of selling the foundation of the game for cheap, potentially introducing new gamers to the classic wargame genre, but one has to be a little skeptic whether GW will burn them out with the followup.
Re:Changes etc... (Score:3, Informative)
depth? Hmmmmmm different strokes I guess. 300 pages into FotR, I'm finding them all pretty much interchangable - in large degree again because no one ever says anything other than reciting 3 page long poems or giving dire warnings.
As for Tom Bombadil, he was dropped for a reason. If he appeared on a movie screen, half of the audience would start laughing at him and the spell would be ruined.
Re:what about the Hobbit? (Score:3, Informative)
> whilst they are making LOTR for the second
> time?
Ignored? Rankin-Bass did the Hobbit back in
1977. A travesty, granted, but no worse than
Bakshi's LotR.
Chris Mattern
Re:Funny snippet for those with AIX 4.3.3 (Score:3, Informative)
That should be credited to the Harvard Lampoon's Bored Of The Rings [amazon.com], a sporadically funny parody from the late 1960s.
My Sort of Review (Score:5, Informative)
They did not do the impossible. The length and breadth of Fellowship of the Ring could not be compressed into a 3 hour movie. Nor could they manage to please of all us Tolkein fans, each of whom brings a mental picture of what Elves/Frodo/Gandalf/Dwarves/ Aragorn/etc. *really* looked/acted like.
I will guarantee that each of you will walk away disappointed in *some* aspect of the movie. I also expect it to be a *different* piece of the movie for each person.
What they managed was the remarkable. The movie works, and works well. They have successfully translated a book almost totally unsuited for a movie into a rivetting, astonishingly beautiful piece of cinema.
In other words, keep expectations in check, and you should enjoy yourself immensely. Go, waiting to see what part they adulterated/messed up, and you risk letting your inevitable disappointment in one section overshadow the considerable success of the movie as a whole.
As an aside, I suspect that there's a lot of (non-existent) advertising revenue in a site that allows each user to vote on the five things that they feel the film did wrong. I figure there'd be at least five hundred possible complaints. On the other hand, my comparison with other people's list have found an almost complete lack of unity about what the points are! (How could nobody else realize that they've totally destroyed the Shire scenes by making Bilbo's eyes the wrong color
Re:what about the Hobbit? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Peter Jackson Interview (Score:3, Informative)
Reuel.
What Irony? (Score:3, Informative)
Shakespeare wrote tons of plays in order to keep the audiences rolling in. It's nothing shocking that they bear a lot of similarities to each other, it made them quicker to write! Some people resorted to writing much quicker plays, but there's a reason he was so successful.
Dickens was paid by the word. There's the reason why his books are so long and drawn out, he got rewarded to make them long.
Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 (in the basement of the building I'm in now no less!) and the whole of Martian Chronicles just to help pay the rent. Asimov wrote the Foundation and robot stories to pay for his tuition.
Every single artist from the Renaissance had a patron who paid for the art.
Does any of this get in the way of the fact that the art is great in and of itself. Long after the money has evaporated, the work is still there for us. That's part of what makes it great.
Re:what about the Hobbit? (Score:4, Informative)
I would argue that, while Tolkien probably didn't plan it, the four books help draw the reader into an unwilling adventure, much like Gandalf had to with Bilbo. Going from a children's book - with Bilbo's much less severe adventure - preps you for the detailed and difficult adventure Frodo must face. Children's books - good children's books - are often marked by a quality that makes them good reading for all ages. Thus, children's books by Dr. Suess, J.K. Rowling, Tolkien, etc. are still readable and enjoyable by adults. It's the same impulse that allows many Disney and Pixar movies (and even Sesame Street - remember H. Ross Parrot?) to be enjoyed by parents and their children, while Barney or The Teletubbies don't exist on that level and aren't designed to elicit emotion from parents while entertaining them, too.
I think it is safe to say that Tolkien realized this when writing LOTR and realized that he had characters and a story that were strong in the first book, and that allowed him to build upon that and create a more "adult" book many years later for the readers of the "children's" book of years past.
Basically, what I'm saying, is that the two go hand-in-hand, The Hobbit and LOTR. Just because one was written for children doesn't mean that it doesn't have a major part in the groundwork and preparation of the other.
Re:Lack of religion (Score:2, Informative)
He was a friend of C.S. Lewis who included a lot of religous themes in his fantasy literature.
There is an article on Tolkien, religion and Lewis here [rutgers.edu]