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!
Sellout... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why the earlier opening in UK? (Score:2, Insightful)
Great casting for Boromir (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop the MPAA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:$300 Million (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what about the Hobbit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because The Hobbit is a fundamentaly differnet story. It is not the prequel, it is a chidlrens book. It was designed and written as one, and thats what it is.
LOTR is a much more complex, muhc darker and much more involved story. There are LOTR fanatics, but few Hobbit fanatics, although there are the real men, Tolkein Fanatics who study both.
All the same, the Hobbit is not so well loved, adored, fantasized over, obssesed over etc. It is an inferior bok and an inferior story, if onyl relative to the true masterpeice.
The irony overwealms (Score:3, Insightful)
Despite its greatness, LOTR was made to meet the demand. It was written FOR THE MONEY!
It sucks that J.R.R. Tolkien stooped to the level of making money? Okay. Then I guess you better not read anything he ever wrote published by Bantam books given his consent. That means it was for the money, otherwise he would have just given it away for free.
I suppose all that leaves is his unfinished works, which he only showed to his friends and family and which was published after his death.
Art and literature are seldom for their own sake, for we are all forced to work until we eat dust.
You might say that marketing dilutes creativity. Who are you to say what is creative? Most of the marketing people I know put a lot of creative thinking into their work - commercials are no exception; a lot of creative effort has been put into using the characters in a way to sell the product. Perhaps if you looked for the "art and literature" within the commercials, you wouldn't get sick looking at them.
Mayhem, blood, and gore! (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course I don't expect it to be completely true to Tolkien's writing. Movie makers tend to take liberties with everything. (I would say that Pearl Harbor and Titanic come to mind, but that would mean I would have to admit having seen them!) I'm going to go see this movie with the sole purpose of being entertained. I'm not going to analyze how it deviates from what Tolkien wrote. I'm going to see this movie purely for the entertainment value. Unless they MAJORLY change the story, I think I'll be happy with what I see. Then again, the wrong filmmaker could MAJORLY change the story.
I'm waiting to pay my $7 until the week AFTER it opens though, just to miss most of the hype.
Re:Please, let's not spread the DivX (Score:2, Insightful)
Onto your wider point: I think the system we have, with copyright expiring after a while, is the correct system: that way the artist knows his immediate family profit from his work and not faceless corporations.
Re:Please, let's not spread the DivX (Score:1, Insightful)
-1, Ogre
Re:The irony overwealms (Score:2, Insightful)
So he ended up making a book and selling it. Who the fuck cares? You would to if you had the talent that he did.
You can hardly say that he wrote LoTR "for the money." Just because Bantam wanted more hobbits, why does Tolkien adding more hobbits dilute the greatness of the book? The hobbits fit the story, whats the problem?
Meh, this is just a pointless troll.
Difficult decisions had to be made (Score:3, Insightful)
hmmmm
Be true to the book....
or more Liv Tyler
Be true to the book....
or more Live Tyler
....
I had to be a tough choice.
Re:Please, let's not spread the DivX (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I'm going to. I should be getting my region 0 DVD grey import this week, but I won't be watching it until the 19th. But I'm doing this out of respect for Peter Jackson and the cast and crew of this film, not because I'm deluding myself that J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of the similiarly themed book would have cared, or that his estate has any interest, rights or say in this film.
[bbc.co.uk]
Michael White, biographer of the Oxford professor and Lord of the Rings creator, said the author would have hated the film.
"I think he would have just closed his eyes to it," White said of Tolkien, who died in 1973 aged 81.
"He had a hatred of all things Hollywood and did not believe in the idea of imitation being the best form of flattery."
However, Tolkien's son, Christopher, who owns the rights to his father's literary legacy, denied reports that he was unhappy with the way The Lord of the Rings films are being made.
He had remained silent about the films, but reports claimed he was unhappy with the way the film-makers interpreted his father's books.
Tolkien sold the film rights to his cult fantasy books in 1969 for just £10,000 - meaning his family, and those in charge of his estate, were left with no control over how the movies were made.
It looks like a good adaptation, and I'm completely OK with the removal of elements and the filling in of backstory (like Gandalf's imprisonment by Saruman). However it's had too much added and changed (without the input of the creator) to be an actual canon version.
A petulant rock chick defending a passive Frodo is most definitely not the same as an elf lord unveiled in his fury and a desparate but defiant Frodo. It denies Frodo an important piece of character development just to get some tits and ass on screen.
A troll that appears in the book as a foot and an arm didn't get turned into a frenzied CGI showcase by accident. This is the most minor of my quibbles, but it's an easy way to add drama, and I'm a little disappointed that Jackson chose it rather than playing within the limits of the original source.
Replacing the elemental hatred of Caradhras with machinations of Saruman is a major shifting of the characters, not a minor plot tweak. This is implied as being on the limit of Sauron's abilities, let alone Saruman's. It actually demotes Saruman to a simple "bad assed mofo" role, rather than taking the harder but more rewarding route of focussing on his delightfully sinister powers of persuasion.
A skeleton knocked down a well accidentally is not a stone thrown down it on purpose. Again, minor point, but why change it, other than ego? The original situation is functionally identical and leads to exactly the same result.
And those are just the changes and additions that I know about. Don't get me wrong, I'm completely stoked about this adaptation, but on its own merits, because of the cast (petulant rock chicks aside), the crew and the director, and not because I think I'll be seeing the book "Fellowship of the Ring". The destination appears to be the same, but the journey looks to be different enough to jar.
Roll on the 19th when I can find out for sure.
Re:$300 Million (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope you're not implying that the movie will make only $150 million. There's as much hype around this movie as there was for Episode 1, and the reviews are actually good! Even if the movie was a total stinker it would take $200M, which it isn't, so one can expect the total revenue for the movie to hit at least $300M. When you consider that Episode 1 made something like $450M it isn't ridiculous to see a figure like that.
Straight to video
Straight to video is impossible. According to interviews with New Line execs theatres which want to show LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring MUST purchase all three installments and show them for a minimum of six weeks.
I expect "Fellowship of the Ring" to do quite well, "Two Towers" to do a little less well, and "Return of the King" to do better than "Fellowship".
Any particular reason you say this? I found Two Towers to be my favorite installment of the trilogy. The action was always non-stop, the ending is absolutly epic (but i won't spoil it) and the potential for great CGI abounds. If anything I'd say that this first installment will gross the least, if for no other reason than Fellowship was my least favorite volume.
Re:Reminds me of Star Wars (Score:2, Insightful)
Frodo and Luke both lived in holes in the ground.
Gandalf is fairly analogous to Obi-Wan.
Aragorn and Han are both of royal blood.
Sauron and the Emperor.
And for some odd reason Chewie reminds me of Gimli.
There is alot more, but the thing I see happening is younger viewers who know nothing of the books are likely to walk away feling as tho LoTR is somehow a rip off of Star Wars.
At The Risk of Losing Karma... (Score:4, Insightful)
I read The Fellowship Of The Rings for the first time this summer in anticipation of the movie. I have to say that it was one of the most boring books I have ever read.
Don't get me wrong! The story was great - there were many memorable moments - but it was told in a very tedious manner.
For example, you could probably edit out everything 95% of the text between the death of Gandalf and the arrival at the elvin village without losing any coherence.
All of this probably means that the movie will be better than the book, so I haven't lost all hope!
Any thoughts?
Re:Please, let's not spread the DivX (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:At The Risk of Losing Karma... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've read long books before -- the Wheel of Time series comes to mind, weighing in at something like 6,000 pages so far -- so I promise that it has nothing to do with a short attention span or lousy imagination. They're just boring.
The writing is mediocre, and Tolkien *really* likes listening to himself talk. The books just aren't that good. Fine, they helped set the direction for modern fantasy. I won't dispute that. Study them for the historical value then, but all of this gushing about them being the best fantasy novels ever is, IMNSHO, misplaced.
Re:Please, let's not spread the DivX (Score:3, Insightful)
I own a copy of the Lord of the Rings, but I still went to alt.binaries.e-books and downloaded the trilogy in several electronic formats. Same thing with several other books I own. Hell, I'm even scanning in a book (for personal reasons) that's been out of print for a decade and won't come out of copyright for another 75 years if the author were to keel over today. In 75 years, there might be only a handful of physical copies of the book, but the electronic version will continue to live.
You know what, I still plan on buying at least one more physical copy of LotR at some point, if not more. If the authors and publishers would offer the books in their own electronic format that I was confident I could reuse when I upgrade to a new machine, I'd buy them (no typos after all.) The electronic format allows me more freedom to enjoy the writing without having to lug around an eight pound book along, especially since I've already got the laptop/pda/whatever. The holier-than-thou freaks in alt.fan.tolkien be damned, I want a more useful version of the book I've already paid for, and will pay for again if only they would put it in a format I want it in.
If I'm so inclined, I'll d'load a DivX rip, thank you very much. Because I'll go see the movie in the theater, probably more than once. And once the DVD comes out, I'll probably get that as well, and when the Director's Cut Special Boxed Edition of the film trilogy comes out, I'll get raped again (There's no more surefire way to ensure a DVD gets a "new, enhanced" edition than to buy the "old, crappy" version.)
The Tolkien estate, Peter Jackson, and New Line will get enough of my money on this that I think they'll overlook if I've got a DivX version sitting in drawer somewhere (I'm not going to watch it again after I get the DVD.) I've got a rip of a certain big sci-fi movie that I never watch anymore thanks to the DVD, but I don't think any 'stormtroopers' are going to knock down my door. I think of it this way: Since the USSC ruled timeshifting was legal in the Betamax case, I'm just timeshifting in reverse.
Look, I agree with you that if someone grabs a rip and doesn't see the movie in the theater or buy the DVD, they're an ass. But to make a blanket statement that everyone who d'loads it is an ass is a little myopic. For many of the rippers, the powers that be are going to get their money, but they just want to see it now. Just because someone rips it, doesn't mean that they aren't going to leave their computer, go to the theater, mix with fellow geeks and lovers and LOTR and watch this in a theater, 40 feet wide in Dolby, as it was meant to be seen. So get off your high horse and let me infringe copyright seeing as I've paid and will pay enough to enjoy something in my own way.
Ah, hell...there goes the karma...
-sk