The thing about Lord of the Rings -- or, an unexpectedly hopeful ending note on rant post

[idiosyncreant]

This is a rant that has been coming on for a while, because I've been binging on Lord of the Rings movie stuff after long abstinence, because my brother sent the family the Lego game for Christmas, and you know how it is with that little taste of an old addiction

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[rhinemouse]

Can I just hug this post 1,000 times?

I have slightly different personal boundaries on what I like & don't like in the PJ movies, but yes. YES. Star Wars is the perfect comparison.

I don't begrudge people who dislike the movies--well, okay, not *much*--but I don't think they understand what they were to some of us. Or what they were to the genre, because seriously, I really think it was Peter Jackson plus Harry Potter that helped create our current era of somewhat faithful book-to-movie adaptations.

And I too decided I was done with feeling defensive (or guilty) about movies that I love. Yes, there are parts of the LOTR movies that I think were silly or stupid. Yes, there are bits that I really don't like. But the effort of hating something that walked away with a bit of my heart? SO NOT WORTH IT.

(And I'm honestly okay with the movies sometimes being an alternate universe. Like, Book Aragorn and Movie Aragorn are really different people, and if I had to choose between them I would totally pick Book Aragorn--but you know, I honestly like the fact that Aragorn now comes in TWO delicious flavors.)

[idiosyncreant]

I think with true fans of Lord of the Rings, it is very personal what you didn't like and what you fell in love with in the movie version. And that's totally alright; it's the culture that's grown up of everyone buying into a certain "oh, the Scouring of the Shire was missing, and I can't forgive them that" list of wrongs that I think is ridiculous.

I don't mind if you felt betrayed by the Scouring of the Shire being missing, personally. If you have joined into a dismissal of the movie based on the fact that others have informed you it was a betrayal, that is something else entirely. : cools self from rant mode:

And YES YES YES, about the success of HP and LotR both creating this new culture of movie adaptations that had to serve the books' fans, and therefore were faithful. And that is part of what I feel people in the present are forgetting or ignorant of... and how important that is to those of us who love books, and even write them...

I always approach movies as retellings, AUs. I know other people find this a little difficult, and I know my flexibility on adaptations is more than most people have. But still. I love book-Faramir and movie-Faramir both, and like Aragorn--they are not the same character.

(Though tbh, there's something about Movie-Aragorn that reminds me of some of the backstory of his that gets lost in a lot of the text. I almost imagine him most of the time as a lot like Faramir, with a band of men, his mother's people. Rangers with a mission that keep them on the move. He has this other history, and he's kind of a bicultural, being raised partly among elves, originally belonging to a people that are much tougher--not Gondorian but even more rough-and-ready than the Rohirrim, I think. Some of this may be stuff I've made up from hints, but my vision of him fits Viggo Mortensen REALLY WELL anyway. He's American raised in Argentina, so that being torn between different peoples comes naturally to him, he doesn't even have to consciously act it out.
WHOA HEAVY PARENTHETICALS)

[rhinemouse]

Yes yes yes! A couple months ago I was rewatching large portions of the Extended Editions, and I was really, really impressed by how well they conveyed that Aragorn is this utterly unique cultural oddity. Because he totally is! Not only is he a Ranger--which is a small outsider group to begin with--but then he was raised by elves, and he also has the throwback Numenorean lifespan which means he'd probably seen childhood friends grow old and die by the time LotR happens. Like, no wonder he fell in love with a half-elven girl. She was probably one of the few people in Middle-earth who understood him.

(I SEEM TO BE DESCENDING RAPIDLY BACK INTO LOTR OBSESSION. IT DOES NOT TAKE MUCH.)

[idiosyncreant]

No, it really doesn't take much. I finally got around to watching the feature on the Extended DVD sets we got years ago, and while I'd had an idea from interviews and hearsay the kinds of labor that went into it, actually seeing miniatures and trucks of orc limbs and the footage is a whole different ballgame.

I wasn't planning to watch the extended cut of the movie except with the actor commentary, but I am. And may go back a third time for the production or writer tracks, if I'm not careful.
(Our family bandwidth limits are getting to the point I can't just watch dramas, so it's to old-fashioned DVDs for me.)

(also, the Lego game IS SO GOOD
I seriously sit watching the original saying to myself "OMG that was actually in the movie and I never noticed until the Lego animation showed it")