Beginning to remember that I used to like Tolkien

[espresso_addict]

I watched the Fellowship of the Ring EE recently, for only the second time.

Comments

[grondfic]

Hello.

Now you've made me want to rush home and watch all three dvds again!

Just to say I noticed you Friended me, so I've made it mutual - hope that's OK.

grondfic

[espresso_addict]

Hi Grond -- I'm glad I've reawakened your Tolkien love too! I kept seeing your writing on rarelitslash and thought I'd tap it at the source :)

[altariel]

Hey, I just watched the EEs a couple of weeks ago! And reread FotR too. I love the extended gift-giving, particularly the short exchange between Galadriel and Aragorn, when we hear him called Elessar for the first time.

There are moments in the first part of The Two Towers EE which hit perfection, but I found these moments get rarer and rarer as the six films progress. There are points where the dialogue is so slapdash that you wish you're watching a silent movie: pictures and music.

[iainjcoleman]

Many of the finest dialogue moments are when they simply take words that Tolkien wrote and give them to a really good actor to deliver. Who could have guessed that would work?

[espresso_addict]

Indeed! Listening to the director's commentary, neither Jackson nor Walsh seem to trust Tolkien's dialogue. I did get to wondering why they bothered adapting the books. At least some of the people they cast were wonderful.

[altariel]

Funny, isn't it? It's almost like he knew something about the English language.

ETA: My current favourite being, "The young perish and the old linger..."

[miss_morland]

I'm one of the few who didn't like Elijah Wood in the role of Frodo; nothing against his acting particularly, but a 17/18 year old just isn't book-Frodo.

THANK YOU! This has always bothered me about the films. I don't get why so many people thinks he's the perfect Frodo; he's not.

[wiseheart]

My mother suffered through all three movies with me in the cinema (she's not a Tolkien nerd like myself), and the thing she hated most was Frodo. She was annoyed to death by the way he rolled his eyes upward and kept falling with no apparent reason. She also thought he was stoned on drugs. (She also asked me - rather loudly - whether Haldir was gay, but that's another matter entirely...)

[miss_morland]

She also thought he was stoned on drugs.

LOL! I can see why she'd think that. *g*

[espresso_addict]

It annoyed me, but not as much as some of the other features of the later films (Faramir! Denethor!). I think it was the efforts of a very young & inexperienced actor to portray something quite complex with inadequate direction. I did like the way that Gollum's face with the huge cartoon eyes was rather similar to Frodo in his bug-eyed mode.

[ithilwen]

Nah, they didn't need to end Fellowship with Gandalf's plunge; what they needed to do was release the EE as the theatrical version. Oh, and drastically cut the cave troll fight and the toppling staircase scene in Moria. Jackson puts too much emphasis on fight/action scenes, to the detiment of quieter scenes which do more to further the character development (and plot, for that matter).

[espresso_addict]

From the director's commentary, Jackson required each of the three films to fall into a simple build-up-to-an-action-climax model, which I think led to some of his worst decisions in terms of interpreting the books for Tolkien fans -- but perhaps was necessary for the success of the films to non-fans?

[ithilwen]

I think he seriously underestimated the sophistication of non-fans, in that case. Each segment needed to build to a climax, yes - but there's no reason the climax had to be action-heavy. It just needed to be intense.