Comments | fictualities: Top three challenges for filming The Hobbit

fictualities

Top three challenges for filming The Hobbit

Dec 19, 2007 10:59

Are you a book person or a movie person? In the Tolkien fandom, that's a question that often leads to virulent arguments -- something I always try to avoid, because life is short, and in my old age my tolerance for wank has gone down from zero to less than zero. The book/movie argument is one I'm particularly eager to sit out, because I find ( Read more... )

tolkien

Comments 52

applegnat December 19 2007, 17:14:21 UTC

First of all, OMG THEY'RE FILMING THE HOBBIT! OMG THEY'RE FILMING THE HOBBIT! I FEEL SO ALIVE!

Okay, going to read your post, will eta soon. But hi and isn't that just the most exciting news in the world?!?!?

fictualities December 19 2007, 17:16:49 UTC

YES THAT IS JUST THE MOST EXCITING NEWS IN THE WORLD!!!!

*excited*

I forgot to say that here because I squeed so much on other people's journals last night. :D

anehan December 19 2007, 17:24:32 UTC

(By the way, if you haven't read this version, you can get it in either The Annotated Hobbit or The History of the Hobbit; if you don't have these sources available to you, I'd be happy to email you a copy of the original version of this chapter)

Pretty please? My library has neither. My email: helka.m@pp.inet.fi

fictualities December 19 2007, 17:44:36 UTC

Done! And enjoy. The changes between the two versions are fascinating, and I'll be interested to hear what you think. :)

anehan December 19 2007, 17:49:06 UTC

Maybe I'll post about it. Right now my to-read pile is enormous (including, among others, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, which isn't quite so short as the name implies), but maybe after Christmas...

anehan December 19 2007, 18:41:44 UTC

Oh, to hell with it. It was too tempting to wait ( ... )

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Re: Contains Hobbit Spoilers! fictualities December 19 2007, 17:55:05 UTC

And the tone of the book itself changed immensely as it went on, giving us an unexpected window into larger and deeper things....

This is an excellent point -- The Hobbit is like LotR itself that way, only more so. And again it's possible to read this change of tone in a Doylist or Watsonian way -- Tolkien wrote himself into seriousness, or Bilbo became more perceptive of the seriousness around him.

Remember that incredible section of the Party chapter where Bilbo discovers his Tookish adventurous nature? Brilliant managing of mood, and that I think is where PJ's vision and Tolkien's prose intersect the best. Making those swings.

Yes yes yes! This is such a wonderful moment. The Dwarvish music in particular is something I've always wanted to see filmed. It could be so magnificent! And it's such a turning point for Bilbo. I always wondered whether the Dwarves ever sang at Rivendell, and what the Elves would have thought of it.

I vote for cutting out half the dwarves. I know that sounds awful, but I do.Seven dwarves? Oh ( ... )

Re: Contains Hobbit Spoilers! dichroic December 19 2007, 18:45:29 UTC

The fanfic would get especially interesting if you give JRRT's dwarves aspects of Pratchett's Discworld dwarves - specifically the lack of differentiation between sexes that makes dwarvish courtship an exercise in extreme tact.

Re: Contains Hobbit Spoilers! anna_wing December 20 2007, 05:28:34 UTC

I suspect the Discworld dwarves' lack of sexual differentiation is indeed from Tolkien, because it is actually Tolkien's own view of the Dwarves (it's somewhere in HoME I think, beards and all. Total lack of sexual dimorphism as far as secondary sexual characteristics goes. Of course, Pratchett's logical extrapolation of it is something else entirely...

Thread 7

cs_luis December 19 2007, 17:51:33 UTC

I'm so excited about this I can hardly breathe. I can't even really think about it.

Several years ago I saw PJ 'speak' (via satellite feed from New Zealand) and he said, in response to questions about the Hobbit, that his main concern was figuring out how to film the climax of the story - the defeat of Smaug. I mean, Bilbo misses the action during that scene. So that is something I will be really interested in seeing!

I also vote for cutting out some of the dwarves. Yikes! I suppose I'm not too hung up on canon here; I just want a good movie! I do hope it ties into LOTR, though - that would be so cool to see the two stories intertwined.

Two movies, though; that confuses me. Are they splitting The Hobbit in half?

fictualities December 19 2007, 18:08:26 UTC

I'm so excited about this I can hardly breathe. I can't even really think about it.

*bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce* It's brilliant, isn't it? :D

the defeat of Smaug. I mean, Bilbo misses the action during that scene. So that is something I will be really interested in seeing!

This is a fascinating question, and is one of the arguments for moving beyond Bilbo's point of view. There's enough information in canon to make a bit more of the men of Dale than Tolkien does in the narrative; one possibility would be to treat Dale as Rohan is treated in The Two Towers, and establish a few sympathetic characters there to work as viewer surrogates. That's just one possibility of course. It will interesting to see what he does!

I also vote for cutting out some of the dwarves.Hopefully there isn't a contingent of rabid Oin fans out there who would be offended by this. One argument for keeping the Dwarves: they're anxious to take on Bilbo not just because Gandalf tells them he's an experienced burglar, but because he'd be the ( ... )

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fictualities December 20 2007, 13:50:30 UTC

I'm posting on a HP board at the moment and am very amused by what the Potter fans fuss about when it comes to film adaptation.

*chortles* Yes yes, the HP fans are a bit prone to focus on adaptation problems that seem a bit, well, trivial in comparison to the challenges that the LotR team faced. The HP movie people are working with books that plainly were written with film adaptations in mind, and the author has a significant say in the films and is around to give her both her ideas and her blessing. My hat is off to the HP movie people for accomplishing a difficult task (ALL film adaptation is difficult!), but, uh, they didn't have to decide how the heck to film "The Council of Elrond" (half a day of talking and far too important to skip!) or how to give satisfactory endings to the first two films in a single three-film story.

Dwarves. Cut the number. Purists will shriek, but the heck.Hee. I'd miss the long slow incremental introduction of the party to Beorn (oh look, a couple of more dwarves!), but the screen would be awfully ( ... )