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#826 Sat, Dec27 2014 3:37pm

Barliman
The famous Innkeeper
From: Bree
Registered: Tue, Jan29 2008
Posts: 4331

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

Interesting. But without the two mentioned elements such fan-edits must be very disjointed.


"A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room: thing wanted always buried."

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#827 Sat, Dec27 2014 5:55pm

Thingol
Brave Sam the gardener
From: Republic of Croatia
Registered: Tue, Jul28 2009
Posts: 3694
Website

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

Hm.... where is possible to find or see those fan edition movies without rabbits and goden dwarf....


.... Farewell to Middle-earth at last. I see the Star above my mast!

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#828 Sun, Dec28 2014 12:01am

Turambar
Archer of Mirkwood
From: Germany
Registered: Sun, Apr27 2008
Posts: 2724

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

The missis gave me one of her famous extra long kisses . . . I have seen no Golden Dwarf.  roll
So I suppose I must have that "SPECIAL" edition ( ahem, how do I have to write "SPECIAL" that anybody know what is meant . . . ???????!!!!!!! )

Master Barliman- how many rat tails were in that last scrumpy you offered to them?


Maybe the magic was the most powerful force in the world. But that was long ago.
The dragons are gone, the giants are dead and the children of the woods are forgotten.

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#829 Sun, Dec28 2014 8:36am

Barliman
The famous Innkeeper
From: Bree
Registered: Tue, Jan29 2008
Posts: 4331

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

How many were in the drink that made you imagine you'd seen a special edition in the first place?


"A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room: thing wanted always buried."

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#830 Tue, Dec30 2014 6:08pm

Turambar
Archer of Mirkwood
From: Germany
Registered: Sun, Apr27 2008
Posts: 2724

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

So- I visited my favourite cinema yesterday. And I have to say, that the movie is extraordinary amazing!
And I have to say, there is nothing that breakes my nerves . . .

For now I will stop- because there are members who did not see it yet.


Maybe the magic was the most powerful force in the world. But that was long ago.
The dragons are gone, the giants are dead and the children of the woods are forgotten.

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#831 Tue, Dec30 2014 7:24pm

Turambar
Archer of Mirkwood
From: Germany
Registered: Sun, Apr27 2008
Posts: 2724

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

I would like to add something. I do have seen this charakter. Very shortly, but I have seen it !!!!!
For your memory: it is the first Bolg-design which was abandonned . . .

Click to close


Maybe the magic was the most powerful force in the world. But that was long ago.
The dragons are gone, the giants are dead and the children of the woods are forgotten.

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#832 Tue, Dec30 2014 9:22pm

ddaines
Skilled Artisan
Registered: Tue, Jan29 2008
Posts: 1958

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

I've seen the movie twice now - enjoyed it more the second time round as I wasn't disappointed when scenes didn't quite match the book and my hopes.

I still think that there is a good film (adaption) waiting for the EV.

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#833 Wed, Dec31 2014 12:02am

Gildor Inglorion
Wandering Elf
From: Montpellier, France
Registered: Fri, Jan25 2008
Posts: 4098
Website

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

well this confirms my opinion it seems... this third movie is far more acceptable and pleasant an adaptation than the second movie was...

All in all, indeed this is an adaptation, but the main plots and subthemes were quite true to the original I think (except for small little things like Tauriel indeed...)

I personnally enjoyed the Galadriel "show".... (but can't say more or I'd spoil)  ... still, even this part is true to the reports from the appendices and what is said of the attack of Dol Guldur, Galadriel rocks...


"Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill." (Gildor Inglorion, LOTR1)

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#834 Wed, Dec31 2014 8:23am

Mornedhel
Traveller
From: Luxembourg province, Belgium
Registered: Fri, Nov21 2008
Posts: 668

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

My feeling as a Tolkien addict I was left with a totally new story that only extracts the source material as a façade for the Hollywood kind movie looking for the largest as possible public and income.

So I watch the Hobbit trilogy as a Warhammer player instead of a Mithril collector.


________________________________
Elen silla lumenn omentilmo

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#835 Wed, Dec31 2014 8:39am

Mornedhel
Traveller
From: Luxembourg province, Belgium
Registered: Fri, Nov21 2008
Posts: 668

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

I still cannot find out what was the worst in this trilogy, wood elves fighting as 1st age Noldorin warriors, Geographical aberrations, giant worms digging tunnels, love between a dwarf and an elf, radagast and his rabbits, Radagast himself, Beorn role in the battle, the battle itself not at all representative of the book, orc coming back to life as in very bad horror films …
The list is too long


________________________________
Elen silla lumenn omentilmo

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#836 Wed, Dec31 2014 8:42am

Mornedhel
Traveller
From: Luxembourg province, Belgium
Registered: Fri, Nov21 2008
Posts: 668

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

Peter Jackson would have based his movies on the book "The Wobbit".


________________________________
Elen silla lumenn omentilmo

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#837 Wed, Dec31 2014 3:16pm

Turambar
Archer of Mirkwood
From: Germany
Registered: Sun, Apr27 2008
Posts: 2724

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

lol  lol  lol "The Wobbit"  lol  lol  lol
Looks like something inside "Burger King": I would like to have a Wobbit, please. With double cheese . . .
So you are disappointed in general, Master M.? I can understand that. Though I am not . . . but that´s another story.


Maybe the magic was the most powerful force in the world. But that was long ago.
The dragons are gone, the giants are dead and the children of the woods are forgotten.

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#838 Wed, Dec31 2014 3:40pm

Barliman
The famous Innkeeper
From: Bree
Registered: Tue, Jan29 2008
Posts: 4331

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

We now serve Wobbit in the Taproom, Master Archer.


"A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room: thing wanted always buried."

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#839 Wed, Dec31 2014 4:01pm

Gavin
Skilled Artisan
From: Canada
Registered: Wed, Jan30 2008
Posts: 936

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

The Galadriel sequence does sort of raise the notion that the War of the Ring was not "the White Council make a last desperate play to banish Sauron once and for all" but rather Galadriel saying "don't make me come down there and beat the snot out of you, you vile little lickspittle." big_smile

I'd also echo what Turambar says: it is a film heavily influenced by 1980s fantasy. Warhammer is itself an outgrowth of Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons started as a weird "piss take" which gleefully stole from any material that wasn't nailed down. It stole just enough from Middle-earth to create a sort of mainstream concept of fantasy which had little enough to do with Tolkien, but created a cultural archetype of what Tolkien-like fantasy should look like. Ever since: Orcs and Goblins are somehow different, are sometimes green, Elves are pretty Vulcan things that live in woods, Dwarves have Scottish accents. In Tolkien Orcs and Goblins are the same thing, Elves are recovering genocidal demi-gods, and Dwarves are a sort of group of Jewish vikings. The Fellowship of the Ring, as a film, was both highly respectful of the source material and able to look past the "D+D-mainstream" fantasy concepts. It married the storyline to historical war films. In set design and scene construction, it went for something grounded, earthy and even dirty. It had Gladiator and Braveheart in its DNA. When the fantastic occurred, it soared out of the grounded world into the ethereal and did so very effectively. It was like nothing else before or since. It was respectful, controlled, creative.

What was harder to spot, even though its pretty obvious now, is that the films borrowed very heavily from that sort of D+D mainstream set of conceits, in much the same way as Warcraft or Warhammer might. Cultures could not be subtly different. They had to be very, clearly, obviously different.  In Return of the King, we see a 7th Century Vendel culture live right alongside an almost Renaissance one. The effect was jarring, but maybe it was a once off.  Or perhaps a twice off: note how Saruman's armies are created as an industrial process. These jarring effects served the source material somewhat, and there was no need to linger. But now, after six films, we can look back and see how everything is created in a very broad strokes fashion, and how it heavily relies on D+D esque visual tropes to draw those broad strokes. Thorin gives Bilbo a mithril mail shirt...while he himself dons armour from high fantasy illustrations. Traditional weapon design in the Fellowship becomes iconic and impractical, a way of visually differentiating the Dwarves in the Hobbit films. Holistically designed Mordor orcs wearing scraps become tyrannical armies of identically armoured villains in the Hobbit.  All the tricks D+D/Warhammer/Warcraft et al use to differentiate scenes and cultures are in full force in the films; it seems the Fellowship of the Ring was a glorious exception.

While I can appreciate the sort of pressures that drove these decisions, it does strike me that some opportunity for something greater and more timeless was lost. In twenty years, Fellowship of the Ring will still stand as an example of fantasy film making at its absolute finest; I doubt the Hobbit films will be so loved.

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#840 Wed, Dec31 2014 4:30pm

Barliman
The famous Innkeeper
From: Bree
Registered: Tue, Jan29 2008
Posts: 4331

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

Haven't read your comments, Master Gavin, because I've not seen the movie yet, but even without seeing it I have to agree with your closing paragraph entirely. Still looking forward to Five Armies as a fun film, however!


"A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room: thing wanted always buried."

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#841 Thu, Jan1 2015 11:45am

Milo
The Attic Warden
From: Toulouse, France
Registered: Tue, Mar30 2010
Posts: 4454

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

Master Gavin is very talkative indeed. I read wise comments, as always.
I watched the extended DOS. Better, but the less better extended movie I feel.


Milo Gamgee-Took of Bywater
________________________
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
J.R.R.Tolkien

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#842 Thu, Jan1 2015 12:43pm

Theobald
Wisest of Ents
From: the Osning in Germany
Registered: Tue, Jan29 2008
Posts: 5724
Website

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

Well, so far I did not comment on this matter very much and I didn't feel to do so. That is because Master Mornedhel and Master Gavin by now have already found words for my thoughts and I only, but entirely, can support their point of view.

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#843 Wed, Jan21 2015 4:41pm

Barliman
The famous Innkeeper
From: Bree
Registered: Tue, Jan29 2008
Posts: 4331

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

OK, finally seen it, and have to say that all in all I was disappointed after movies 1 and 2. There are so many places in part 3 where just a nod in the direction of the events in the book, or the introduction of a short passage of Tolkien's text could have brought it much closer to the original - room could easily have been found for such additions by taking out 10% of the fighting, which gets a bit repetitive after a while. And why did they have to change the battle as described in the book?

OK, there were some nice moments - I particularly liked the fight at Dol Guldur - but there was a plethora of absurd moments too (Giant worms? Suoer-large trolls? Beorn arriving by eagle? Really?).

Of the six LOTR franchise movies this is without doubt the one I enjoyed the least. I confess that I still quite enjoyed it, as a Fantasy (note deliberate use of capital letter...) genre flick, but if JRRT isn't spinning in his grave I'll be amazed.

Hopefully the extended edition will improve things!


"A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room: thing wanted always buried."

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#844 Tue, Jan27 2015 5:55pm

Gavin
Skilled Artisan
From: Canada
Registered: Wed, Jan30 2008
Posts: 936

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

Interestingly, this afternoon, I read about this:

https://tolkieneditor.wordpress.com/201 … hour-film/

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#845 Fri, Jan30 2015 2:24pm

ddaines
Skilled Artisan
Registered: Tue, Jan29 2008
Posts: 1958

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

I wonder what kind of film we would have got if GDT had remained at the 'Helm' to direct?

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#846 Mon, Aug29 2016 10:30pm

Gavin
Skilled Artisan
From: Canada
Registered: Wed, Jan30 2008
Posts: 936

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

Well, today, I finally watched the Extended Edition of An Unexpected Journey.

What a difference it makes.

The individual extras are nothing terribly exciting. Some of them are extra dumbness. But they are useful extra dumbness. The weirdly stretched and overstuffed first film is now longer, and there's more time given to scenes where nothing else is going on, but characters are interacting, expressing themselves and given moments of "humanity" (or hobbity, or dwarfity) that were not there before. Thorin, we learn is quite aware of the potential for madness in his family, and aware others around him are equally aware. Bilbo and Elrond actually make friends, the ancient distant immortal recognising, perhaps, a fellow scholar and lover of learning. The Shire sequences are much extended, feel fuller and are as charming as before.

Someone even passes a statue of an elf maid which looks eerily like a Chris Tubb sculpt - something to do with the hair, at any rate.

The big dumb moments are still there. One even gets dumber - one of the goblin songs sneaks back in.  There's a bit of useless pratfalling by the Dwarves when they are guests in Rivendell, a scene which gets a bit tiresome, but it breaks up some maybe slower, but important interactions between the key cast.

One of the key issues, for me, is the design of the orcs. And how they really shouldn't have made them so front and centre. What makes the Orcs so effective in the older films is that you never really got a good look at them. You got impressions of wild eyes and violence and scars and inhumanity, something about how they were equipped, something about the character of the foe. I have been painting a bunch of the licensed GW orcs recently and they are really quite annoying. The designs are ok, but after a while, something about them becomes just seems wrong. The costume designs tell a story elsewhere, but the story is chaotic here. Contrast with the simplicity of the Mithril designs. The costume designs in The Hobbit are worse, with even less of a story and more stylisation.  The film as a whole has some strange weapon designs, but nowhere is this more obvious than with the various Orc tribes. Physically, they are even worse. In the older films, they were clearly people in makeup, but the camera doesn't dwell on them. In this one, imagining advanced in CGI technology and cinematic blending that clearly don't exist yet, the director chooses to let the camera linger on different orc designs. They emerge as plasticy, characterless and overdone, as if they have fallen into this often quite charming film from some other genre entirely. The whole Azog plot is defensible as a cinematic change, but the execution is weak indeed.

And, sad to say, they did not take this golden opportunity to cut the "storm giants" sequence.

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#847 Tue, Aug30 2016 7:24am

Barliman
The famous Innkeeper
From: Bree
Registered: Tue, Jan29 2008
Posts: 4331

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

I rather like the storm giants, so - as usual - everything is really just a matter of personal taste and preference. Funnily enough, Mrs B and I watched al three extended Hobbit movies over the weekend, and as much as they're fun in parts, they really irritate me in so many ways that I really have't got the time or patience to write them all down. They're really just a contest in how many Orc heads can be chopped off in any five minutes of movie-time. And as you say, Master Gavin, silliness abounds throughout. Mrs B, however, loves these movies!

Then, last night, we watched the extended edition Fellowship of the Ring again, and the difference between these and the Hobbit efforts is distinct. Whereas the LOTR trilogy are like finely executed paintings, with a distinct quality of "otherness", the Hobbit movies are more like industrial-scale digital photographs, with few concessions to atmosphere, wonder or beauty.


"A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room: thing wanted always buried."

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#848 Tue, Aug30 2016 10:17am

Maenas
Traveller
From: Barcelona, Catalonia
Registered: Thu, Mar6 2008
Posts: 572

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

Barliman wrote:

..../we watched the extended edition Fellowship of the Ring again, and the difference between these and the Hobbit efforts is distinct. Whereas the LOTR trilogy are like finely executed paintings, with a distinct quality of "otherness", the Hobbit movies are more like industrial-scale digital photographs, with few concessions to atmosphere, wonder or beauty.

Completely agreed with these feelings!


---
Mae govannen mellon nín.

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#849 Tue, Aug30 2016 12:46pm

Gavin
Skilled Artisan
From: Canada
Registered: Wed, Jan30 2008
Posts: 936

Re: THE HOBBIT MOVIE

Well, despite the improvements, the thing still cannot see Fellowship with a telescope, in terms of quality. It remains, alas, half a good movie. Just with bit that make it a lot more fluid and natural feeling.

Watching the second extended film now. It's as dodgy as I remember.

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