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In Reply to: Huh? posted by mollecon on December 30, 2003 at 18:55:02:
"Poor Filmmaking." That's taking the argument a bit far, isn't it?no
I mean, one can disagree on the choices made by the director, or argue that he approached the whole thing the wrong way
right
- but dissing mr Jacksons efforts as 'poor filmmaking'? Maybe that speaks more about your ability to judge, Bulkington.
Or maybe your defense of Jackson speaks to your inability to judge. Why the personal attack?
Mr Jackson tried to make a movie (it really should be judged as one, not 3) that while capturing the spirit of Tolkien was still able to draw large audiences to the theaters - the latter being necessary in order to pay for the whole damn thing... I would imagine a TV-series in some 30 one hour parts could have been made that followed 'the story' more truly. In return we would have gotten a discount version of Middle Earth, since there wouldn't have been the finances to pay for the real stuff that Jackson delivers.
I find it interesting that my knock against the filmmaking gets attacked while in the next breath you suggest that Jackson made some sort of concession to audiences in order to finance the LOTR enterprise. Again, why hold it to different standards? Why apologize for it? The basis of these kinds of apologetics is a red herring anyway. Can you imagine decisions having been made not only with respect the kind of inevitable changes required to condense so long a work for the screen but also with respect to the stylistic rendering of individual scenes and sequences that would have made the films better than they were? I can; and I think such changes could have been made without alienating the audience while at the same time saving money on the cost of production. On the first point, I don’t begrudge these or any films their departures from their original source material so long as those departures are a necessary consequence of the translation of the story from page to screen, an actual improvement on the source material, a change that works as well as that from which it departed, or a change whose intrinsic interest is the nature of its departure as commentary upon the original. Much was made prior to the release of Fellowship about the difficulties Jackson faced in condensing Tolkien’s books, and I think for most people who bother to give such matters any thought, that difficulty goes without saying. But he only compounded the challenge by interpolating matter that was not only not required in the translation but not an improvement on the story by any stretch. (I can elaborate on these issues later, but I’m thinking specifically about the minimization of Saruman as unseen, almost geographic threat and generally unkonwn quantity by pronouncing his role in The Fellowship in scenes that were some of the film's cheesiest to boot; the machinery and orc hatcheries at Isengard; the invention of chief orcs in whom for the audience to “identify”; and the lame tokenism of Arwen.) On the second point, I find Jackson’s directorial style not only to be wholly alien in spirit to Tolkien’s novels but also wholly inimical to good, affective film making in general. For all the realism of the production, Jackson’s swooping camera shots that remove the perspective from that of the characters and sometimes the acting from the actors, the bombastic fx flurries, the overstating of the dangers to the characters to such an extreme as to frustrate the suspension of disbelief--all of these are characteristic of Jackson’s thoroughgoing anti-realism. Considering that perhaps Tolkien’s strongest literary strength is his ability to make his world vivid and palpable to his readers--to make a world not just beautiful to look at but one that one might plausibly experience--and that he achieved this primarily by grounding the narrative perspective always in the experience of select protagonists (I mean select because, for example, what Gandalf does when Gandalf's alone remains essentially a mystery to us until he has occassion to narrrate his experiences indirectly other characters later--this invests his imprisonment by Saruman, his battle with the Balrog, and Gandalf himself with a potent sense of mystery and wonder eliminated by Jackson in the filming), Jackson’s films can hardly be called “in the spirit of Tolkien.” I referred to the soaring landscape/cityscape shots as transparent, question-begging authenticating devices in an earlier post; I probably also said something about the scene in which the perspective is shifted to that of an arrow--an Evil-Dead-like, anti realistic parody move amounting to a kind of post-modern buffoonery and a general lapse in seriousness compounded by scenes like the elfin shield-surfing later on. But my objection isn’t that Jackson failed to approximate a Tolkien-like style per se; my objection is rather that, in place of a realistic style that would have better served the films even had they been Jackson’s sole invention, Jackson gave them the Jackson style, which sucks in itself. Have you seen his other movies? He isn’t a good director. Don’t, as Tim Burton “enthusiasts” so often do, confuse the real achievements in production and artistic design with directorial ability. Just because he likes “fantasy” and “horror” doesn’t mean he’s good at it. Indeed I think people with that kind of subjective attachment to genre are exactly the people who should keep their hands off of it.
As a lover of the book, one always want's the filmmaker to picture & portray it the way one did when reading the books. That will never happen in a million years, even if you tried yourself!
Again: read herring.
Being a member of a few Tolkien boards I'm rather familiar with the responses the movie(s) have gotten from the book enthusiasts. And while there certainly are a few that thinks a slow & painfull death would be a too easy solution for mr Jackson, a remarably large number of fans (of Tolkien, that is!) like the movie(s) quite well.
No offense, but as a recovered enthusiast I’m suspicious of any praise or criticism coming from that camp.
At least some of those people, that liked it, are movie enthusiasts, too - they are well aware of the fact that a story cannot function the same way in a book as it does in a movie.
The praise of many otherwise perceptive critics for these films has been due either to a lower set of genre-based standards or to spectacle-induced critical short-circuit.
Oh, just for the sake of it; I've read LotR ~15 times, + of course The Hobbit, Silmarillion etc. I've also seen the movies several times - funnily enough, even though many of the pictures that Jackson delivers are not quite in accordance with the ones in my head from my book reading, I still enjoy the movie(s) immensely - & I'm perfectly able to separate, thankyouveddymuch.
I lost count myself, but you’ve got me beat I’m sure. I lived in Tolkien through grade school and junior high school and credit him with making me a reader. In the third grade I discovered The Hobbit (the version with the illustrations from the animated film) in my school library and read it over and over again. It wasn’t until the fourth grade that I discovered that there were three dense, non illustrated, and generally serious-looking sequels with large, mystery-filled titles. My response was, effectively: “holy shit!” Soon after at a library book sale I found a box set of the paper backs of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings (the Hobbit was yellow, the Fellowship blue, The Two Towers green, and the Return of the King red–remember those?): I didn’t have enough money for it but the librarian gave me the remainder and it was those books, their look, their feel, their smell that defined much of my childhood. The effects, too, though, were somewhat deleterious. Being an enthusiast, I was unwilling to stray from the “genre,” and my discovery of much more accomplished literature was too long postponed. I now regard The Lord of the Rings less as great literature than I do Middle Earth, its history, and its languages as a great feat of fiction. That said, Jackson’s changes to Tolkien are so inept as to serve as foils revealing the extent to which Tolkien’s narrative strategies (which I want to stress could very easily have been translated to film) were more accomplished than I’d come to give him credit for. Don’t get me wrong, Jackson’s Lord of the Rings was an amazing cinematic feat. But where it overwhelms and impresses will, in itself I suspect, I hope, soon become too well known and tired to its fans and soon cease to so dazzle them; certainly when the fx are superceded it will have been rendered horribly dated by the industry itself. The films won’t endure. Even the feat of spectacle itself suffers the worst possible failing: it leaves nothing to the imagination. That’s not a fault of film, it’s Jackson’s.
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- Huh? yerself - Bulkington 09:16:32 01/02/04 (0)
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