Chen G.

I read about it at the time, and it seems like a kind of joint decision: They had talked about it, but it was clearly risky and at least in hindsight Villenueve said it was the better choice for him. I don't think he even started doing the treatment for Part Two until he saw the first film was doing okay at the box office. I mean, The Lord of the Rings is way more...accessible than Dune, and to underline that, while Lynch's Dune flopped, Bakshi's Rings did not. So there was more reason for trepidation ahead of Villenueve's film.

The two Dunes do have a different sensibility to me: The first one is almost all atmosphere, the second one is much more overtly a war picture. There's A LOT more character introductions in Part Two (and a lot more characters that are killed off in Part One never to be seen again: I was surprised there wasn't even a flashback to Oscar Isaac) then there are in The Two Towers, much less in The Return of the King. And it remains to see how Messiah will play out. I feel like comparing an 11-hour trilogy to a "paltry" five hour duology is perhaps not the most scientific comparison.

Huh. The only thing I will say to that is that the seating setup for the recording suggests a chamber-sized ensemble (or a "striped" recording?). I'm not even sure the space would fit an 70 or 80-piece orchestra. Films had been recorded with a combination of a symphony orchestra and a smaller chamber ensemble, e.g. Kingdom of Heaven. So who's to tell?

I know Thompson's work pretty well. They're greats in the field of art history.

Its just that actors have a very "tunnel view" image of productions they're in, certainly when its to some extent an ensemble piece. They know their part, and they have a good grasp of the scenes they're in. But they don't necessary keep tabs on everybody else's scenes or how it all fits together, especially not in films where a lot of the stuff isn't there in-camera.

Certainly, his assertion that the bulk of the two other parts was done in the pickups is not accurate, to say the least. The bulk of the footage in The Two Towers and The Return of the King is from principal photography. The pickups were substantial, but in the grand scheme of things amount to touch-ups and improvements rather than filling-in wholesale missing pieces. But we're getting sidetracked here...

This interview to me is proof that actors are not the best judges of productions they took part in. But certainly, if people detect different sensibilities across films that had been written together, filmed together, and to some (admittedly small) extent even edited together, that's sure to be the case with Dune, which was none of those things.

I mean, its not unusual for musical works to appear in cut forms, often sanctioned by the composer, including dropping movements from symphonic works, redacting scenes from operas, etc... that's ostensibly what the OST is, with the added perk that the OST gives us alternates that we wouldn't otherwise have.

Yeah. Last time around one could see the beginning of a melodic line, but it mostly fell outside the picture area. All the same, I feel like I can't complain too bad: if this was an Amazon Prime project, he'd probably be hung from his own intestines... What's not entirely clear to me is the scoring situation: STROMA is a chamber group, but the partitura seems to suggest a full symphony orchestra with triple winds and at least four horns.

Now that's a big statement. Even the two "Parts" of Dune are separate productions: Villenueve did not write the two scripts, even as a story treatment, together or even back-to-back and did not film them together. They have, as far as I can tell, pretty much the same crew, but in the first part he didn't particularly try to introduce as many of the cast-members of both parts: there are many new faces in Part Two. The two films do feel reasonably of-a-piece, but Dune: Messiah is bound to be a different beast. I doubt it will play as cohesive enough to be regarded as a 7.5-hour film.

More sheet music! https://www.instagram.com/stephengallaghermusic/p/C4AFQijrHej/ https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/430853416_1445037876358532_5498869579623331739_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_e35_s1080x1080&_nc_ht=scontent.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=108&_nc_ohc=coA8nzopTZEAX-YcOs-&edm=APs17CUBAAAA&ccb=7-5&oh=00_AfDjHNg0AJurLxBj-Y0TzdqmcgeD3JIrrj0cs2V3E2p80A&oe=65E7D9FA&_nc_sid=10d13b Again looks mostly like chords moving...

We do not! I think they're keeping Saruman as a bit of a secret ace coming up to a teaser. I mean, we who know the appendices know that Saruman is indeed supposed to show up at the end and take Isengard... I guess listening to the speaking voice of the cast members and seeing who has a Lee-like timber would work, but my attempts to do so proved inconclusive.

I use that terminology to distinguish the "Dresden" Tannhauser from the "Paris" Tannhauser, which was sung in French and only later reverse-engineered into German, and is therefore well-delineated by using its French title. Wagner's revisions to Tannhauser are quite extensive - unlike the Dutchman - and seeing a Dresden or a Paris Tannhauser are very different aesthetic experiences.

I mean, the performances save it big time! There are two or three elements to the production that may or may not irk one. The first, which I don't particularly mind, is that all scenes with Parsifal are depicted as flashbacks: at the moment where Parsifal first walks onstage, Mr. Kaufmann walks on and takes his seat at the front of the stage, singing his lines as if remembering the events from long ago, while upstage a young actor plays the youth opposite the other characters. Its not a bad idea, although in act three, it became a little hard to focus on Zeppenfeld's glorious rendition of the Karfreitagszauber while the actor and Garanča's Kundry were busy chewing each other's faces... The second element, which I find quite objectionable is the setting of the Brotherhood of the Grail in a prison (Kundry is a journalist working in the prison, I believe). The whole idea of Parsifal is that, under the leadership of the weakened Amfortas, the brotherhood has hit hard times, but they're still ostensibly "the good guys." Many productions kind of turn them into a perverse society - see the production I linked where they seem to be tormenting Amfortas to drink from his blood, or the Lehnhoff production (with another absolutely stellar cast) where Amfortas is being tormented by his Zombie-like father, or the Barenboim/Kupfer version, with Sir John Tomlinson's frankly bullish take on the sagacious Gurnemanz - but I think this one is possibly even more egregious. Frankly, I try to look past that stuff and engage with the performances - vocally and actorly. To that end, by far the most important casting is Gurnemanz, because he sings far more than any other character. It can be sung well by dramatic, black basses like Tomlinson, Rydl or Salminen, but his long lines tend to benefit singers with prettier voices: Kurt Moll and Robert Lloyd had won great acclaim for singing the role this way, as had more recently Rene Pape and Franz Josef-Selig. Short of that, a great Kundry is very important, and while Garanča is wonderful, my heart belongs to Waltraud Meier in this role: by far the one most suitable to her fach. You'll barely find a performance of that calibre on the West End:

Well, in the case of Rohirrim I see it more as an aesthetic discussion and getting to know more of the approach the filmmakers are bringing to the story. Within this story outline, there are still questions like: How much of Wulf's base of power in Dunland will we see? How much of Gondor's tribulations with the Corsairs will be shown? What Saruman will be like in this? What will Eowyn's narration be like? Its not like The Rings of Power where huge swathes of plot are total unknowns.

Sadly, at the moment The War of the Rohirrim is a glorified side-project for Fellowship of Fans... The channel had cultivated a following based on a Rings of Power fandom (I call it North KoROPea) for whom the New Line films are old hat, and the Amazon show is the new thing that's "down with the kids"... Philistines.

Season Two is proving much more impervious to leaks: the damn British crews seem much more professional as far as secrecy is concerned than the Kiwi crews, ergo its easier to fall into false rumours and inaccurate information. Expect probably one or two of our biggest scoops to turn out false in the near future.

I saw this before. An inane production, but superb performances from Kaufmann and Garanča, but I'm especially taken with Georg Zeppenfeld's Gurnemanz: you end up listening to Gurnemanz for far, far longer than either Parsifal or Kundry, and this is a fantastic performance. I've heard Zeppenfeld in the role in the 2012 Bayreuth production (below), and the 2023 production (also with Garanča), both exceptional. Surely one of the leading Wagnerian basses alongside Josef-Selig and Pape, and now he's pushed up into Hans Sachs, which I'm dying to see and hear.

Yeah, I know that's a kind of reservation that many people have about pulling from the appendices. They're not stories cast in scenes and with dialogue: they're more like a chronicle. Actually, a lot of Tolkien is like that, including practically all of The Silmarillion and most of Unfinished Tales. My own view of it is a little more simple: Do I find the story of Helm Hammerhand interesting and worth my while? Yes, I do. Therefore I have qualms about seeing it adapted, even if in this case we're talking about a very different concept of "adaptation" compared to previous forays into this series. Also, I do think the story of Helm is a little different than some of the other vignettes to be found in the appendices, certainly then the ones that The Rings of Power is at least ostensibly based on. For one thing, the story of Helm is contained entirely within the appendices, so its not going to chafe against material from other Tolkien publications, as is the case with The Rings of Power. While, strictly speaking,The Rings of Power is based on a lot more material by way of page count (then again, its also incomprably longer, being that Rohirrim is said to be no longer than 130 minutes) but while those pages do give us a rudimentary chronicle of events, they don't really tell us much if anything about who was involved in those events and in what capacity. Whereas here, the role of characters like Helm and Wulf in the events is much more clearly drawn. And, really, I think the filmmakers approach here is profoundly different. If one were surveying the appendices for material that would fulfill, as I call it, The Full Middle-Earth ExperienceTM - "Is it really Middle Earth if we don't have Hobbits, Wizards, Orcs, Elves, Dwarves AND Men?", to paraphrase McPayne - one could find better candidates than the Helm story: it has no Hobbits, no Dwarves, no Elves, no overt connection to the war of the Ring, and a pretty downer ending. That they chose it to begin with suggests they had a different set of priorities. What's more, if the Amazon approach was applied to this film, it wouldn't JUST be The War of the Rohirrim, it would be a film intercutting the war in Rohan, in Gondor AND the fell Winter in the Shire, the better to have Gandalf and the Hobbits in there, something we're told is not the case and indeed would be nigh impossible to cram into the piece at that length. They did add a cursory role for Orcs, a Mumak - both reasonable within the Tolkien context - and there's obviously a small role for Saruman in the thing. And the other advantage it has - on a more audiovisual level - is it won't have that "lookalike" syndrome, and in this regard bringing back much of the original team is very significant indeed!

Sure, but that's on a more rhetoric level, you know? I just don't see any similarity of substance between the two books, and if it were possible even less between the resulting films.

Frankly, I find the oft-touted comparisons to Lord of the Rings very, very misplaced. The sensibility of the books, the adapted screenplays, the mise-en-scene of their respective directors and the pulse of the editing are starkly different across both properties. There's really no concrete point of comparison except they're both seminal "genre" works, grand of scale and serious in tone, which is pretty generic as a common ground to invite comparison. I also think Villenueve's take on Dune will probably not prove as durable as Jackson's on Tolkien: Jackson personally wrote and directed six films (the shortest of which being as long as Dune Part 2 which is hillarious to me) and his interpertation of Tolkien is soon to be joined by a seventh film and counting. Villenueve will be lucky to get Dune Messiah and that prequel television series made, and beyond that? The sequel novels from Messiah on sound increasingly ridiculous, frankly.

Philippa said in Annecy that they weren't well-versed in Middle Earth. I have to say, some of the points that Philippa et al touches on in the latest interview - when Helm will have recieved his moniker "Hammerhand", why was Frealaf named "Hildeson" after his mother rather than his father - do seem to betray a pretty good study of what little text there is for this story: these things never occured to me while reading it.

I definitely wouldn't deny it the moniker of "epic" in our usual sense of the word: none of the three fits the original, literary definition of "Epic" in the sense of epic poetry in a certain metre, and all three only fit the "epic" label in the more infantilised sense of anything remotely legend-like or "cool." But it is "epic" in the sense of the cinematic genre that's defined by abstract notions of grandeur. Its as big a film as anything, and certainly far bigger feeling than any Star Wars film I can think of off hand. Yes, I also found the realisation of the Emperor's home disappointing, albeit elegant-looking. My real issue with the film is that, unlike Part One where you don't expect all the story threads to come to a head too much and so can indulge in this pensive, mystical atmosphere, here a huge amount of plot gets pushed into the second half of the film. And yes, I also don't like the score particularly. There's some lovely Duduk writing for Chani, but a particular low was the chanting during the final assault: I was whisked out of Arrakis and straight into the pit in The Dark Knight Rises. But a film's right to the term "epic" is definitely not defined by its score, and I don't think Zimmer's efforts discredit Denis mise-en-scene. This may be a less popular notion but I also find Denis casting overly-glitzy: even a rather hamfisted cameo for the mature Alia had to involve stunt-casting Anya Taylor-Joy. Seydoux is in here very briefly for what's frankly a nothing part.

Really? I don't really get any major alarm noises going off from what we know of the project. Yes, the writers are very green but they're working on the basis of a previous screenplay by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, and while I don't want to insinuate that "Boyens is actually writing this thing herself", it is clear she was very involved with the shaping of the story.