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The Hobbits: The Battle Of Twe Two Bagginses!


Who's the best Baggins  

25 members have voted

  1. 1. Who's the best Baggins

    • Bilbo (Martin Freeman)
    • Frodo (Elijah Wood)


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Weird that Denethor burned just by setting himself ablaze with a flaming brand, yet Gollum never did even as he swam in the lava of Orodruin!

Magic of the Ring and Cinema! Just like Denethor's half-a-mile blaze of glory.

Yeah, I thought that when watching the EE. Wasn't that tomb quite far away from the helicopter landing area?

Karol

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Weird that Denethor burned just by setting himself ablaze with a flaming brand, yet Gollum never did even as he swam in the lava of Orodruin!

Magic of the Ring and Cinema! Just like Denethor's half-a-mile blaze of glory.

Yeah, I thought that when watching the EE. Wasn't that tomb quite far away from the helicopter landing area?

Karol

The whole city away. The tombs of the kings and stewards are at the farthest side of the city from the great prow.

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Oh dear, Denethor can run fast then! He must have been on fire or something.

Karol

As I said it was an endurance race. His health took a deep dive at the end. He was all burned out... I mean up, burned up. The poor man.

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I actually never found this to be an issue.

Denethor is no normal man. He is descended from the ancient Numenorians and his blood is untainted by that of lesser men!

His lifespan, mind, physical prowess is far greater then ours.

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I actually never found this to be an issue.

Denethor is no normal man. He is descended from the ancient Numenorians and his blood is untainted by that of lesser men!

His lifespan, mind, physical prowess is far greater then ours.

You just come up with this stuff quite conveniently to support PJs movie silliness and keep up this weird illusionary construction that already teeters under the weight of realities. Poppycock I say sir, poppycock and some boulderdash on top!

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Weird that Denethor burned just by setting himself ablaze with a flaming brand, yet Gollum never did even as he swam in the lava of Orodruin!

Magic of the Ring and Cinema! Just like Denethor's half-a-mile blaze of glory.

Yeah, I thought that when watching the EE. Wasn't that tomb quite far away from the helicopter landing area?

Karol

The whole city away. The tombs of the kings and stewards are at the farthest side of the city from the great prow.

Exactly. The guy ran on fire for roughly half a mile . . . why? So he could deliberately make his death dramatic? As if he could have any notion of which direction he was running after the first few seconds. Makes for a cool shot, sure, but it's utter nonsense.

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Maybe I will!

But keep in mind, those kind of moments work in small doses littered across a more grounded medium. If the whole film is just that, well then it becomes harder to digest.

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They already had the elf-fetish hunk dwarf in Aidan Turner. And Brian Cox would have been awesome. Totally different from Armitage but so awesome!

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Cox would have been brilliant. But he's old! They wanted eye candy.

But Brian Cox is hot in his own way! It's not an "obvious hotness" (a la Aidan Turner), it's more of a "subtle, subdued hotness"!

brian-cox-image-1-749433996.jpg

That's it: I'm starting a KickStarter project to have them film Cox in front of a green screen and insert him in the movies!

And add Brendan Gleeson as Dwalin to that too!

Oh man Cox would have been an excellent Thorin in the actual age he was in the novel. :)

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Agreed. I thought Sean Bean played the part to perfection. His extended edition scenes added even more depth, thankfully; I felt the theatrical cut of FOTR reduced him to simply being arrogant and entitled.

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I'll picture Brian Cox. Because Brian Cox is Thorin Fuckin' Oakenshield. I would have killed to see him in the role! I remember there were even rumors that Cox had been approached for the role. What a fuckin' shame this didn't go anywhere...

Dude . . . that may be the best bit of armchair casting ever. I've also had a big problem with Armitage, for that very reason. He's just not the Thorin in the book.

But then, a lot of the dwarves, and the whole race of hobbits, has never been quite right for me. This goes to another point about all the movies: the non-human races should all have looked non-human. Portraying hobbits as nothing more than miniature men takes something away from their ambiance. As much as I don't care for the Rankin/Bass productions, and hate the Bakshi film, I can say they got the look of hobbits right, at least as far as Bilbo and Frodo were concerned (Bakshi did make Sam too much of a pastry puff, I think). They needed to be more than just short; they need a certain stockiness, a solidity in the arms and legs, maybe a bit more hairiness in those places. Tolkien said they were "inclined to be fat in the stomach," and while that doesn't mean they were all obese slobs, they should've had some sense of that weightiness about them. And their faces should've reflected that same feel. A small prosthetic for the nose to make it look just a bit bulbous would've done wonders. Some of their faces—Elijah's and Billy's, especially—look positively anemic. They're just not hobbits. (Those of you who know the books can understand what I mean, I think.)

The dwarves of the current trilogy are both better and worse, depending on the individual. They nailed the look of Gimli in the LOTR flims, which would make you think they could pull it off just as well with the Hobbit movies. And in some cases they do; Balin is pretty spot-on, as are the Oin and Gloin types.The ones that look like Bofur stray a little further off the mark, but still have some sense of dwarvishness about them. Fili is about as far off the ranch as you can wander and still have some sense of credibility. Thorin himself steps past that line, never really looking like much of a dwarf's dwarf. Then . . . there's Kili, who should be tossed into the Crack of Doom for an imposter. Could you possibly create a less-dwarvish dwarf? It's one thing for the hobbits to look like men. But for dwarves, it's an absolute travesty. Of course, they probably did this to maintain some believability in the whole Tauriel/Kili side story. It would've been an odd thing to think of her being at all attracted to Bifur, for instance. But then again . . . why the hell do they need to make a dwarf look like a man so that an elf maiden can be attracted to him WHEN IT'S NOT IN #%&@! STORY TO BEGIN WITH?!

It just goes back to how far PJ has had to stretch things in order to bloat his version until it busted at the seams.

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Didnt we have this conversation like 2,5 years ago, Uni?

Massive panic about starfish hairdo's! It turned out it wasnt all that bad.

They obviously needed to make an unwieldy amount of Dwarrow visually distinctive from each other, and chose this approach. Having 13 of the kinds of Dwarves that we saw as background characters in LOTR would clearly not have worked either. As dwarves go these films were always going to struggle to make all of them interesting.

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Didnt we have this conversation like 2,5 years ago, Uni?

Y'know, even as I was typing it, I felt like it wasn't the first time I was making those comments. I think I said it about the hobbits in the first trilogy; not sure if I got around to mentioning the same about the dwarves.

They obviously needed to make an unwieldy amount of Dwarrow visually distinctive from each other, and chose this approach.

But what was the point of that? They didn't even develop those Dwarves. Oh, great, you can spot them in an action sequence. But so what? What's the point of being able to tell Dori from Nori, when you don't care about both characters anyway?

Boom. On the nose. And I think it's possible to make different dwarves with similar appearances distinctive from one another. Hell, if PJ had spent all this time building up these characters instead of creating and shaping new (and irrelevant) ones, you'd know each of them like brothers by now.

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To be honest I'd much rather have them spend time in Tauriel or Bard then having yet another Dwarf say anything. About half of them are colorful background characters, and I appreciate the fact that they at-least managed to make them visually stand out from each other.

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I think the problem with the Dwarves is that you meet them all at once. In Fellowship you're given time to get used to Frodo and Gandalf, then Sam joins for a bit, then Merry and Pippin, and then Strider in Bree. You spend time with all these characters and get to know them pretty well before we add in Boromir, and two very distinct characters in Legolas and Gimli. There's space and time. In the Hobbit you get plonked with 13 Dwarves straight away and you don't have that luxury. Personally, I think it was a good choice to develop characters like Tauriel and Bard for the film as it added a bit of variety. I love the book as it is but I'm fine with the majority of the changes made.


Oi!

You guys are gonne really have kittens when Warner and New Line will start making Middle Earth spin-off movies a few years from now.

I'm down for a Tauriel spin off!

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There's space and time. In the Hobbit you get plonked with 13 Dwarves straight away and you don't have that luxury. Personally, I think it was a good choice to develop characters like Tauriel and Bard for the film as it added a bit of variety. I love the book as it is but I'm fine with the majority of the changes made.

I like what they did with Bard. These were mostly fine changes.

Tauriel was a useless addition, that not only ruined many moments in this trilogy, but FOTR as well (as suddenly, Gimli being infatuated with Galadriel doesn't seem that special anymore...)!

My only regret is that we never saw Kili and Tauriel get it on in the bushes beside the Long Lake.

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Cal me a good, but the image I had in my head of Thorin was that of actor Kevin Conway

Kahless.jpg

:lol:

I remember how I thought Armitage's Thorin looked like a Klingon in his first publicity photo.

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The scene in AUJ of Balin and Dwalin greeting each other by headbutting is taken straight from the Klingons in Star Trek!

Very distracting.

Hey that was the result of months and months of pondering on dwarven behaviour and individual little quirks by the actors on the dwarf bootcamp! Don't disrespect their commitment and depth of character building!

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Ah the first publicity stills. Back when it was all new. No more films. :(

To quote Christopher Lee from the FotR documentaries: And thank god for that decision!

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