Nick1Ø66

The day before yesterday I finished The Rings Of Power and yesterday I started to watch House Of The Dragon. And, boy, what a difference! I'm home again! I was afraid that writing would be mediocre but it was actually surprisingly good. Then the choice of actors ... The king, the king's hand, the brother of the king, young Daenerys ... I approve all of them. And, yes, I turned my eyes away during the brutal caesarean section scene. All in all, a very promising start.
 

Tolkien. Grave. Rolling.

https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/lord-of-the-rings-fellowship-of-the-ring-nft-release-1235406247/

I concur completely. They don't have confidence in the drama of the plots and characters, or their audience. They introduce new mysteries in every episode as if they’re afraid we won’t return unless they keep us hooked with shallow intrigue.
 
I can't help making comparisons to House of the Dragon. In the first episodes, I noticed that there were quite a few shots of rats, and realized that it’s a visual metaphor for the kingdom being rotten and in decay. Nice.
But then I watched an Alt-Shift-X video, where he revealed a theory that Larys Strong is a warg who spies on the royal family through the rats, and suddenly there's a cool new layer to it.
See what I mean? Even if the rats are foreshadowing of a mystery, they already have a function in the story. Hot D works no matter if there's some eventual greater significance to the rats or not. Whereas in TRoP, I feel like most mysteries just stall for time until the reveals.

I have both shown immense moderation in my response to the show, praising aspects I like while making known reservations I have.
 
 I’ll point out this - I am disappointed in one fundamental thesis that the writers have - that it can only be interesting if there is a surprise - hence the mystery box construction of the show.
 
well shit. That ain’t true at all. At all. At all. That basically means any book adaptation is uninteresting to fans because they already know everything. But that is literally the opposite of truth. Since the conception of cinema they have been doing book adaptations. 
 
the trick is to do them well, not make them surprising. The writers explicitly claim them invented the mystery box structure so that Tolkien readers were not 6 or 7 episodes ahead of casual viewers. This is a ridiculous way to go about writing a show. 
 
I will say this again and again, and I am a screenwriter too so take it for all that’s it’s worth - interest derives from good compelling drama and conflict and characters and dialog - not shocks and twists.
 
 Why not give drama a try - make a straight 2nd age show - without shock reveals - and see if it interests the audiences. It’s like they don’t trust Tolkien’s material, that is why they deviated so far from it. 
 
my argument is the material is very compelling and dramatic on its own - just do a straight show and it would be just as good or even better. 
 
i feel what I am missing is a sense of awe inspiring immensity that I should feel. These are god like larger than life characters- Tolkien’s tales are one of nations and civilizations and enormous transformative cataclysmic events that should stun and awe the viewers with their scale and sweep and scope. 
 
i just don’t feel that. I felt that honestly to a degree in the Jackson films. It felt like something really enormous was set in motion, the stakes felt galactic. But for some reason I am missing that feel here. This makes the show feel small despite the large budget.
 
i want a show about really powerful and wise and foresighted people making enormous consequential choices. That is what drama is. 
 
maybe we’ll still see that in subsequent seasons. But we definitely didn’t see it in season 1. 
 
it has actually made my wary about a silmarrillion or first age show. Will it ever feel as jaw droppingly immense as Tolkien’s words do? We don’t know.

Impressive. Most impressive.
 
While my feelings about the show itself are well known, I can't help but respect the passion, talent and commitment Bear has put into this project. He was an obvious choice for the score, and even though he wouldn't have been my first choice (among the prospects they could have realistically hoped to get), it's hard to think of many other composers who could put out such a solid body of work under such demanding constraints. You could argue simply the scope of what he's doing is historic in terms of TV scores.

I do like the Main Theme (as I like Bear's work), but to be blunt, as much as I enjoy it, I don't think Shore's theme is in any way crucial to the show, and it doesn't add anything except music to an (uninteresting) opening titles sequence most people frankly skip.  Especially since, as far as I know, Bear isn't building on it with his own score.
 
Bringing Shore on board was always a gimmick to lend credibility to the show, but given that they're not doing anything with it, I think it was probably a mistake to do so. Again, it's a lovely piece of music, and it's nice to have a little coda to Shore's Middle-Earth work, but I think Bear should have been given the opportunity to make the project totally his.

I do like the Main Theme (as I like Bear's work), but to be blunt, as much as I enjoy it, I don't think Shore's theme is in any way crucial to the show, and it doesn't add anything except music to an (uninteresting) opening titles sequence most people frankly skip.  Especially since, as far as I know, Bear isn't building on it with his own score.
 
Bringing Shore on board was always a gimmick to lend credibility to the show, but given that they're not doing anything with it, I think it was probably a mistake to do so. Again, it's a lovely piece of music, and it's nice to have a little coda to Shore's Middle-Earth work, but I think Bear should have been given the opportunity to make the project totally his.

House of the Dragon feels less algorithmically driven to me than genre shows on Netflix, Amazon, Disney, etc. I swear some of the shows on those streamers feel like they're designed based entirely on focus groups & audience data, and conjured up in writer's rooms where groupthink is the dominant virtue.
 
House of the Dragon, the best show on TV, feels purposeful and confident in its characters and story. Whoever is making the decisions on that show clearly has a vision of where they want it to go, and it shows. This is what good television is supposed to look like.

This correctly places Indy IV at the bottom. The rest of the list is rubbish. E.T., while wonderful, is best described as the "sentimental favourite" among those who saw it at a certain age.

Only if land is on your left.

Mr. Bear, on page 720 of The Lord of the Rings, there is a quote from Frodo, he says “In a world full of mirth and magic, you lose time within yourself”.  Do you agree with this comment?

Only if land is on your left.

This correctly places Indy IV at the bottom. The rest of the list is rubbish. E.T., while wonderful, is best described as the "sentimental favourite" among those who saw it at a certain age.

How about Yoel Razvozov as the next 007?
 
This is pretty fracking cool. Very well done.
 
 

Only if land is on your left.

Well yeah if you ignore a whole buncha characters and stories

That's the other thing too: I had trepidations going into this show, but the two things I wasn't particularly concerned about were dialogue (which almost never bothers me in movies and shows) and pacing. They turned out to be two of the show's biggest issues.
 
There was a hillarious comment over one the reviews for The Guardian about Rings of Power dialogue: "Oi, Galadriel, what do you fancy for breakfest" - "'twas, in the days of old, it it said, that..." So many of the lines not only try too hard to sound old-timey, but also do that fantasy dialogue thing of using lots of random namedrops and lots of "worldbuilding" stories. "Why", says Celebrimbor to illustrate a point, "The sun started as something no bigger than the palm of my hand." Or how the great and delightful Peter Mullan has to tell this long story about Aule crafting the Dwarves instead of just, you know, saying what he means to say.
 
There isn't a ton of that in the movies. Little bits to give flavour like "not some blockheaded Bracegirdle from Hardbottle." Otherwise, the characters mostly just...say what they mean to say. Fancy that.
 
But, really, the bigger issue is the pace and the emphasis on creation myths.

Well in this show Galadriel is an awful, awful amoral, manipulative, entitled, whiny, self-centered, self-important, empty poxy pseudo-wisdom spouting character who does not care for anything or anyone but her revenge and can't answer a single question with a straight answer (problem with so many other characters in this show as well), so I guess they turned that on its head.  Looks fair but feels foul. Which I guess could be said about the whole show. What a disaster.
 
 

I think there's a difference between a mystery and a "mystery box". I think of a mystery box as tool used by writers and showrunners in the era of serialised TV (and popularised by LOST), used to string the audience along so they'll continue to tune in week to week.  Good, character driven drama doesn't need mystery boxes, because you're watching for the compelling characters (which is also what makes a show rewatchable, IMO) and not to just find out what happens next.
 
Done well, and with thought, and by writers who know what they're doing and where they want to take the story, mystery boxes can sometimes be effective. But when used by lesser, lazier writers (like the kind on ROP), it's just cheap and annoying.

You should do the interview as Hans Jensen!

With the German accent too, of course
Great, I had a feeling he'd mentioned this somewhere, but hadn't checked yet.
Oh believe me, there's a lot of homework to do. Apart from re-reading articles and blogposts, I have a few films to watch and scores to study. Not just his own stuff, but the other composers he's cited as inspirations too (James Horner, Basil Poledouris, Jerry Goldsmith, Bernard Herrmann, Danny Elfman, John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, Shirley Walker, Elmer Bernstein).

Mr. Bear, on page 720 of The Lord of the Rings, there is a quote from Frodo, he says “In a world full of mirth and magic, you lose time within yourself”.  Do you agree with this comment?

Cheap is the word.
 
So many of the storytelling choices in this season - perhaps none more than Sauron's "join me, and together we can rule the Gala Middle Earth as hubby and Elf-wife!" - are cheap.

Mr. Bear, on page 720 of The Lord of the Rings, there is a quote from Frodo, he says “In a world full of mirth and magic, you lose time within yourself”.  Do you agree with this comment?