Chen G.
-
Posts
9,807 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
4
Posts posted by Chen G.
-
-
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.
-
18 minutes ago, Nick1Ø66 said:
BTW, what's this I read about Fellowship of Fans getting played with disinformation?
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.
-
2 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:
Perhaps an opportunity for me to give this work another try. One of the Wagners I haven't cracked yet.
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.
-
1 hour ago, Nick1Ø66 said:
To adapt something, you must first have something to adapt. When you strip it down, what we're getting is basically an original animated film, written by two green screenwriters, set in a Middle-Earth, using a few names and an event Tolkien once referenced.
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!
-
1 minute ago, Marian Schedenig said:
The blurbs on my copy of the book include one by Arthur C. Clarke: "I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings."
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.
-
1 hour ago, Mephariel said:
You are right that Dune isn't as good as LOTR, but neither is Star Wars and most other sci-fi. LOTR's production design, music, and acting are leagues above most other films. It is disingenuous to argue you need to be as good as LOTR to be epic sci-fi.
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.
-
1 hour ago, SF1_freeze said:
Dune is no where close to the real Sci-Fi or Fantasy epics like Starwars or LotR, because it lacks the basic ingredients that made them great:
- A visually appealing and sprawling technologically advanced galaxy, with different societies, planets and eco-systems, that are shown in a way appropriate to the story.
- A musical thematic score that covers the whole scope of an epic and not like Dune only includes 2 or 3 themes within a big pot of loud and noisy nondescript action material or just atmospheric background "music" which is more sound design than anything else.
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.
-
Contraforte spotted!
Its nice that they got some of the "OG" crew back: Mark Wilsher was music editor and mixer for all six films. As far as I can tell even many of the musicians in this chamber group are veterans of both The Hobbit and, in many cases, the original Moria recording. -
19 minutes ago, PrayodiBA said:
Being a muslim, I knew from the part one movie that they borrowed some of Islamic elements; the Lisan al-gaib, etc.
But here, it was pretty on your nose.
I thought so, too!
All these Arabic and Farsi terms - which clearly were the epitome of the exotic to Herbert and to Villenueve - come across pretty funny to a native, especially in what's supposed to be an otherworldly setting.
-
I must say, I'm less taken with this than I was with part one, and its not the novelty of part one being the first. Both films are very slow, meditative with a mystical atmosphere, but in this film, where all this plot is meant to come to a head, it feels a little counterproductive: a whole laundry list of important new characters have to wait to the 100 minute mark to be introduced.
I also think Villenueve, because he wants to make Dune Messiah, emphasized everything that would suggest there's more of this story to be had. I'll be curious to see if that way of playing it out pays off.
-
I like those a lot!
But I think that was someone else whose name currently escapes me. Mark Governor, I think.Also, Gallagher has continued to post. While the sheet music suggests there's recordings with a full orchestra taking place, Gallagher and Wilsher are also recording a chamber orchestra (featuring some NZSO Lord of the Rings luminaries) in Our Lady Star of the Sea Convent Chapel in Wellington. A venue owned, funnily enough, by Jackson and Walsh.
-
I'm interested to see what Gallagher will do with this. It seems to me rather a unique situation where, across the seven films now, while Howard is clearly not scoring this film, someone whose contributions can be heard sandwiched into Howard's score, did. You could say all seven films - and ancillary projects like Hobbiton or whatever contributions they provided for The Rings of Power - was all done by "Howard Shore and co", encompassing what I think are very erstwhile conributions from Plan 9, Gallagher, etc...
And we know Gallagher knows Howard's technique, having been a music editor on his scores and having - Doug tells on the score commentaries - read Doug's book in preparation for The Hobbit, and audiences at Annecy saw footage from this film with what’s almost certainly a Howard Shore temp track. Whether and how much he'll channel the Howard "sound" remains, therefore, to be seen. He’s obviously in his right to use as much or as little of Howard’s sound as he pleases.
-
Aye. Its this instrument: has a very medieval, but quite nasal, sound:
It seems to be mostly chords moving: the melody part doesn't start until circa bar 10 and we can't really tell where the melody goes.
-
On 11/02/2024 at 4:01 AM, Marian Schedenig said:
This is one of the most highly regarded recordings:
I missed this, which is too bad because Dame Gwyneth Jones...
But this is just in, replete with Garanca:
-
Hoiho! Hoihohoho!
Come Gibich vassals, gather now!
Woe! Woe! To arms! To arms!
Arm through the land!
Goodly arms! Mighty arms!
Sharp for strife!Need is upon us!
Need! Woe, woe!
Hoiho! Hoiho hoho!https://www.instagram.com/p/C3wSbTVpau8/
-
4 minutes ago, Pellaeon said:
I’ve assumed it’s an imperceptibly-high-tech space suit.
Well, yeah. But its more space suit than armour, is what I'm saying.
It became MORE armoured - and less cheap-looking - over the films. But its still primarily a space suit (or, as retconned in 1977, a life-preserving suit).
-
21 hours ago, Tallguy said:
Well Vader does have that huge "hatch" on the front of his armor. But perhaps he's more machine now than man...
Some armour…it seems to me the majority of Vader’s suit is leather, not armour. -
1 hour ago, Jurassic Shark said:
If you're in the cinema, don't forget the half-hour with commercials at the start.
which would make a movie that's actually three hours be three-and-a-half...
Its just funny to me see people take two-and-a-half hour movies and somehow round them up a whole half hour.
-
27 minutes ago, Tom Guernsey said:
Almost as bored as I looked after almost 3 hours
Pet peeve here, but why do people feel the need to round a movie runtime upwards so hyperbolically? The movie is over at the 156 minute mark. Nowhere even near three hours.
-
21 hours ago, Richard Penna said:
Or this could be an early indication that he decided not to do RoP 2 solo. Who knows.
Pretty sure he's doing that solo.
Season three, though...who's to tell?
-
53 minutes ago, Mr. Hooper said:
Strap in...
- A. A. Ron and Mr. Hooper
-
2
Der Ring des Nibelungen (Richard Wagner)
in General Discussion
Posted
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: