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"On The Music Of Middle Earth"


Dixon Hill

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In terms of a dramatic performance, I actually really like Jack Black in this. I think it has more to do with us as an audience being used to see him in comedic roles, but some time into the film you understand that the performance is solid. 

 

Adrian Brody doesn't really work in the film, that much is true. It isn't terrible or anything, its just kind of odd.

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I would love, LOVE to see the last cut of ROTK that existed before reshoots added in stuff.  Probably some real gems in there that shouldn't have been taken out.

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About the only thing I'm missing in that movie is more exploration of Denethor, rather than having him serve effectively as another villian, as he does in the finished film.

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5 minutes ago, Disco Stu said:

Tonally, everyone seems to be acting in different movies.  

 

Unlike your prior racist remarks, this criticism is reasonable and I tend to agree.

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3 minutes ago, BloodBoal said:

So, not only racist, but also white male supremacist. Great!

 

me rn

 

giphy_(4).gif

 

 

1 minute ago, mstrox said:

If everybody seems to be acting in a completely different film, that's on the director and not the actors.  IMO.

 

Yep.  That's probably down to the weight loss.  Somebody get PJ on a diet of cheescake and cheeseburgers

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15 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

About the only thing I'm missing in that movie is more exploration of Denethor, rather than having him serve effectively as another villian, as he does in the finished film.

 

I so wish they had revealed in the film that Denethor was corrupted by the Palantir.  It would have really helped things!

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Yes. Than again, there is already so much stimulus in that film, that I can kind of understand why his character wasn't expanded upon.

 

Still, I would have liked to have just a bit more. There are certainly hints of it: "It is as Lord Denethor predicted" etc; and the Palantir that Aragorn uses in the Extended Edition isn't supposed to be the Orthanc one.

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1 hour ago, BloodBoal said:

I thought Chris Hartwell was the guy who sung You Know My Name?

 

Anyway, King Kong is good. Sure, PJ's excesses became more and more pronounced in this one, but it's still an excellent film all around. There's a lot of heart to it, and a lot of memorable moments. I can totally understand people finding the movie to be too long, or some individual scenes to be over-the-top (the stampede sequence being generally the one people like to use as an example), but to call it a bad movie is being dishonest. Or I guess people who say they don't like it simply lack the intellectual ability to understand its dense scientific concepts. ;)

 

King Kong is great. Flawed sure, but it's the kind of epic adventure that Hollywood isn't as interested in these days. One with size, scale and a whole lot of heart. It still had the markings of a great director. You could definitely point out where the seams are falling apart, but it still takes you on a great ride.

 

And Jack Black was fine!

 

50 minutes ago, BloodBoal said:

 

No way. He's fine. Maybe you have more of a problem with the way the character was written than Black's performance? 

 

I think the relationship in itself is OK, but poorly handled (the fact that Jamie Bell's character is completely abandoned after Hayes dies does make the whole thing feel pointless). As for the acting, Bell does overdo it a bit at times but Evan Parke ("the black guy", as you disgustingly racist person like to call him) is fine.

 

Again, I think you're pushing it. That being said, I could see why people would hav a problem with him in that film. He doesn't quite feel right as an action hero.

 

You know, every now and then, you remind me why I used to like you. :heart:

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I don't argue that you can tell PJ was losing his grip on the production. But at the end of the day, it still holds up pretty well (unlike The Hobbit), and it manages to deliver on everything I want from a great summer blockbuster. To be frank, it's been a while since I've had that kind of ride in the cinema.

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1 minute ago, KK said:

I don't argue that you can tell PJ was losing his grip on the production. But at the end of the day, it still holds up pretty well (unlike The Hobbit), and it manages to deliver on everything I want from a great summer blockbuster. 

 

Yes! A great summer blockbuster... in December!

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Have you noticed how all these threads involving The Hobbit tend to go the same way? By now I would have thought you arseholes would be tired of repeating yourself ad nauseum.

 

As for Kong, Jackson got Kong right, which at least is the most important thing I guess. Almost everything else - cast, pacing, set-pieces, music - I had big problems with. I don't know what this means in all, but I don't think it holds up, and I shan't be watching it again. And my opinion is clearly the only one that matters here.

 

5 minutes ago, Holko said:

The best thing that came out of PJ's King Kong is the recreation of the lost Spider Pit sequence!

 

Essentially, this is correct. The 'actors' were shit of course but it was a lot of fun. Shame his own version of the sequence was shit.

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4 minutes ago, Barnald said:

Have you noticed how all these threads involving The Hobbit tend to go the same way? By now I would have thought you arseholes would be tired of repeating yourself ad nauseum.

 

If people here were tired of repeating themselves, most threads wouldn't make it past 2 posts.

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In true Lucasian fashion, he could replace it with a line about how he always had intended to cast Martin Freeman as young Bilbo, but he had to wait until he was old enough to film the scene.

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18 minutes ago, mstrox said:

In true Lucasian fashion, he could replace it with a line about how he always had intended to cast Martin Freeman as young Bilbo, but he had to wait until he was old enough to film the scene.

 

Stephen Hawking would never do such a thing. Nor would Newton!

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On 27. November 2017 at 10:08 PM, Nick1066 said:

 

Look how much Jackson's sensibilities changed in the relatively short time between LOTR and The Hobbit. Who knows what he'd do in ten years. He'd want to approach the material in a completely different way, and in most cases that means fuc*ng it up.  Leave it alone.

 

I don't think Jackson's sensibilities changed very much from LotR to the Hobbit. What changed was the amount of influence he had. As a relatively new director to such big films, in conjunction with Boyens and Walsh, and a producer above him, both FotR and TTT aren't comparable to the Hobbit in the sense that PJ couldn't do whatever the fuck he pleased.

It probably wasn't until RotK was on the horizon that PJ had plenty more control and leeway. And, as it is with movies, the director gets most of the fame and credit, even though both Boyens and Walsh had surely just as much to do with the success.

 

In retrospect, King Kong is probably exactly what you should have expected from Peter Jackson, at the point of his career where for the first time, because the success of LotR was credited to him, he had complete control over his film. 

 

By the time the Hobbit came along, PJ was the godfather of Middle-Earth, a completely different dynamic for the production. If he wanted to do something, who would say no? He probably had more control than what was good for his films.

Pair that with the quantum leap in what was possible in CGI technology, so that Jackson could actually do more of those crazy wacky ideas, which he would have thought twice about doing in LotR, and there you have the Hobbit.

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3 hours ago, gkgyver said:

By the time the Hobbit came along, PJ was the godfather of Middle-Earth, a completely different dynamic for the production. If he wanted to do something, who would say no? He probably had more control than what was good for his films.

Pair that with the quantum leap in what was possible in CGI technology, so that Jackson could actually do more of those crazy wacky ideas, which he would have thought twice about doing in LotR, and there you have the Hobbit.

Jackson readily admits the CGI aspect in the documentaries of the Hobbit films (e.g. about 25% of BotFA was pure CG with no live elements). He mentioned specifically e.g. how he always wanted to do the orcs in CG but back in 1999 when they began the production of LotR the technology wasn't developed enough to have enabled it so they had to use costumes and prosthetics and masks. I certainly don't have any complaints about the orcs in LotR, quite the contrary. They feel quite rough and real and the actors give wonderful performances even through their heavy prosthetic make-up (well I don't like the design of Gothmog but that is beside the point).

 

But yes the CGI enabled PJ to do basically whatever he wanted without constraints (some might say sans consideration too) in the Hobbit and it really isn't all for the better.

 

 

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6 hours ago, gkgyver said:

 

I don't think Jackson's sensibilities changed very much from LotR to the Hobbit. What changed was the amount of influence he had. As a relatively new director to such big films, in conjunction with Boyens and Walsh, and a producer above him, both FotR and TTT aren't comparable to the Hobbit in the sense that PJ couldn't do whatever the fuck he pleased.

It probably wasn't until RotK was on the horizon that PJ had plenty more control and leeway. And, as it is with movies, the director gets most of the fame and credit, even though both Boyens and Walsh had surely just as much to do with the success.

 

In retrospect, King Kong is probably exactly what you should have expected from Peter Jackson, at the point of his career where for the first time, because the success of LotR was credited to him, he had complete control over his film. 

 

By the time the Hobbit came along, PJ was the godfather of Middle-Earth, a completely different dynamic for the production. If he wanted to do something, who would say no? He probably had more control than what was good for his films.

Pair that with the quantum leap in what was possible in CGI technology, so that Jackson could actually do more of those crazy wacky ideas, which he would have thought twice about doing in LotR, and there you have the Hobbit.

 

We recently had this discussion, and I agree with you in principal. The issue was definitely that Jackson was unrestrained on The Hobbit in a way that he wasn't on LOTR.  And this led to his having free reign to indulge in his worst impulses. 

 

Where I disagree is who was restraining Jackson. Frankly I'm not sure Boyens and Walsh (Jackson's partner) had the ability or authority on LOTR to restrain Jackson. Rather, it was the studio, via people like Barry Osborne (and perhaps others), who reigned Jackson in. Osborne had real gravitas and was a genuine producer of substance who could and did speak for the studio. Bones and Walsh were both Kiwis who Jackson just brought along, they were part of the deal.  Now, it may be that they had Osborne's ear, but they certainly weren't in a position to contradict Jackson officially. And let's remember....the variable here is that people like Osborne and Ordesky weren't around for The Hobbit, whereas Boyens and Walsh were. And you're quite right, an unrestrained, basically unaccountable Jackson had pretty much carte blanche on The Hobbit (ala Lucas without Gary Kurtz), and it led, IMO, to at least some of that film's excess and deficiencies.  Some of this is true to a lesser extent on ROTK, but the real problems start with The Hobbit.

 

All that said, no matter what, if Jackson does revisit the films in 10 or 15 years, his sensibilities will certainly have changed, unless he just doesn't grow as a person or artist. And at that point the only restraint on him would be how much money the studio would be willing to give him on newly expanded and revised editions.

 

43 minutes ago, SafeUnderHill said:

 

Not true. The studio had influence over the Hobbit films - they forced the introduction of a love triangle (something PJ said wouldn’t happen initially).

 

The studio obviously had some influence on The Hobbit...they were paying the bills after all. But Jackson's contract would have given him much greater authority over The Hobbit than LOTR, and certainly final say over the script. That's just product of Jackson's success, when he made LOTR he was just the guy who directed Braindead and Meet the Feebles. Now the studio was begging him to direct The Hobbit after the Del Toro fiasco and he was in a position to call the shots (and where are the LOTR producers on The Hobbit...not there). So maybe the studio wanted the love triangle, the probably did, but if Jackson didn't want to go along it wouldn't be there. And in any event, the love triangle always struck me as more of a Boyens/Walsh thing.

 

*This post is dedicated to Barnald, and is a designated "repeat discussion".

 

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Yes, it would have helped had there been someone to reign Jackson in just a little bit more.

 

With that said, however, there's also the question of how much Peter knew when to restrain himself. We can never be quite sure, but that we see him progressively pulling back on some of his early knacks even as his creative control is gradually (and, supposedly, exponentially) increasing, tells me that there is more than a modicum of self restraint there, and certainly far more than he is given credit for in these parts.

 

Stuff like less extreme-close-ups post Fellowship of the Ring, less intentionally slowed-down footage post King Kong, less fake-out deaths, etc...

 

Hell, even between installments of The Hobbit, he knew to dial back stuff (presumably for reasons of public opinion) like Radagast or the Dwarves' dinner table manners scenes. In The Battle of the Five Armies, you can even see that they cut back on the romantic subplot.

 

 

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Jackson was originally the producer of the Hobbit, so that alone shows how much more influence he had the second time around. And true, the love triangle was something that the studio at least wanted to be embellished, but, truth be told, when the films were expanded from 2 to 3 movies, I'm pretty sure Jackson/Boyens/Walsh would eventually have come up with/embellished the love story themselves.

And really, as far as storytelling goes, I think there are more important flaws in the trilogy than the little bit of romance. It gave us awesome music, for one, and secondly, I think it's not as silly as the Arwen stuff in RotK because it doesn't affect the main story. I have a much bigger problem with Arwen dying being literally the sole motivation for Elrond to reforge Narsil, than with that cute little side story in the Hobbit.

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