|
Post by Stormrider on Feb 25, 2013 7:17:56 GMT -6
Not very many nominations for The Hobbit Movie. There were so many good special effects movies to compete with.
|
|
|
Post by Andorinha on Feb 26, 2013 7:26:01 GMT -6
I heard The Hobbit did not get any awards, was nominated for three?
|
|
|
Post by Stormrider on Feb 26, 2013 7:37:57 GMT -6
Yes, it was nominated for a few of the more creative and artistic awards (I forgot which ones). Special effects, costume design?, makeup perhaps.
|
|
|
Post by Andorinha on Feb 28, 2013 11:34:33 GMT -6
|
|
|
Post by Stormrider on Mar 1, 2013 21:35:30 GMT -6
I just skimmed the link you provided (my eyes are pretty bleary from my re-read of Adv in ME so I need to go rest them).
The beauty of JRRT's works is in his writing and our reading and interpreting for ourselves the wonderful tales. Hollywood does creep in and change things quite a bit. Too bad PJ didn't take each book of LOTR and make it into 6 movies so he could have stuck like glue to the story as written instead of schmoozing some parts and altering them. Makes no sense to me to make the shorter Hobbit into 3 films and make the longer LOTR into 3 movies instead of 6.
But I still enjoyed watching the movies anyway. But yes, the written images have been and always will be more treasured, felt, and remembered more than what the movies have altered and changed in my vision. And it is good to actually sit down and re-read them every once in a while as I always had done BEFORE the movies came out.
|
|
|
Post by Andorinha on Mar 10, 2013 9:50:42 GMT -6
I have not really been looking for Hobbit Movie critiques, but find it interesting that the three I have run across echo my own dismay with the PJ treatment: "Despite all the technical advancements, if we can call them that, most moments in The Hobbit feel like Peter Jackson is sadly trying to make all those familiar LOTR elements work for him once more, without ever really being able to reignite the old flame. The supposedly awe-inducing visit to the elf city of Rivendell is a ho-hum experience in this new frame-rate-ruined world. A silly battle sequence involving a wizard, silly Radagast the Brown, riding around pell-mell on a rabbit-drawn sled looks like an interstitial from late-era Super Mario. Even Elijah Wood, appearing briefly as Frodo, looks strange — a pale ghost of himself, as if stitched in from another movie by some forlorn and desperate hand. The film is inevitably resonant with memories of the original trilogy, and little about it can hold up to the comparison. There's too much effort in the wrong places — action instead of story, technical tricks instead of actual design — and the constant rhythm of arbitrary event after arbitrary event becomes tiresome well before the film's two hours and forty minutes have lurched to a halt. I'm sure there are kids who will like this wan, distracted effort — they might not yet have anything else to compare it to, depending on their age — but as a human who remembers what came before, I'm afraid The Hobbit left me nothing but frustrated, sad, and tired. Frustrated that these big-budget visionaries seem to consistently feel they have to taint their earlier masterpieces with techno-junk followups, sad that once magical lands now flicker cheap and garish in my head, and tired at the prospect of two more of these things. I exited the theater trying to remind myself that Attack of the Clones was way better than Phantom Menace and that Revenge of the Sith was better still. I then realized how depressing it was that I was making that comparison. Oh, Middle Earth. What have they done to you?" -- Richard Lawson, Dec. 12, 2012, The Atlantic Wire www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2012/12/the-hobbit-movie-review/59903/
|
|
|
Post by Andorinha on Mar 10, 2013 10:06:33 GMT -6
Ok, here's the third, somewhat derivative from Lawson's, and then I'll beat the dead horse no more... So the phrase "It looks like a video game," partly refers to The Hobbit's visual appearance. But I get the sense that's not the whole story. If I had seen the film running at a standard framerate, I suspect I would have had similar overall complaints, and my friend would have made the same video game comparison afterward. That's because the complaint is indicative of a deeper problem. Video games convey drama and consequence in a very different way than other media.
Video games convey drama and consequence in a very different way than other media. In a game, you can die dozens, even hundreds of times, and you'll always be back, replaying the same bit until you win out. As a result, action sequences can feel inflated, and for an outside observer, they can feel shallow. Watching a game, particularly a photorealistic action game, can be confusing and incoherent out of context—why should I care about this? What are the stakes? The main character just took a shotgun blast to the face, got back up, and mowed down twelve bad guys. Where is the tension?
Often in The Hobbit, there's a spectacular amount of crap happening on-screen. Characters tumble all willy-nilly, enemies stack on top of each other, everyone is yelling… but no one appears to be in any real danger. Most of Thorin's heroic band of beardy dwarves are indistinguishable from one another in the heat of the moment, and they all appear to be essentially impervious to physical harm. They fly this way and that, but we never really feel all that worried about any of them. Gandalf is absent for most of the battle sequences, and usually turns up at some culminating moment to wield his godlike powers and save the day. For all its wild action, there's very little actual tension, and I had a hard time finding a purchase. ...
I don't make the comparison lightly, but too often in The Hobbit Jackson falls into the same traps George Lucas did while making the Star Wars prequels. He confuses action with excitement, and the result is a film devoid of tension, with no risk and therefore no payoff. That Jackson also indulges in Lucas' tendency to rely on his audience's affection for past material only makes the comparison more apt.
I was sorely disappointed by The Hobbit. What could have been a bittersweet, lighthearted return to Middle Earth feels instead like a self-indulgent faux epic, drowning in bloated spectacle and unearned sentiment. It was almost exactly as satisfying and dramatically engaging as watching a stranger play a video game. And there wasn't even an achievement for making it all the way through. -- Kirk Hamilton, Dec. 13, 2012, The Hobbit Feels Like A Video Game. That’s Not A Good Thing. kotaku.com/5968069/the-hobbit-feels-like-a-video-game-thats-not-a-good-thing#13629310482154&{%22type%22:%22iframeUpdated%22,%22height%22:2233}
|
|
|
Post by Stormrider on Mar 11, 2013 16:27:43 GMT -6
Yes, I feel it was pretty fast pace compared to the LOTR movies and I found it hard to keep up and was thankful I had read the book. Along with the odd storeyline twists PJ added did give it a video game quality. I wonder how Gulermo DelToro would have done it!
I don't like the newer Star Wars episodes as well as the originals either. The computer tech stuff, true can do things that are more impossible for real life action, but nothing like real action instead of animation.
|
|
|
Post by Andorinha on Mar 11, 2013 21:05:08 GMT -6
Yeah, I would like to see several different ways of doing The Hobbit, the old animated version (Rankin and Bass) works for me because it uses one format all the way through. But with PJ's version, the attempt to marry real life with CGI almost constantly introduces an "alienation effect" that makes the final product surreal/ unreal. In LOTR, with longer scenes of real life, and then CGI for the places needed, there was less a sense of disbelief, and a less hectic pace to the whole movie effort. With The Hobbit by PJ, I never really "believed" the film. Maybe something like roto-scoping the entire production would have kept the film believable by placing it all in a similar format?
RE Del Toro: That would be interesting, to see how a different director/ producer would have handled it!
|
|
|
Post by Stormrider on Mar 12, 2013 6:37:45 GMT -6
RE Del Toro: That would be interesting, to see how a different director/ producer would have handled it! Especially since he was originally selected to be the director, it would have been interesting to see what he would have done with it. In the beginning he was working with PJ's group to write the movie script version, so I wonder if he was part of that Radagast/Bunny sled addition!
|
|
|
Post by fanuidhol on Mar 12, 2013 9:20:01 GMT -6
Since I've been known to beat dead horses, I will add this fragment of Professor Drout's review about the "video game" feel of the movie: "But despite all these flaws, in overall assessment The Hobbit is a good, fun film (I’ll go see it again, and I never thought that about The Two Towers). Films are, after all, primarily a visual medium, and when the visuals are so good we can forgive other things (things that books will always do better, anyway). I was a little surprised at how precisely some of Jackson’s images match The Lord of the Rings On-line computer game: Goblin Town is an almost perfect rip-off (and as both are different from anything in the books, I have to wonder if someone on the production team sneaked a peak), dwarvish architecture is also awfully consistent with the MMO, as are particular features in Rivendell. But perhaps great minds do think alike." The longish review with reader comments can be found here: wormtalk.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-first-hobbit-film-some-thoughts.htmlI especially liked this part: "The first false note is a small but telling script blunder. At the very beginning, in an overview of the history of Erebor, the narrator says that Thror, King of the Dwarves, “ruled as if by divine right.” This line is utterly irrelevant to everything that happens later, and it is jarring for no good reason. There are no references to God or religion in Middle-earth, so to invoke, through one of the top ten ideas of 1643 is incomprehensible and totally unnecessary. You could, if you wanted, make some reference to Tolkien lore at this point, and there are innumerable other ways to say that Thror was arrogant or entitled. The film-makers took infinite pains over hundreds of tiny details, but they left a fair number of little turds like this one in the script" Fan
|
|
|
Post by Andorinha on Mar 13, 2013 9:39:15 GMT -6
Hi, Fan,
LOL, yeah MD is right, lots of little annoying divergences from the spirit of the books... Interesting though that MD still finds the film version basically good as a film.
I'm hoping PJ reads the critical notices and can react to them, gradually refining his products. Alas, for now I'm left waiting for a more sensitive set of films to be made, maybe 50 years to a hundred from now when the copyright squabbles are finally mooted and the whole Tolkien corpus becomes public domain.
As you say, Stormrider, six films, one for each of Tolkien's sub-books in LOTR would be appropriate. Then I'd like to see The Hobbit done separately, without the "backstory" index materials. Perhaps then another set of films based on the indices?
As MD stated, there were too many Dwarves, not only in the battle at Moria gate, but also in Erebor. I found it hard to believe that so great a kingdom as PJ depicted could have been so easily overthrown by one young dragon. From the book, I always had the feeling Dale was about a couple of thousand, men, women, and children; Erebor under Thror/ Thrain maybe another thousand with only a few hundred effective fighters on hand for defense at any given moment. So the dragon wasn't pitted against vast armies. Tolkien gave us an approximation of the numbers likely to be involved when he tells us that the entire expeditionary force of Dain was only about 500, wasn't it? The "great" Battle of Five Armies might have had 7,000 participants total, mainly goblins; 513 dwarves, 1 hobbit, 1 wizard, 1 bear, maybe 20 eagles, and at best a thousand Elves, and maybe 500 men?
;D
|
|
|
Post by Fredeghar Wayfarer on Mar 15, 2013 0:00:14 GMT -6
The review that Fanuidhol quoted brings up an interesting point. I hadn't realized how similar Goblin-town was to the version in Lord of the Rings Online. I guess, as a player of the game, I had gotten so used to the wooden rope bridges, I forgot that that description isn't in the book. The similarity of the Dwarvish architecture doesn't surprise me. One would expect Dwarf buildings to have huge dwarf-head statues and carved war heroes holding huge axes. I can buy that as great minds thinking alike. But the Goblin-town visual is kind of suspicious.
As for the reviews, I agree with some points and disagree with others. I thought An Unexpected Journey was an enjoyable film...when it followed the book. The new material and the break from the tone of the original is where it started to fall apart. The video game style visuals and manic action scenes don't bother me as much as some reviewers. I guess I'm just used to that sort of thing in fantasy/sci-fi special effects movies. The changes to the story were more concerning to me, as well as the pacing with the three-movie structure.
On that note, I'm in a bit of a quandary. I'm not sure what version of the movie to buy, theatrical or extended edition (there's one coming later this year, just like with LOTR). I still resent that Jackson is doing this as a trilogy so the movie is already more drawn out and extended than I like. However, another part of me, the part that's an uber-fan, is going to want to know what's in the deleted scenes.
Maybe I should just buy the regular version and wait for someone to post the extra scenes to YouTube or something.
|
|
|
Post by Stormrider on Mar 15, 2013 6:19:30 GMT -6
I don't mind the additional back story additions to PJ's movie but I didn't like the goofy stuff like Radagast's bunny sled. I did like Radagast himself but the bunny sled was way weird!
I would have liked to have gotten to know each Dwarf better, too. The fast pace did away with the character developments.
I would be curious to see the deleted scenes, too. I saw commercials stating that the DVD would be out soon but already had decided to wait for the extended version even though The Hobbit will be three movies long as it is.
|
|
|
Post by Fredeghar Wayfarer on Jul 31, 2013 13:47:17 GMT -6
They just announced Nov. 5 as the release date for the extended edition of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. As I stated earlier in the thread, I don't have much interest in an extended edition. I feel that the movie is already too long and the story has been unnecessarily expanded and drawn out by making it a trilogy. Whereas the extended LOTR movies added more aspects of the book, the extended Hobbit movies look as though they will simply add more of Peter Jackson and company's fan fiction. This breaks my heart a little as a Tolkien fan but I don't think I will buy the EE. That said, there is a clip from the EE at this link featuring a quiet moment between Bilbo and Elrond. It's a very nice scene and feels more in the spirit of the book than many of the actual scenes we got in Rivendell. Grr, don't give me second thoughts after I swore not to buy the EE, Jackson! www.theonering.net/torwp/2013/07/31/76235-hobbit-an-unexpected-journey-extended-edition-release-dates-content-pricing-announced/
|
|