Oct 172010
Time to get your geek on:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/39373868
Warner Bros. on Friday said it has given the green light to start filming two movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel “The Hobbit,”
About damned time. If the world made any real sense at all, “The Hobbit” should have come out somewhere around 2004 or 2005. And by 2012 or whenever, we should be well into the five or six movies of “The Silmarillion.”
But no. I guess we *needed* to have an interlude with glittery emo teen vampires so we could recognize soemthing actually *good.*
24 Responses to ““The Hobbit” is a go”
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Unfortunately Warner Bros have also announced that Mad Max IV is going on hold until 2012.
That’s not so much an “unfortunately” as it is a “at this point, who gives a damn.” I heard a few years back of an effort to make another Conan movie starring Arnie as old King Conan, with some new guy as Conans protege or some such. Meh. A good Conan sequel (unlike the piece of crap sequel that was actually produced) in the mid/late 1980’s would have been worth seeing. Mad Max IV, had it come out in the late 1980’s would have been something to see. Twenty five years later, the gloss is off. A delay of two more years is hardly going to matter at this point. A geriatric Max railing about the Jews? Meh.
I feel a lot more confident about The Hobbit with Jackson at the helm than del Toro.
It will be interesting to see how much the “look” of the movie will resemble the LOTR trilogy.
For instance, will the goblins look like the big-eyed critters we ran into in the Mines Of Moria?
Of course the biggie is Smaug…I sure hope they have him talk, as in the book. It’s a pity Vincent Price is gone, as he could have probably done a great job on the voice of a stuck-on-itself dragon.
John Howe’s calender painting of a winged Nazgul looked a lot like what showed up in Return Of The King:
http://img47.imageshack.us/i/frodoeonazgul3fq.jpg/?a=j&ci=-1&rt=4
So, based on that, will Smaug look like his calender illustration also?
http://angel.cs.msu.su/~salnikov/gilrond/Images/John_Howe/the_death_of_smaug.jpg
Given the small size of the book “The Hobbit”, I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a bit of The Silmarillion gets stuck into part one to explain how the whole ring stuff got started in more detail.
Gandalf wanders off early in the book to deal with “The Necromancer,” who we find out in LOTR was in fact Sauron. So I suspect that incident will make an appearance, along with several of the other wizards.
I just do not see “The Silmarillion” ever being made into films. It does not have the broad appeal that LOTR or the Hobbit have.
Best be talking to HBO, if you desire to see the Silmarillion brought to life.
If the “Necromancer” scene is included (I’m pretty sure it will be) we may get to see Saruman again also.
I hope the spiders in this one look more like black widows than the inevitable big tarantulas.
We may even have an opening for a black character here in the form of Radagast The Brown. š
After Jackson’s attempt at Lord of the Rings I have no faith that he will attempt to tell the story of the Hobbit either in the detail or the spirit in which it was written. J.R.R.Tolkien would be spinning in his grave to see how his books have been abused. I shudder to think how Jackson and Hollywood would dismember the Silmarillion.
NERD FIGHT!!!
Let’s just say that if he had somehow made Tom Bombadil work and kept him in the movie, he would have been a genius of the level of Orson Welles as a director, because everyone’s favorite proto-hippie and his flower-girl wife didn’t fit the tone of the rest of the story at all.
That little character came _way_ out of left field.
Ring-a-ding-a-dildo. š
Way back in the 1960’s Tolkien had a radio interview in Britain in which he gave away an interesting piece of info; the Elves are based on the French, and the Dwarves on the Jews.
Knowing that, we have the Dwarves trying to get their treasure back from some big vainglorious thing that stole it, can fly, likes setting fire to cities from the air, and has its fat belly covered with jewels to cover up it’s slimy underside.
You don’t think that Smaug was in charge of the Luftwaffe, do you?:
http://johndenugent.net/images/hermann-goering.jpg
You start following that line of logic, and Sauron is Hitler, Melkor is Kaiser Wilhelm, Saruman is Mussolini (as Italy fought on the Allied side in WWI, then went over to the Axis in WWII), and Saruman’s Orc shields have something that could be taken for the Fascist salute on them.
Don’t even get me started on how many things in LOTR resemble things in the movie “The Wizard Of Oz”, but I doubt picking an apple off of an Ent would be a wise idea, and looking into the Wicked Witch Of The West’s crystal ball can result in getting every bit as much of a wrong number as Pippin got from looking into that Palantir.
Look! Gaily-dressed Hobbits in the bright colors they are so fond of:
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/11_03/munchkinsOLD_468x348.jpg
Look! Winged servants of evil:
http://www.fearnet.com/fearnetImages/imcu7fbJZ7XuWAh9rJ6Jxq7A==.jpg
Forced to do another’s bidding (in this case due to the fact she has their magic cap)
Look! Sneaking into the evil land disguised as Orcs:
http://davelandweb.com/judygarland/images/Oz_Ebsen_Winkie.jpg
Jackson had a perfect script for Lord of the Rings in the form of David Silbey’s BBC Radio Series Script from the early 1980s (he actually brought Silbey in as a script consultant). All he had to do was add pictures to it and it would have told the story faithfully to the spirit and intent of Tolkien. It had no trouble with Tom Bombadil. He was and remains an important part of the story. However he flubbed it. He decided to make it “more spectacular” “more exciting” and so removed characters, situations, changed things around and introduced completely new side stories which were irrelevant. He snatched foolishness from the jaws of triumph. Typical philistine effort.
Bombadil would have been ridiculous, no matter how handled. And while the Scouring Of The Shire bit at the end was a sad loss, the fact is the movie *already* had multiple endings, and that would have added an extra hour or more to the already extensive running time.
Yeah, “The Scouring Of The Shire” was a sad loss, as seeing the big men thinking they could boss this particular group of Hobbits around and finding out (fatally) that oddly enough once you’ve been through what they have, mere bullies are about as threatening as mosquitoes…and about as easy to kill… would have been a lot of fun to watch.
The scene I would have added was when it comes time for Frodo to go into the West, and they pan back to Sam’s front lawn, which now has a 200-foot-tall Mallorn tree growing out of it, and all of the hobbits are going to him for advice on how to deal with any problems they run into in their gardens, as he obviously has a innate gift in that direction. š
Meanwhile, back at Tomitty-vomitty-bangitty-bombitty and Goldensnatch, when the first movie came out, a critic described excising his part as the smartest move Jackson ever made, as he “Was like a malignant cancer on the whole work.”
I can sort of guess what Tolkien had in mind for the character – this is what the whole of Arda would have been like if Melkor didn’t think that he had a really good singing voice.
If that was the case, then my opinion of Morgoth has just moved up a notch, as anything was better than a perpetuity of this sort of goofy shit:
http://iangoldfarb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/bombadil.jpg
BrianR wrote:
“more spectacularā āmore excitingā and so removed characters, situations, changed things around and introduced completely new side stories which were irrelevant. He snatched foolishness from the jaws of triumph. Typical philistine effort.”
Where in that entire trilogy did you ever run into a piece of writing as well done as this: “History became legend…and legend became myth… and for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, the ring ensnared another bearer. The ring came to the creature Gollum, who took it deep into the tunnels under the Misty Mountains… and there it consumed him.”
That started out as a throw-away line in the description of the script by Fran Walsh, and Jackson realized that was a great piece of dialog for Galadriel to deliver, that not only got you up to speed about what had happened before, but had a real epic feel about it.
Tolkien had done that, and it wouldn’t be a paragraph, it would be a page or two.
Tolkien was nothing if not wordy.
Mad Max IV will not star the idiot American. Perhaps you just can’t watch the reality of what peak oil and global warming will bring?
> Mad Max IV will not star the idiot American.
Michael Moore? I didn’t really think he was going to be in it anyway.
> what peak oil and global warming will bring
A plethora of nuclear power plants and a blooming of the Australian outback due to increased rainfall?
They should really build this thing out in the Australian outback:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower
>Where in that entire trilogy did you ever run into a piece of writing as well done as this: āHistory became legendā¦and legend became mythā¦ and for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, the ring ensnared another bearer. The ring came to the creature Gollum, who took it deep into the tunnels under the Misty Mountainsā¦ and there it consumed him.ā
That started out as a throw-away line in the description of the script by Fran Walsh, and Jackson realized that was a great piece of dialog for Galadriel to deliver, that not only got you up to speed about what had happened before, but had a real epic feel about it.
Actually, its a line from Brian Silbey’s BBC radio play.
Tolkien had his own views on what he was writing. He believed he was writing an epic quest story. He as was also a product of Victorian and Edwardian England. He had also worked on the Oxford Dictionary project. So, its not surprising that he was, as you put it:
>Tolkien was nothing if not wordy.
Does that make his prose bad? No, merely a product of his environment. What you’re suggesting is like abridging The Bible in those modern “translations”. You lose the majesty and you lose the language compared to say the King James version (no, I’m not likening LoTR to The Bible, just using The Bible as an example – for those who are too stupid to understand such usage).
> You lose the majesty and you lose the language
As it was, LOTR was, what, about 12 hours long? IIRC, a page of text translates on average to at least one minute of film time. A faithful adaptation of LOTR would have been extremely long, vastly expensive, and basically pretty *boring.*
And BTW: feel free to abridge the Bible as much as you want. It might be better. “In the beginning… as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. The end.” Imagine how much better things would be.
So, should we then abridge the Constitution of the United States.
As I said, David Silbey wrote the perfect script for LoTR, all it needed was pictures. The BBC radio serial was what, 14 hours long? And it included all the songs and the speeches and the descriptions. Remove the descriptive text and replace it with pictures and you end up with about the same amount of time Jackson took to show it on screen in his version.
It _might_ have been boring for you but then, perhaps you aren’t the audience that such a movie is intended for? Of course, considering the normal output of Hollywood crap that is inflicted on the world, perhaps you’d be happier with that stuff with its whiz-bang giant explosions and mindless car chases?
> It _might_ have been boring for you but then, perhaps you arenāt the audience that such a movie is intended for?
Ahem. Read that line directly into your nearest mirror.
> perhaps youād be happier with that stuff with its whiz-bang giant explosions and mindless car chases?
Gosh, yes, that’s why I expressed such joy about a new documentary about the making of “2001.” Because of all the explosions and car chases.
In a discussion about how great Jackson’s LoTR is and his Hobbit might be, it appears there is little room for tolerance of a dissenting viewpoint.
If you like the King James Bible, you should latch onto “The Jerusalem Bible” which the Catholic Church did during Vatican II; it was a direct translation of ancient Greek and Hebraic source material into English without going through the Latin mid-phase.
The Vatican wanted top-notch etymologists working on it so they could choose words and phrases for it that would get across the nuances of the original wording.
One of the people who worked on it was J.R.R. Tolkien.
As far as being wordy, If I were the lord of the Nazgul and this little girl with a sword told me:”Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!”
My response wouldn’t be: “Come not between the NazgĆ»l and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.”
But rather: “What the fuck is a ‘dwimmerlaik’? Where did you dig up a word like that that? Back off bitch, or there’s going to be trouble.” š
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11604193
He looks perfect for a younger version of Bilbo, based on Ian Holm’s portrayal of the character in the LOTR films.
Somebody’s already done some photoshopping of an image of him, and the effect is dead on-target:
http://www.hobbitfilm.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/bilbo-martin-freeman.jpg