The worst review of the Lord of the Rings movies that I've seen

[pegkerr]

The worst review of the Lord of the Rings movies that I've seen.

Wow.

Um, I disagree.

(Have you seen any reviews that are worse? If so, where?)

Comments

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

When I read reviews like that I always feel sort of like the reviewer must've been having just a really crummy day, or something. Possibly a crummy year.

[whapnoggin.livejournal.com]

This is the comment that irritates me most: "Who can remember anything out of Howard Shore's vapid, overblown score for The Lord of the Rings?"

I certainly can remember--and could. I went home from my first viewing of The Two Towers with the theme for Rohan running in my head, and I was pleased with the variations on it in The Return of the King. This is the kind of comment that makes me say of the critic, "Where does he get off?"

It's just the Harry Potter effect, really. If anything becomes wildly popular--as the LOTR films have now done--someone will feel obliged to point out how high-minded s/he is by hating--not just disliking, but violently resenting--the popular item. Of course it can't have become popular by being any good, or by appealing to anything real in human hearts.

[ravenspb.livejournal.com]

I agree. Furthermore, we have been listening to the WoO score for most of our lives. It is as ingrained in our minds as much as "Tara's Theme."

[corinnethewise.livejournal.com]

I think what I hate about most reviews is that they assume that every other person on the planet must agree with them since they are a reviewer and their word is sacred or something. Sure they can tell me what they thought, but they can't tell me what I thought or what everyone else thought, but they think that they can.

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

He sounds to me as though he likes old movies because they're old movies. I'm not sure that you can really compare The Wizard of Oz with The Lord of the Rings. Well, you can of course, but I'm not sure it works.

Heck. I'm not sure I'm saying any of this right.

[gwendolyngrace.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree. It also sounds like he doesn't really like the story itself, and doesn't understand its finer points.

Plus, there's a *huge* difference between a soundtrack meant to underscore a film and writing a musical score that is meant to take the foreground. And this reviewer clearly doesn't understand the use of leitmotif, either.

Sorry, Wizard of Oz is a good film, but it's not an epic, and the Wicked Witch is downright cartoonish compared to the ominous, unrelenting march of evil conveyed in LotR. Really, she's just a woman with a footwear fixation.

Let's compare something more in the same scale as LotR, like Ben Hur or Ten Commandments. At least then we're talking something closer to the same language. And Troy? Give me a break. Of course it's an SFX extravaganza. There's a huge difference, IMO, between a film made solely for its SFX, and one where the *only* way to tell the story is to develop astonishing visuals.

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

I actually think he makes a lot of good points...

[ravenspb.livejournal.com]

He does make some good points when it comes to special effects as being the purpose for so many bad epics. I thought the HD fight footage in "Gladiator" was particularly gratuitous. That said, he implied that there was absolutely nothing to be salvaged from this movie. He is leaving out all of the incredible detail work done to create a totally authentic expererience that had nothing to do with SFX.

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

Well, I thought the detail work WAS in the FX. I don't think these are the greatest movies ever made, and I might argue about a "totally authentic experience" in regards to any film, let alone one this reliant on effects, make up, and audience knowledge of the source material, as well as several tried and true film cliches. I do love the movies. I also agree about Jackson's limitations (as shown so far) as a director and the current trend of movies. It seems to be against the law to criticize LOTR these days, which seems silly to me. So I'm glad to see someone go against the crowd, even if he perhaps overlooked the many positive aspects of the films.

Of course, the only part of Gladiator I liked was the initial battle sequence. But I'm a classicist and I'm just all about tortoiseshell formations.

Practical effects

[gwendolyngrace.livejournal.com]

No, there's a huge amount of detail in all three LOTR movies that involves practical effects: props, costumes, and everything else. What I loved about the films did involve the special (computer or optical) effects, too, but mostly it was the feeling that, for the span of the film, the audience is completely and utterly immersed in a world that is absolutely separate from this one. As much as is possible in an undertaking such as this one, Jackson created Middle Earth - with as much painstaking continuity as the original books. Yes, the writing team made decisions I would not have made, and no, they are not a literal translation of the books onto the screen, but the amount of labour associated with the practical elements - location scouting, costumes, armour, swords, jewelry, even the architecture of the different cultures represented - that was a crowning achievement and deserves recognition.

Re: Practical effects

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

I consider props and costumes to be part of the effects of a movie. All of that was brilliant. I feel any lack to be in the acting anf writing departments. For example, I was not lost in that world. Every time someone joked about dwarf-tossing, I was yanked right out.

Re: Practical effects

[gwendolyngrace.livejournal.com]

But by the same token, I found tears in my eyes three times during Fellowship; all of them had to do with architecture. Two of them were in Moria. Ditto Two Towers - I have studied Anglo-Saxon and Norse society, poetry, and music, and IMO, Rohan lived up to its literary inspiration.

I don't consider the miniatures, the arms and armour, or the practical sets 'special effects.' They're practical effects - there's a difference. They're real - they are not illusions. The actors can pick them up, feel them, interact with them. They become artifacts more than they are props.

But if you simply write off the work of the hundreds of blacksmiths, designers, artisans, and carpenters in creating those environments and instruments, then in that sense, yes, the movies are *mostly* about the effects - because it's the visuals that have been the barrier to making a successful visual adaptation of the books. There have been award-winning voice adaptations, radio dramas, etc. The only times so far that anyone has attempted to present this story in a dramatic *and visual* medium, the results have not been well or widely received.

I didn't expect to lurve every single moment, and I didn't. I also have problems with some of the writing decisions. The point is that if he can successfully bring these books, these books that the majority of fans doubted could be done justice, these books that most production studios thought were unfilmable, even to 75% of "right" (acknowledging that your 75% (or less) might be different than my 75%), I'm okay with that.

Re: Practical effects

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

I never said I didn't like the movies, nor am I in any way writing off the efforts of those technicians--my husband makes chain mail, I understand the effort.

I simply meant that in some instances--I felt it most strongly in ROTK, the spectacle of the movies takes over and I was left a little hollow. The reviewer had a point there, though he took it too far by claiming that those moments were the sum of the films. I look at the films and the books as separate entities, and they are certainly an accomllishment. But the adulation given them currently, so that any criticism results in a deluge of righteous defensive fans, is also going too far.

Until the EE comes out, I have to hold off on a total grade for the trilogy. I disliked TT in the hteatres and loved the longer version. Several things I felt were quite poorly done in the last I am told are "fixed" in the EE. But I think it is important while acknowledging the amazing work that went into this film, to note that it sometimes overwhelmed the core of any movie--the story.

[pameladean]

Somehow I don't think it's the people who love the movies of LoTR who are being so dazzled by special effects that they don't know what they're looking at.

And when he said there were more convincing women in the Iliad than in Tolkien, I choked on my dinner. In the Odyssey, sure, okay. In the Iliad? Give me a break. Eowyn is worth Helen, Andromache, and, um, what'shername, the mobled queen, put together.

Pamela

[whapnoggin.livejournal.com]

To compare Tolkien's characterization to Homer's is mostly ridiculous--sure, you do have the "epic" genre link, but especially in the characterization of the hobbits, Tolkien is devoted to a type of interiority that just doesn't appear in Homer, where characterization is largely governed by epithets. If the women are more compelling in Troy that in Jackson's LOTR, it'll be because they were scripted that way. It's true that there's a wider range of roles for women in an Iliad adaptation--Andromache, Hecuba, Helen, Cassandra, etc., plus all the divine and semi-divine figures such as Athene and Thetis--but that doesn't mean that the actual characterizations are inherently deeper. Eowyn, for all that Tolkien turns her into Mother of Ithilien at the end of ROTK, is far more developed psychologically than most of the women in Homer (though I don't want to state anything categorically, and Penelope is always interesting). I'm sure that in Troy, as in the recent miniseries, you'll find a lot of free adaptation to make the characters more accessible to movie audiences. So on the whole, the comment you refer to makes me boggle, too.

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

Ahem.

Helen, Andromache, Hecuba, Cassandra, Breseis, Chryseis, Polyxena, Thetis, Hera, Aphrodite, and Penthesilea (she's mentioned, her story is in full in the Homeric Hymns). To name a few.

I don't know how many will be in the movie, but the women of the Iliad destroy Tolkien's paltry girls any say of the week. Eowyn has minimal screen/page time and I thought was given especially short shrift by Jackson. Homer's women show the full range of human emotion, not just batting at things with a sword or making cow-eyes at a proto-king.

Feminism in texts

[gwendolyngrace.livejournal.com]

That's not the question, though. The question (and one of the few points the review makes that I agree with) is how will the film adaptation choose to portray these females? Will Helen be a doe-eyed, passive pawn? Will Athena's wrath be shown in any depth, or will it be relegated to the role of petulance and self-importance? Will they show the gods politicking, scheming, lying to each other, and to what extent will they ignore the nuances of the relationships in order to focus on the lustful, magic-induced, maniacal arrogance of Paris romantic pathos of Helen and Paris?

Tolkien's interpretations of females in the books often had more in their subtext than their text, and the films both did and did not balance that out. I do not like, for example, the portrayal of Arwen as a sword-wielding border guard in FotR, especially since it got completely dropped in the other two films, but mostly because that's not how Arwen operates - she's not a chick in chain mail. The power and influence she wields over Aragorn is completely sexual, and I have a problem, too, with Jackson's decision to retain her as his "inspiration" in that hokey Sir Walter Scott sense, without also playing up the aspect in which she holds his victory over him in the book (i.e., you don't get this until you do what you're supposed to do). The tension between Aragorn and Eowyn, then, is more keenly felt in the book, IMO, *because* she is such a departure from the other woman in his life - all the other women, in fact, but particularly Arwen. He finds the idea of a warrior chick kinda hot, but not sufficiently hot to screw up his relationship with Arwen (which, in and of itself, is remarkable for a man ;^)). And of course, Eowyn's character boils down to a nifty little twist on the whole, "Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd" plotline with the Witch-King.

But mainly, I think, the treatment of women in both Homer and Tolkien is pretty limited, and yet oddly revolutionary. In Homer, because the natural misogyny of the era limited the ways in which his females (except for the goddesses) could exert their power; in Tolkien, not necessarily because of any underlying or deliberate misogyny (I'm far from an expert on his personal views), but because the *story he's telling* is of a world and of a time and of a type where women's roles were more-or-less marked by their gender. Because hes deliberately evoking the Medieval feeling in the books, of course he's going to subjugate women to some degree in them. However, I would really hesitate to say that Galadriel*, Arwen, and Eowyn do not measure up to Athena, Penelope*, or Helen. I think they all exert the fullest influence they're allowed to have within the contexts of the worlds they inhabit.


*Celeborn is whipped...dude, Galadriel is clearly noted to be the one in control there.

*Well, as someone else noted, this chick is possibly the smartest cookie of them all. She's a genius compared to the men of her court. Yeesh.

Re: Feminism in texts

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

Well, I am sort of an expert on Homer. I have read it in the original Greek and have my degree in classical studies. I am co-authoring a book on feminine archtypes in Greek texts. You are mischaracterizing both his age and his women, and lumping the Odyssey and the Iliad together. What the commenter (not the review) said was that there were no good women in the Iliad. The movie is not the Iliad, it doesn't even try to be. it encompasses action not in the poem.

Before I start in, though, I do like your analysis of Arwen. It's something my husband and I have discussed.

The misogyny you mention is a function of the Attic era. Homeric Greece was certainly not Berkeley, but it had a very different view of women. I mentioned Penthesilea--she is the queen of the Amazons. I'd put her against Eowyn any day of the week. Every single archetype of the psyche, male and female, is present in the Iliad. That's why it still resonates with us. Hecuba, Cassandra, the gods, these are stunning characters, not only strong but complex--and in LOTR the women are not terribly complex. The Silmarillion deepens Galadriel's character somewhat, but you cannot feed into the movie information which is not there. If Eowyn is given he due in the EE, I'll be mollified somewhat, but that doesn't make her greater than the heroic women of Troy and Greece. The Odyssey is far more complicated--its women are both more complex, more evil, and more benevolent. But they are there, they are fascinating, and to say that Tolkien beats Homer for female characters--far from saying Jackson does, is sort of laughable. Even Breseis, and I wonder if she will be in the movie version, has a moment of standing up for herself.

We can't judge the movie yet. I'm fairly sure it will suck. But the person I was responding to couldn't even come up with the name of Hecuba ( I think that's who she was referring to) and yet thought the three measly female roles plus one non-speaking hobbit rated more consideration than women whose lives and names have become metaphors for the deepest parts of the human psyche.

Re: Feminism in texts

[gwendolyngrace.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that Tolkien's females beat Homer's (and I'll defer to your expertise in classics); I'm just saying that they're none of them slouches given the periods they represent.

Missed the point?

[gwendolyngrace.livejournal.com]

Whether or not this reviewer likes the story, or likes that it was drawn out over three movies as the original was over three books, there's also something to be said for these films changing the way cinema views story telling. Sequels and installments have made perennial returns, true - but LotR reminded audiences and filmmakers that it's possible to conceive of *and sell* a single story told over several parts - *not* just three movies that string together, but each tells a closed chapter of the tale. Could Tarantino have sold Kill Bill in two films without Jackson's example? Possibly, but probably not.

The point is, there's at least two ways to look at it: 1. Does the film make history because of its internal merits?; 2. Does the film make history because it changes the industry?

In this case, it's both. So there.

[mattador.livejournal.com]

Never seen a worse one, no.

Hmm. I wasn't a big fan of the movies, but the problems I ahd with it were entirely different. What planet is this yutz living on?