The Hobbit films, previously to be directed by Guillermo del Toro and now to be directed by Peter Jackson again.

I guess I just am comfortable with the fact that I read these books decades ago. So if someone wants to make a spectacular $200million fantasy film based on these properties, I'll gladly get high and watch them.

Sorry Ned. We crossed posts. Thanks for the illumination.

"Well obviously we could squeeze ‘The Hobbit’ into one movie, but In a three hour movie you would be amazed at how much of the story you would have to lose.”

Slightly heartening news, but not very heartening.

x-post -- No worries etc.

Really, all I want is for WETA and company to do the best dragon EVER on screen. I have a feeling they will.

Everyone who clicks on this thread will pay to see this movie. Quit frontin youse nerds!

Not everybody, I can guarantee.

We had a discussion about D-Wars vs Reign of Fire last night (while watching the intolerably boring Sky Crawlers). I really enjoyed Dragon Wars, while Reign of Fire was hugely disappointing (88 minutes of dudes flexing, 2 minutes of dragons. WTF!).

So yeah--an epic SMAUG would be really timely.

So if they split it in two, wheredo they put the break? When Gandalf leaves them before Mirkwood, or at the end of the barrel riders?

Leaving 'em before Mirkwood makes for a perfect cliffhanger as such, so probably that.

They could base it on the adventure game and leave them stuck in the Misty Mountains forever.

Fleeing the Goblins with assist from the Eagles could be an epic ending.

It just depends if they want to spend an hour on the Battle of Five Armies or not.

Part of me doesn't want this to happen because I love the Rankin Bass version, warts and all. Plus, the voice of Smaug in that still gives me shivers. Plus, "Theodore".

I hope they keep the song "15 birds, in 5 fir trees, their feathers were burned, in the fiery breeze..." I could go on and on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLVgGADHg60

Awesome Nate!

I can (and do) quote this movie all the time (and sing the songs). I've watched it every Christmas morning for the last 20-some years.

Not the right movie, but I was once in a band that did a cover of "Where There's A Whip."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdXQJS3Yv0Y

We had a discussion about D-Wars vs Reign of Fire last night

where does dragonslayer fit into this

Saw Dragonslayer at the cinema when it came out. As a 12 year-old felt a bit cheated cos it was 90 minutes of build-up and 5 minutes of dragon-slaying action, but the gore was cool when it finally happened.

d-wars is the most utter garbage!!!!!!! def watched reign of fire a lot as a kid. maybe four or five times.

Hey at least D-Wars has dragons in it. Reign of Fire is a bullshit tease. Could have been the best movie ever if they'd done it right. What a premise!

"Where There's a Whip, There's a Way" -- great song! Great lyric!

xx-post - Dragonslayer - yawn. There is a boob shot though, right?

I do like the dragon from Fritz Lang's Siegfried though. An oft-overlooked fantasy classic!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu-J9ewSDrc

(actual dragon fight takes place about 4:20 in that clip btw).

Oh I've wanted a DVD of Nibelungen for years. Think there's a bunch of sub-Wagner mythology movies from the 10s and 20s, yeah?

Yeah this is the only one I've seen. Really awesome. This is by no means the best part.

I had the idea that Eureka! had put out Lang's "Die Nibelungen" on DVD, but I can't find any ref to it whatsoever on their site. Kino do a 2DVD vers of it (which I got to admit I haven't got -I watched it on youtube :-/ ). The dragon is great! Best bits for me are the scenes in the primordial forest, which IIRC they built the sets for in an old Zeppelin hangar. Amazing visuals, throughout. Pt1 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7Ah2MNqeoU

Just looked. Was confused in my inebriated state last night cos Amazon have the Kino release as a US import, but it seems to be Region 2.

Hey at least D-Wars has dragons in it. Reign of Fire is a bullshit tease. Could have been the best movie ever if they'd done it right. What a premise!

― Nate Carson, Saturday, July 25, 2009 2:41 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Matthew McConaughey is pretty hilarious in it as the crazed baqld dragon-hunter from America

er that should be "bald"

hellboy/blade 2 director guillermo del toro is directing the hobbit movies under the watchful eye of peter jackson

won't be catching these then.

um, why? I think it's important to remember del toro is also (and more relevantly) the director of the devil's backbone and pan's labyrinth.

you say "director of pan's labyrinth" like thats a good thing...

I hope the vid game they make of this just involves floating in a darkened barrel.

...in your barrel, smelling your apples.

we wanted to embellish a few things and put a little extra narrative that includes Gandalf and what he was doing with the Necromancer

stop it!

Having a torrid affair with the Necromancer

Heh, yeah. I just think that it's important to the atmosphere of The Hobbit that when Gandalf disappears for big chunks of it, you don't really know where he's gone, or why, or whether he'll come back. I think filling in those gaps can only hurt the story.

(Although I've not read it for 20 years, I may be remembering wrongly - maybe he does explain all that stuff really).

Betcha Middle-Earth has a magical creature with eyes in its hands that we won't have known about until this movie comes out.

And I for one would be happy to have that around.

There's a quick mention of the Necromancer at the start and end of the book, the end part being Gandalf and Elrond talking in Rivendell about having driven the Necromancer out of Mirkwood but that he's still at loose. So there is a brief explanation but that's it, and it's after the fact, so yeah, it's the lack of information about his departure which makes the story.

(That said -- I can't remember if these details I just mentioned were always in the story or were part of the revisions Tolkien introduced in the second edition done as part of his retconning after LOTR.)

Someone told me yesterday that the Necromancer is actually Sauron. Is this true? I only recall the Necromancer from RPG supplements...

Yes, same character.

I think that's so.

wait, 'pan's labyrinth' is not good?

'pan's labyrinth' is good. greenwood becomes mirkwood due to the creeping penumbra that is sauron reconstituting himself as the necromancer

i think there are people here who don't think pan's labyrinth is good and they are people you can ignore

Feel free to ignore me then! Love, love, love Devil's Backbone but Pan's was just pretty, boring, drivel. I disliked Children of Men too, if that helps your casual dismissal.

yes

An epic Smaug will be great. I still remember Smaug from the animated movie, thinking "Jeez, how are they going to kill THAT guy?" His voice was awesome - "I can hear your breathing. I can smell your breath." Damn!

I, for one, hope they go with an elongated, wyrm style dragon, instead of a shorter, stouter dragon, a la Reign of Fire.

Turns out, I quote the passage about Bard's black arrow whenever I find something I've misplaced - "You have never failed me, and I've always recovered you!"

Especially funny when you've misplaced a cocktail two or three times.

Haha nice. (And yeah that speech of Bard's might actually be Tolkien's best take on epic dialogue.)

Smaug as a character similarly is his best out-and-out evil character, as opposed to the ominous but ultimately near voiceless Sauron and Gollum and his broken psyche. Gives him a chance to create a creature who is nothing but sneering spite and cruelty and needs no other explanation.

His voice was awesome - "I can hear your breathing. I can smell your breath." Damn!

Fuck yes, Richard Boone. I wish he'd lived long enough to do more voice work.

And if you thought Ornaldo Bloomps bringing down the Elephant hardcore in ROTK was too gritty and realistic.

That's the best bit, though!

this week is school holiday week.
so, me and mk2 decided to watch this trilogy.
having never read the book(s), we really enjoyed the whole experience.

what was fascinating was just how much of the JRRT world has been ripped off for the 'Elder Scrolls' games.
i had no idea, but mk2 is massively into Skyrim, and Oblivion.
and there is a lot (seriously - a lot !) of crossover.
even in the small level detail of the game, eg, the use of a book called "black arrow" that increases your archery skills.
(one example of many that mk2 picked up as we watched the films)

so, question : did the creators of the Elder Scroll games get clearance from the JRRT estate to rip off a lot of the same language/ideas etc ?

i doubt there's anything of Tolkien in the Hobbit movies bar a few names.

inasmuch as all fantasy fiction rips off largely from Tolkien, not only is TES not exceptional but in many respects it's a good deal less egregious than most tbh

yours, a butthurt fanboy

Probably not; Tolkein has been getting ripped off heavily by everyone since he wrote. In particular Dungeons and Dragons was invented by a bunch of Tolkein fans and is basically a Tolkein pastiche in many ways. And D&D is the direct ancestor of video game fantasy RPGs like Elder Scrolls.

also

https://timcrairebooks.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/ba-cover.jpg

fair enough.
i am not that much of a fantasy fanboy, so was shocked as to how often mk2 was 'this is in skyrim' etc.
i guess you are right, its all a direct connection to the D&D world.

If anything, Peter Jackson ripped off Skyrim

movies are still terrible

So this guy has edited the three Hobbit films down to a single film. Or actually three films, there are 2 hour, 3 hour and 4 hour versions.

http://jobilt.tumblr.com/post/156704220060/jobilt-hobbit

I'd previously just seen the first film on a plane, hadn't bothered with the second or third ones. Watching this just confirmed for me that the problem with the films isn't just that they are too long, it's that they are a series of reasonably decent set pieces strung together into a directionless, meandering whole. And I still don't care about any of the dwarves / understand their motivation / feel myself in any way emotionally invested in their fates.

But anyway, might be worth checking out. The edit was good overall, only counted three jarring cuts.

many years later i finally saw THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES, and it's crazy how long this movie feels. this series was mostly terrible, and this was perhaps the worst one. it is *atrociously* paced and makes zero sense and every single moment when they felt they had to shoehorn in LOTR references and foreshadowing was *trash*, and while i actually know why they decided to create and include such garbage in terms of padding things out and turning this single novel into a trilogy (i'm still amazed this crime of an idea wasn't stopped early on), it came off storywise as if Jackson and co weren't confident that the story of the Hobbit was enough to build a compelling narrative around.

what the hell was going on with Gandalf in a cage and then him being rescued by Galadriel and Saruman and Elrond? The Nazgul were there? Sauron himself? please don't explain it to me.

my favorite recurring bit was how multiple characters would hand obviously duplicitous coward and thief ALFRID LICKSPITTLE important assignments such as: a) handle the night watch, b) "look after my children, make sure they're safe" and c) make sure Bilbo gets a good meal and keep an eye on him. I was convinced at some point Bilbo was going to d) hand him the Ring for safekeeping. the only thing worse than craven, greedy, stupid characters is when no one notices they are. the only thing worse than *that* is when everyone notices they are just that, but they don't exile them on the spot, and in fact continue to give them crucial gigs.

If you can take video reviews, Linsday Ellis has a good series going on YouTube right now about how the Hobbit movies screwed up. Two parts up, third is going to be about how the series affected New Zealand.

please don't explain it to me.

There is an in-text explanation but yes, it was handled in strange fashion here.

i may check that out, xp

the tone of this film was so wrong. the tone of the whole trilogy, really. when i think of the Hobbit, i don't think grim portentousness. i don't think it would have to be lighthearted per se but there was a way to make this into a film (one film!) that would be correct and true to the story and not be out of line with the properly serious LOTR adaptation.

considering how few errors Jackson made w/LOTR i'm astonished that this series was just one error after another.

the second film was the best, i think the Smaug business was actually well-done and it was led up to impressively.

There is an in-text explanation but yes, it was handled in strange fashion here.

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, April 12, 2018 5:11 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is there a general explanation you can give on what occurred in the source material? read the Hobbit recently w/our kid but can't remember a single thing about this, so I assume maybe it's from The Silmarillion?

I'm enjoying that Ellis series too (although the 'lost innocence' framing seems a bit unnecessary), and should probably actually watch the second and third films. I just feel like I know exactly what they're going to be like. By her account, some of the things that went wrong were: Jackson having hardly any preproduction time after del Toro left; too many parties being owed a share of the profits from the first film, which motivated them to stretch it into three films; and Warner Bros insisting on reshoots for things like the Tauriel love triangle. The actor who plays Óin also talks about the scheduling being a mess.

xpost -- The very, very brief explanation: as Tolkien was writing up The Hobbit he threw in 'the Necromancer' as a Macguffin to have Gandalf leave the rest right before Mirkwood. It's handled much more lightly in the book than in the movie, of course, and while he was drawing on what he'd already written of general Middle-earth backstory for hints and details that emerged throughout the story -- 'Sauron' as a character had existed in one form or another since 1917 -- this wasn't anything systematic. He's just this 'horror' that never directly features: Gandalf tells everyone at Bag-end that he'd found Thorin's father in the Necromancer's dungeons and gotten the key (and map I think) from him, he mentions he'll have to leave the party at some point, he does so at Mirkwood, and later back at Rivendell Bilbo hears him talking to Elrond about how the Necromancer had been defeated. This is all very much in the original edition of the book pretty much without change.

Tolkien later of course had to deal with the inadvertant tone shift problem -- to the point where he attempted a full Hobbit rewrite in the early 60s much more in an LOTR vein, but he never got farther than three chapters in, after a friend read it and rightly said it was good but at the same time it just wasn't The Hobbit, which really should have been the greater lesson there. The only thing major he did had happened some years earlier when he rewrote the Gollum scene, making him much more sinister and murderous instead of comically threatening, and turning the Ring's loss into a personal breaking point for him.

the second film was the best, i think the Smaug business was actually well-done and it was led up to impressively.

Yeah, and as I said from the get-go, I think, that's really all I wanted out of the films, a great Smaug. Not entirely thrilled with the invented action setpiece at the film's end but it does have some striking moments as it goes, and I would have much more enjoyed a full confrontation between Smaug and Bilbo where he never took off the Ring but hey. A bit unsurprising that and the Gollum sequence were the best moments overall over the three films.

In the book as well, those two scenes seem like a pair - Bilbo riddling with Gollum and then spinning riddles to buy time with Smaug.

thanks Ned, I think I forgot the Necromancer connection there.

the best part of BOTFA was the opening sequence w/Smaug's attack, though the Master and Alfrid are terrible characters who feature in too large a portion of it (and characters of that exact type almost always are terrible.)

i think one reason this film felt longer than even the extended cut of Return of the King was just the pacing, and how little actually occurred in the story. you could really sense the story being stretched out here. i mean Legolas was basically the main character in the third act, or so it felt. He was involved w/every character.

The various fan edits floating around help to a great degree -- there's one especially good one that reduces all three films to a three hour effort and follows the plotline of the original as closely as they can possibly manage it. You can sense the joins here and there but it really helps.

Sooooo, as I've mentioned in other threads, in two weeks' time our podcast on Tolkien will finally get around to talking about these films in front of an audience:

https://www.megaphonic.fm/live-2023

Rewatched them all this week for the first time since 2015. That was a slog.

Lindsey Ellis's video series was mentioned a little earlier in the thread but let's link them all, shall we:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRUQ-RKfUs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElPJr_tKkO4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7t_g5QObs

And our podcast is live! We had thoughts, we did.

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/50

Congrats on making it to the big 5-0! (Enjoyed the last one on the animated RoTK, btw.)

Hahah thanks. I'm glad that we're kinda through a lot of the 'uhhh' adaptations woods after these last few months -- we need to get back to the actual work itself! Which we are, per Jared's choice of the next topic.

It's all part of the rich tapestry, imo!

I think these movies are worse than the Star Wars prequels. By a lot.

Oh yes

As far as characterization goes, Alfrid Lickspittle makes Jar Jar Binks look like Harry Lime.

They're better than Rings of Power by, like, a lot.

Rings Of Power has the big advantage of not being 48fps

Yeah, as bad as Rings was it was less ugly and tedious than the Hobbit films.

48fps is fabulous, it literally looked like you could walk in to the screen. It will be shame if it never catches on because the film designed to champion it was a steaming turd.

no it looked like a bad soap opera sped up

Like watching someone else play a video game all evening.

Like watching someone else play a video game all evening.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR)

Unwelcome flashback to the barrel sequence. Hard to believe I watched all three of these in the cinema.

Haha. I did the same.

I'd complety forgotten about the barrel scene. In fact, I think I must have totally blanked them all out as the only thing I vaguely remember is the fucking atrocious Radagast sleigh bit

That was the lulz and best thing in the films, I wouldn't go so far as to say befitting the original conception of this children's book but nothing like the travesty of the barrel sequence, or the rollercoaster in the golbin caves.