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

horribly familiar xpost

there's more Tolkein vibe in that Dutch(?) book cover than there is in the whole of the trailers i've seen so far, the heavy, dingy, po-faced look of everything outside the Shire is totally absent of any magic or otherness, just another grubby cartoon action-movie. even the giants throwing rocks which reads as a cute simile for the weather in the book has to become actualised and uglified and serious-business-ified and ugh ugh ugh i've decided i don't hate Tolkein just this lame literalist murdering of everything that was decent in his books

something Deleuze/Guattari wd have fun with about the way the book's pack of dwarves has to become these differentiated characters with a quirk attached to each so's they breathe off the page god those trolls make me angry too

so on balance, you're lukewarm?

i can't explain quite what it is but magicless wd be as close as i can get to my objection, and the whole dragging of a world that belongs to the 1930s/40s into the tedious quest for "realism" that is the 21st century. i'm sure somebody more invested in Tolkein than me has written something comparing Jackson's entire enterprise to Saruman's work on the Shire

I don't know what he would have thought of Jackson's movies, but the notes from Tolkein in the annotated version of The Hobbit lead me to believe that he would not have cared for that book cover. He was vehemently opposed to the illustrations for foreign editions of his book having any influence from Disney or being cutesied up.

i don't think that cover's very Disney

No, but its awfully cute. I want to hug it.

yeah it's cute. i think there's a primitivism that chimes with something Tolkeiny, i seem to recall Smith of Wootton Major's original illustrations having that folk tale vibe to it too

I just don't get why about half the dwarves look dwarfy and the rest just look like dudes.

i am not a tolkien fan At All and i much preferred the lotr movies to the books and i like martin freeman but i have no hope for this thing. i read the hobbit like ten times as a little kid and will always love it and yeah i'm with NV; a lumbering epic triptych with lots of whispered conversations about the dark lord is just the furthest furthest thing from the hobbit i can imagine. (it's like the lord of the rings or something.) the small scale of the hobbit is its best feature, the way a mercenary (even criminal!) job for a bunch of shady gold-lovers and their semiattentive and vaguely abusive wizard patron turns into a bildungsroman for a 50-year-old man (yeah yeah i know hobbits live long so 50 is actually like 15 or whatever but all of bilbo's mannerisms and habits and likes are middle-aged, and his awakening from a kind of vacantly satisfied middle-aged british pastoral childishness is all the better for being juxtaposed w/ thorin's awakening to the positive points of this same childishness). how great is it at the end when for the generic heroic work of Slaying The Dragon tolkien drags on and just as quickly shoves off a generic hero, because 1) this isn't bilbo's department and 2) we don't care, since bilbo slew the dragon that mattered when he could have turned back in the tunnel and didn't. obviously the movie is not out yet and could be anything but i find it verrrrrrrry hard to imagine that the fairy-tale smallness, the focus on very minor forms of heroism, could be preserved across a nineish-hour trilogy that knows about the ring.

reviewing this thread i find that i have already posted all of that. all of it. bedtime i think

Remake of "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" or GTFO

http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2012/10/08/62953-neil-finn-of-crowded-house-provides-the-end-title-song-for-an-unexpected-journey/

"the greatest adventure"

actually this film's principal failing is likely to be its omission of "that's what bilbo baggins hates"

Though apparently one of the trailers shows the dwarves singing...something at Bag-End. Maybe just Pogues songs.

You're kind of the last person I'd expect to have not seen the trailers by now, Ned!

But yeah I was rereading the book and there's a lot of "and then they carried on with much singing" - it would be kind of hilarious if the films were 50% musical.

TBH what I suspect will happen is that they're just not going to be the 4-hour butt-numbers that the LOTR films were - if you split it at entering Mirkwood / Smaug's death, and stick in all the Dol Guldur stuff in the last section, you could make three snappy 90-minute films out of it.

(I don't really think it's going to be 90 minutes, I just reckon it'll be closer to 90 than 240)

You're kind of the last person I'd expect to have not seen the trailers by now, Ned!

Eh? I had seen them! I just remembered a bit like that in one of them -- sure seems like they're singing something. Anyway.

(I don't really think it's going to be 90 minutes, I just reckon it'll be closer to 90 than 240)

I would be fine with this.

Imagine if Part 1 is just hobbit songs and stories

xp Ah right, the 'apparently' threw me - yeah, the song they're singing in Bag End is the one from the book afaict.

the latest rumoured running time for the first one is 2hrs 44mins

lol

man i had somehow forgotten that that song's in the book! was just thinking of the cartoon. never mind then.

But yeah I was rereading the book and there's a lot of "and then they carried on with much singing" - it would be kind of hilarious if the films were 50% musical.

There's a lot of singing in LotR too, but they left almost all of that out, except for Pippin's Enya number in the third film (which I don't think was in the book?). I had high hopes that, based on the source material, the movies would've been more musical-ly, but sadly they weren't... For example, when Gandalf "dies" in the first book, the other members of the Fellowship burst into a multi-part lament, with Aragorn starting to sing spontaneously, Legolas continuing after him, etc. How awesome would've it been if that was in the movie?!

*leafs through book, does not find anything resembling that scene* (Frodo sings a song in lothlorien 35 pages later but Legolas says the grief is still to near for him to sing.)

Hmm, maybe I misremember, but I'm pretty sure there's some scene in the books where the characters start to spontaneously sing when they think someone is dead... Maybe it was when Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn think Merry and Pippin have been killed by orcs?

in the first book, the other members of the Fellowship burst into a multi-part lament, with Aragorn starting to sing spontaneously, Legolas continuing after him, etc. How awesome would've it been if that was in the movie?!

If by awesome you mean very irritating. I am so glad there was not more singing in the LOTR movies, I skipped all the songs and poetry in the book when I was a kid. I just wanted to get to the orc killing.

You know what both audiences and production executives love? Stopping a movie dead in its tracks for the characters to sing a lament to a dead person.

It works in musicals and Disney films, no?

The scene you're thinking about the funeral of Boromir at the start of The Two Towers

Ah, yeah, that's it!

Ah yes.

"You left the East Wind to me," said Gimli, "but I will say naught of it."
"That is as it should be," said Aragorn. "In Minas Tirith they endure the East Wind, but they do not ask it for tidings."

Transl: "I'm not fucking singing." "Good, we'd rather not have to fucking listen, lol."

If that had ended up in the film I suspect farts would have been involved.

This movie was not marketed as a Disney film or a musical, it was marketed as "Serious adventure is serious, and also hobbits."

Yea, but if it had included all/most of the songs from the books, obviously the marketing would've been different too.

And why can't a musical be serious? Do you think The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is not serious?

The movie was what it was. Of all the criticisms that were provided, and they were legion, I don't recall any of them being "Not enough musical numbers!"

i saw QI tonight (maybe a rerun, in fact do episodes of QI ever air in originality or do they come into being pre-viewed and full-fledged as reruns? i digress) and sandy toksvig was there in a red jacket and i thought to myself that she would make a splendid hobbit, a first-rate bilbo indeed. too late now, but maybe there'll be a chance before her clogs are self-popped for a scriptwriter to have a decent crack at the franchise, eh

i've decided i don't hate Tolkein just this lame literalist murdering of everything that was decent in his books

― syntax evasion (Noodle Vague), Friday, 28 September 2012

confident that this too shall pass and you will indeed in the fulness of time remember that you do in fact hate tolkien

Much as I will probably quite enjoy these, I kind of hope they flop massively just to teach everyone a lesson.

And that somebody on the internet does a single two hour edit of all three that everybody agrees is much better.

Hmm...

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=35541

I hope he's Bard.

Hahaha if only.

"Black arrow! You've never failed me, and I've always recovered you. I had you from my father, and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true King under the Mountain, go now and speed well!"

songwise, there's the part in the fellowship movie where sam recites a little poem about gandalf's fireworks in lothlorien. watched it once w a friend, and sam says "the finest rockets ever seen / they burst in stars of blue and green / or after thunder, silver showers" and friend suddenly yells "THAT WAS ONE OF GANDALF'S POWERS". still laugh.

HA!

was the green dragon song merry and pippin sing in rotk in the theatrical cut or the extended? ages since i've watched it. was that in the book?

Theatrical IIRC. Not in the book (nor was that whole sequence, because what happened was *two hour lecture follows, everyone flees*).

movies cut out lots of lectures iirc. Also the multiple decades between the birthday party and Frodo fleeing the shire.