Hobbit-hype!

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I liked The Hobbit as a fun tale but Lord of the Rings needed some serious editing. It is painful to read except for a few awesome moments, like the scouring of the Shire.
:mad::confused:

Maybe you are not literate enough to read and comprehend the genius of J.R.R. Tolkien. Or perhaps you are just trying to provoke an argument.

Millions of readers in almost every country in the world would disagree with your statement.
 
:mad::confused:

Maybe you are not literate enough to read and comprehend the genius of J.R.R. Tolkien. Or perhaps you are just trying to provoke an argument.

Millions of readers in almost every country in the world would disagree with your statement.
Not everyone enjoys the same kind of books. Some people find The Lord of the Rings too long, and that’s ok. One could say it’s their loss; but maybe they derive enjoyment from other things that I don’t.

I do think that InJesusItrust could have expressed his/her opinion more charitably. To describe the book as “painful” to read is going to upset some people who love the book. How about just saying “I personally didn’t enjoy it” and leave it at that?
 
:mad::confused:

Maybe you are not literate enough to read and comprehend the genius of J.R.R. Tolkien. Or perhaps you are just trying to provoke an argument.

Millions of readers in almost every country in the world would disagree with your statement.
:tsktsk: As an art form, literature is highly subjective. It is not practical to fault someone for taste. Those who do so too much may find themselves turned to stone at sunrise.
 
There you go. There must be thousands of those decisions that completely depart from the books.

There are going to be a lot of female characters in The Hobbit that WERE NOT in the book.

:mad::mad:

We must be PC, you know. Let’s turn Middle Earth into a reflection of 21st century USA/Europa.

:mad:
I am female, and perhaps this is my feminine side showing, but I don’t think it is so much as being PC as the reality of the concept. Each of us have to deal with temptation and our own adventure into faith. That is a masculine battle. (a battle of strength and will and not strictly male)

There is a reason the women of the New Testament actually take a prominent role in the stories despite the fact that they are rarely mentioned. (the whole bible for that matter)

Backstory on my thoughts; Each of us has a masculine and a feminine side. This doesn’t have anything to do with the carnal or physical body being male or female. This has to do with the actual workings of our being and our soul. The carnal, or physical side just makes one side or the other more dominant, but is present in each and every one of us. We are crated man and woman…and so on.

I think if you read the story and realize the groups of people he describes there are also women there. (and many more men) They are just quiet as women usually are.

It takes the masculine side in each one of us to forcefully stand up to evil. It takes the feminine side to love another despite the presence of evil influences and to know there is something better there.
 
:tsktsk: As an art form, literature is highly subjective. It is not practical to fault someone for taste. Those who do so too much may find themselves turned to stone at sunrise.
Please don’t wag your finger at me! Calling The Lord of the Rings “painful” is quite a value judgement, wouldn’t you say? And I am not a troll, thank you very much. 😛
 
Please don’t wag your finger at me! Calling The Lord of the Rings “painful” is quite a value judgement, wouldn’t you say? And I am not a troll, thank you very much. 😛
Indeed it is a value judgement, but the other user was critiquing a piece of art, not another user.
 
I cannot even remember the last time I went to the theater to see a movie (I think I’ve gone twice in the last 6 years). But I’m definitely going to see this one! :bounce:

I probably won’t go as many times as the original trilogy, though. I saw those three films a total of 16 times in the theater. (Hey, I was young and single at the time with no kids and less financial obligations. :o)

I love the books, but I’m 100% okay with there being 3 Hobbit movies. I cannot imagine how Peter Jackson is stretching it all out into 3 movies, but I’m excited to find out. The more the better!
 
Some of the changes I can understand from a theatrical point of view. As awesome as he was, Tom Bombadil did nothing for the story, other than taking the Old Forest arguably makes more sense than taking the road. Glorfindel was in it for just the one scene, so it was easier to conflate him with Arwen. And even if you don’t like the change, can you at least agree that the Oathbreakers swarming the oliphants was pretty awesome?

Changes I didn’t like, however, included Faramir and Aragorn, Narsil, and the scouring of the Shire. Faramir wasn’t swayed by the Ring nearly as much as his brother was, but they were both weak in the movies. Aragorn is supposed to have wanted to be king this whole time. Narsil should have been with Aragorn, partly because one of my favorite scenes is at the Prancing Pony. The part where he stands over the hobbits and places his hand on Narsil’s hilt as if he was going to draw it (but doesn’t because a broken sword’s not so menacing). Finally, the scouring of the Shire is actually fairly plot important, and Jackson probably could have moved the Palantír into Two Towers to make room
The thing about the scouring of the shire is that Jackson himself doesn’t like that part of the book. I can understand omitting it from the movie. It would have dragged out the ending even more than it was.

Yeah, the changes in Faramir bug me (and also Theoden…in the books, Theoden wanted to help right away, but in the movie, he wants to retreat and only helps when he’s basically backed into a corner and has no other choice). But I understand what Jackson was doing. I think he wanted to highlight the bravery of the core Fellowship and also drive home the allure of the ring. I can see how those points would not have come across as strongly in the movie if some of those characters were as noble as they were in the books.
 
There you go. There must be thousands of those decisions that completely depart from the books.

There are going to be a lot of female characters in The Hobbit that WERE NOT in the book.

:mad::mad:

We must be PC, you know. Let’s turn Middle Earth into a reflection of 21st century USA/Europa.

:mad:
Oh, for goodness sake! Some people are never satisfied. I don’t mean to come across as condescending, but there aren’t a ‘‘lot’’ of female characters in the film. Galadriel is returning as part of the ‘‘White Council’’ just like in the appendix Tolkien wrote. In fact she was the founder. They are basing this on Tolkien’s writings. This stuff WAS going during the events of ‘‘The Hobbit’’. It may not have been in the book, but this is based on Tolkien’s writings. Now Jackson has said that he did invent the character of Tauriel, but she is not a major character. So, I see no reason why they can’t flesh out the wood elves by introducing a minor character. It’s not as if they are turning some of the dwarfs into female counterparts.
And may I ask why you care? You have repeatedly said you won’t watch the movies so what’s the big deal? Why get upset over something you aren’t going to see?:confused:
 
I cannot even remember the last time I went to the theater to see a movie (I think I’ve gone twice in the last 6 years). But I’m definitely going to see this one! :bounce:

I probably won’t go as many times as the original trilogy, though. I saw those three films a total of 16 times in the theater. (Hey, I was young and single at the time with no kids and less financial obligations. :o)

I love the books, but I’m 100% okay with there being 3 Hobbit movies. I cannot imagine how Peter Jackson is stretching it all out into 3 movies, but I’m excited to find out. The more the better!
Ditto. I don’t usually go to theaters because in a theater you can’t pause the action to make a potty run. But I’m going to this one, because I want to see it in 3D. We’ll also get the DVDs, when the expanded “director’s cut” versions come out – and there will be a director’s version 😃
 
I bought the directors version of LOTR, each movie with an accompanying extras disk - was it about 20 hours of extras - anyway, the extras were amazing.

I was also in New Zealand when Te Papa museum had an exhibition of costumes and swords, armour, etc. It was amazing in detail - not just the hero costumes, but all of them were full of details that you wouldn’t expect to find in a movie. Swords with engraving in Elven or runes, coat linings with monograms.

In contrast, a few months before I had seen the Star Trek travelling exhibition, where communicators were made of wood, and the costumes were thrown together. Very shoddy, though it all looked fine on screen.

Which shows that the detail that Peter Jackson wanted, and paid for, was not absolutely necessary for a movie to be visually effective. (I’ve seen Henry IIX’s court decked out with gold sprayed pasta on their clothes, It looked fine in the movie), but PJ wanted everything to be perfect for his actors. Aragorn was never separated from his sword for the entire filming of LOTR - as people in Wellington can tell you - it was a surprising accessory for someone going out for coffee, or in a local restaurant, but Viggo had his sword with him even then.
 
I bought the directors version of LOTR, each movie with an accompanying extras disk - was it about 20 hours of extras - anyway, the extras were amazing.
Ditto, and it’s a LOT of watching 😃

But I love all the behind-the-scenes stuff. I think my favorite part was all the Maori extras done up as orcs doing a haka dance.
 
The Battle of Helms Deep was filmed in a quarry beside the main highway into Wellington, in the Hutt Valley. Filmed at night, in the cold, for months and months. They said you could tell the Helms Deep extras in the street by their staring eyes, and pallid, sun-starved complexions - not to mention the T-shirts emblazoned with I SURVIVED THE BATTLE OF HELMS DEEP (I’m not sure if that is the right name for the battle actually. Am I right?)

The quarry was cut into one side of the valley, and people on the other side of the valley could put their binoculars onto the set and watch, for months!

Orcs doing a haka would be a blood curdling sight!
 
The Battle of Helms Deep was filmed in a quarry beside the main highway into Wellington, in the Hutt Valley. Filmed at night, in the cold, for months and months. They said you could tell the Helms Deep extras in the street by their staring eyes, and pallid, sun-starved complexions - not to mention the T-shirts emblazoned with I SURVIVED THE BATTLE OF HELMS DEEP (I’m not sure if that is the right name for the battle actually. Am I right?)

The quarry was cut into one side of the valley, and people on the other side of the valley could put their binoculars onto the set and watch, for months!

Orcs doing a haka would be a blood curdling sight!
By the book? No, it’s the Battle of the Hornburg. By the movies? They never give a name for the battle, but most people associate it with the name Helm’s Deep, so they call it after that
 
From the religion section of this morning’s newspaper:

al.com/living/index.ssf/2012/12/the_hobbit_movie_opens_in_thea.html
Tolkien was a Roman Catholic whose mother converted to the faith and raised him in it. His father died when he was 3 and his mother died when he was 12, leaving him an orphan. Yet he remained a devout Catholic throughout his life and it helped shape his literature, Chance said.

“He blended Roman Catholic influence with Celtic, Anglo and Old Norse mythology,” Chance said. “He mixes all that together. You have to see him as a Medievalist and you have to see him as a Catholic.”

That’s not to say that “The Hobbit” or “The Lord of the Rings” are explicitly “Christian” tales. Chance says there are definite undertones of Christian theology throughout Tolkien’s work – both “deeply religious in their subtext.”

“You’re not going to find that on the surface.”
 
That’s true. He was a lover of Germanic language and culture and myth, but tempered against that was his wartime experiences in trench warfare against the Germans in WWI, and the corruption of what he saw as traditional German values of honor and Christianity by militarism and, later, the rise of National Socialism.

Tolkien said, when discounting the German/Orc comparison:
“I’ve said somewhere else, even the goblins weren’t evil to begin with. They were corrupted. I’ve never had those feelings about the Germans. I’m very anti that kind of thing.”
WWI’s technological innovations in mass killing (poison gas, aerial bombardment, tanks, automatic weaponry) probably influenced LOTR’s view of Saruman’s warfare and the destruction of the countryside, as well as Tolkien’s ghastly experiences in trench warfare, which probably influenced the descriptions of Mordor.

The Hobbit’s return to the Shire certainly strikes many ex-soldiers as typical of the feelings and experiences of veterans returning home after combat.

Here’s an interesting article on Tolkien’s experiences in WWI and how it may have affected his work:

greenbooks.theonering.net/guest/files/040102_02.html

BTW, a friend of mine who was in Vietnam as a combat engineer (and who later became an author himself) wrote a fan letter to Tolkien from Vietnam and was surprised to receive a handwritten letter in response from Tolkien, who said he always tried to respond to letters from soldiers, as a fellow veteran.
 
So did anyone go see it yet? I plan on going sometime in the next week or two.
 
So did anyone go see it yet? I plan on going sometime in the next week or two.
Me! I went to the midnight premiere with enough people to fill two rows. I really liked it and enjoyed the parts Jackson added with the White Council. On the other hand, I’ve seen several bad reviews even on CAF. Personal preference, I guess. 🤷
 
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