Lord of the Rings discussion thread

[wildstrawberry]

30 minutes ago, Moria Polonius said:

 

Me too. The books dragged like whoa in certain places, skipped over some really interesting stuff (e.g. Aragorn making the deal with the undead) and there was a sad lack of women. I definitely preferred the movies, although the battles were still way too long for my taste.

 

From the hobbit movies I only really enjoyed the middle one, although I'd cut out Beorn and most of the "lets run atound the dragon cave" too.

 

80% of the first movie was unnenecessary. I remember sitting at the cinema, thinking: "Is this in any shape or form connected to the ring or the dragon? No? Why is it in the movie then? The hobbits encounter with trolls, them being chased by those wolflike things, the whole hoopla with goblins, and the biggest wtf: the attack by the rock monsters. Like, what was the point? 

 

The Thranduil kingdom and Laketown were really intersting, though. Basically, they should have left the 20% of the relevant stuff in the first movie and attached it to the 2nd movie. And they should have left the relevant 30% of the third movie and attached it to the second movie. .... That would have made a really long 2nd movie though. But seriously, I watched the Battle of Five Armies with my Tolkien-nerd of a friend, and when half an hour into the movie they started gearing up for the battle, I asked her: "Wait, already? Is the rest of the movie going to be one long-ass battle?" And she just cringed and said " Yeah, it appears so." But I agree that it could and should have been one movie.

 

I still rewatch LotR though, especially the Fellowship. 

 

I remember two years ago being at a rock concert and there was a long guitar solo in the middle. After a few minutes the solo started to quiet down, but then it picked up again. And again. And Again. And again. I found myself thinking, "This is like Return of the King, just when you think this is the end, there's more!"

 

The bolded part = the two biggest reasons for me too.
I never read 'The Hobbit' book,and,in general,it's hard to imagine how a less than 400 pages book needs to have a 3 movies adaptation,so I think that it was a typical Hollywood-y money-grabbing reason behind this decision.The critics' reviews when they came out were pretty meh too.I've seen the first one (bored me to no end) and part of the second one,but I just couldn't get into them at all and eventually gave up on the series.
The Fellowship is my favorite and my most watched too.But I really love all 3 LOTR movies a lot.
 

[Sayu93]

Love the books first and foremost. Though I've read them first translated into german (it was quite well translated too), I prefer the english language original simply becaus of the beautiful use of language. I see the films as a bit AU but I like them quite a lot. (I helps maybe that I'm an avid fanfic reader)

for those of you who like metal maybe you know that the band Blind Guardian made an entire album about the Silmarillion

Here's a live of one of the songs

at the beginnin he does a short mc in german:

no objections from up here, looks brilliant. One can work with that. At least for the beginning. We're staying tolkinish (yes he makes the name an adjective). We're covering a dark topic in the history of the Noldor. A song about the Mister Fingolfin and his last hours.

And then the songtitle

 

[Fulcher]

Quote

Well, we knew Amazon was looking for its own Game of Thrones; we just didn’t think they’d aim this high. A full-scale Lord of the Rings TV series is in development at Warner Bros., with Amazon leading the pack in an understandably competitive bid.

Variety reported late Friday that the iconic J.R.R. Tolkien novels might find new life as an adapted TV series, though no deal has yet emerged from the early-stage negotiations. Amazon is said to be foremost in pursuit, with CEO Jeff Bezos personally involved to secure a broad hit needed for the streaming service to compete with the likes of Netflix and Hulu.

http://screencrush.com/lord-of-the-rings-tv-series-amazon/

 

So who will be the new Frodo or Bilbo then? Maybe Shoma Uno?

[micaelis]

I just became aware of this thread so I figure I should become active.  The question was asked when, where and how did you come to know LOTR.  It started on one day in the mid-60s, when I discovered this paperback at a store where I usually purchased the science fiction books that I devoured as rapidly as they came out.  This wasn't SF, however, but I went and started reading it.  I was not immediately drawn into it, perhaps because when I bought this volume (volume 1 of the infamous Ace 'pirated' edition) the other two were not yet available.  So I set it aside and basically went on to read other stuff.  Then the other two came out and I picked those up, but I didn't dive right into them.  Fantasy at that time was not nearly the established genre it now is.  That it is now well-established as a major publishing genre is due primarily to LOTR.  It didn't open up a market, it CREATED a market.  Finally, though, I decided to read it andI wasn't very far into Fellowship when I was captured.  I'd like to say I read it in a single sitting but that wasn't quite the case, but I took less than a week to get through the whole thing.  I was hooked and I reread the novel (it's not a trilogy but a single novel divided into three volumes) on the average of once a year for many years thereafter.  As fantasy became an increasingly viable genre in the years that followed I found myself reading them as rapidly as they appeared.  In fact the fantasy genre had pretty well eclipsed my interest in SF.  Particularly after Ballantyne, the publisher that had marketed the author-approved version of LOTR, started marketing a line of Ballantyne Adult Fantasies, edited with commentaries by Lin Carter, I began learning much about the pre-LOTR  history of fantasy literature.  Adding my own researching I found myself on several occasions some years later using that knowledge to teach a course on SF/Fantasy at the University of Nebraska while I was finishing work on my PhD in English, where I always included LOTR.  Through all these years LOTR has remained my favorite novel, as it has for so many.  I think it can be said without qualification that LOTR is the most popular and influential novel of the 20th Century.  What LOTR also accomplished was to raise academic awareness of SF/Fantasy and popular literature in general, allowing them to take a place as objects of serious critical analysis and commentary.  My current copy of LOTR, the fourth I've possessed, is a single volume containing all three books, which is as it should be.  Tolkien wrote it as a single work and it was the reluctance of the publishers to market it between a single pair of covers that forced him to permit its division into the three separated titles most of the world knows them as.  I reiterate, it is a single novel, just as Peter Jackson's admirable adaptation of it comprises a single movie in three parts.  I think it is very difficult for those who weren't around back in the 60s and 70s of the last century to realize the tremendous impact LOTR had.  It was so superior to so much SF and the bits of fantasy that then existed that it transformed the marketplace.  There were things that followed that could not have happened without LOTR.  Science fiction New Wave novels, for instance, would not have found a place on the shelves in bookstores and such without the example of LOTR's sales to let publishers know that there was a market for truly ambitious SF and fantasy, and while much that has also appeared has only limited literary value, being the inevitable hackwork that emerges whenever a successful formula is developed, there has been much that is admirable also.  In some future post I'll list some of those works, both in fantasy and SF, that I include in my pantheon of great achievements in those genres.  I'll close by saying I'm glad that I discovered this thread although it should not be surprising.  If people recognize Tolkien's achievements it just logically follows that they'll find in Yuzu those same heroic qualities found in Frodo, Aragorn and Gandalf.

[micaelis]

On 11/4/2017 at 8:01 PM, Fulcher said:

Well, we knew Amazon was looking for its own Game of Thrones; we just didn’t think they’d aim this high. A full-scale Lord of the Rings TV series is in development at Warner Bros., with Amazon leading the pack in an understandably competitive bid.

Variety reported late Friday that the iconic J.R.R. Tolkien novels might find new life as an adapted TV series, though no deal has yet emerged from the early-stage negotiations. Amazon is said to be foremost in pursuit, with CEO Jeff Bezos personally involved to secure a broad hit needed for the streaming service to compete with the likes of Netflix and Hulu.

I think they're looking at the wrong book here.  LOTR - been there, done that.  A far more adventurous undertaking would be to start developing the various stories in the Silmarillion.  They are just begging for a screen treatment.  I don't think Amazon would find its endeavors repaid simply redoing LOTR.  I know a number of LOTR fans like myself, however, who wish parts of the Silmarillion could be seen as well as read.

[Sayu93]

3 hours ago, micaelis said:

I think they're looking at the wrong book here.  LOTR - been there, done that.  A far more adventurous undertaking would be to start developing the various stories in the Silmarillion.  They are just begging for a screen treatment.  I don't think Amazon would find its endeavors repaid simply redoing LOTR.  I know a number of LOTR fans like myself, however, who wish parts of the Silmarillion could be seen as well as read.

Oh yes!!!! Or even better: The whole of the middle earth stories as a TV show or even several shows. Silmarillion as the skeleton and the unfinished and tales  history of middle earth books as stuffing....oh how i wish that come true

[ralucutzagy]

Yay! This is indeed a good news!!! 

 

[Sayu93]

Yeah pre lotr stuff... now that opens up a whole universe of possibilities.... I personally would love some first age stuff...

[Smultron]

16 minutes ago, ralucutzagy said:

Yay! This is indeed a good news!!! 

 

 

I don't even know what to think about it...  

 

This tumblr post covers it perfectly: 

Quote

Greatest dilemma of the Silmarillion fandom: we want the movies but we don’t want the movies

source: https://silmarilthief.tumblr.com

[Specs]

The story of Luthien and Beren would be very nice to see on film. 

on a super random note, I did this very low quality Skating and LOTR mashup a while a go...good times. 

I did some screen-grabs and then pasted Yuzu on top. Since it's screengrabs, the quality was sooo low, I had to also downgrade the quality of Yuzu's photos to match the pixelization. -I never did get very far into photomanip, someone who is really good at it should paste Yuzu into more LOTR scenes. 

 

[Moria Polonius]

13 hours ago, Specs said:

The story of Luthien and Beren would be very nice to see on film. 

on a super random note, I did this very low quality Skating and LOTR mashup a while a go...good times. 

I did some screen-grabs and then pasted Yuzu on top. Since it's screengrabs, the quality was sooo low, I had to also downgrade the quality of Yuzu's photos to match the pixelization. -I never did get very far into photomanip, someone who is really good at it should paste Yuzu into more LOTR scenes. 

 

I remember seeing those long time ago and having a great chuckle! I didn't know you were the maker, Specs, what a great idea!

[Fulcher]

The Hobbit movies were not very successful in the Japanese theaters, so they have to do something to reawaken the interest for Tolkien's stories in Japan. Maybe they should let Yuzuru Hanyu play Annatar ("The Lord of Gifts"), that is Sauron in his fair form.

[Fulcher]

[Bilge]

I love LOTR, i read the books and Hobbit too, but Silmarillion.. it was a heavy book for me back then when i was little so i droped itXD I actually want to start again to it and other Tolkien books he is a genius creating a whole universe with such details

 

On 17.05.2017 at 9:45 AM, yuzupon said:

I'm appalled at myself for not noticing this thread. 

The first Tolkien book I read (when I was perhaps 12 or so, and in my language) was The Hobbit, actually. It was recommended to me by the bookstore employee after I bought all the Narnia series in the span of 2 weeks. 

I've watch all the movies, and read the trilogy. I hope to finish the Simarilion by this Summer. 

 

I'm also a big fan of Harry Potter and the Narnia series. 

I'm also a fan of Harry Potter, i read all the books and Narnia too (i haven't met anyone reading narnia books^^)  but not a fan of Narnia movies because they stared from the 2nd book? i just watched one

 

 

 

THESE ARE GREATXD

On 16.11.2017 at 12:50 PM, Specs said:

The story of Luthien and Beren would be very nice to see on film. 

on a super random note, I did this very low quality Skating and LOTR mashup a while a go...good times. 

I did some screen-grabs and then pasted Yuzu on top. Since it's screengrabs, the quality was sooo low, I had to also downgrade the quality of Yuzu's photos to match the pixelization. -I never did get very far into photomanip, someone who is really good at it should paste Yuzu into more LOTR scenes. 

 

On 20.11.2017 at 1:20 AM, Fulcher said: