Did I bash? I said:Tonks_kittygoth wrote:Um ok, What is with the LotR bashing?
They skiped stacks of stuff in all three movies, granted they added silly orkies scenes but not many. They were way to short if anything.
Sorry but I have to say *Wimps*
also it reminds me of the Austrians emperor's comment on Mozart's music having too many notes.
Modern culture needs to find someway to re develope the concept of attention span.
I didn't say I hated the films. On the whole, I liked the films. I said I had issues with them. Issues like silly dwarf-tossing jokes, Legolas using a shield as a skateboard (!), sentimentality that was sometimes as thick as gravy on a Deep South breakfast (hence my comments about the White Ship's departure taking too long), and a few structural changes to the narrative that lessened the dramatic tension in key scenes.I did think the LOTR trilogy was too long... I really didn't need some of the cheese at the end of Return of the King. Get on the freakin' boat already, Frodo...
Jackson's version of the Rings trilogy was visually impressive, but I had some serious issues with it.
And long, long battle sequences in the second and third films.
I didn't mind the changes to the novels; in fact, some of the changes were good. And I'm not at all bothered by a director "interpreting" a text. But some of the sentimental scenes in the films went on and on and on in a way that felt like overkill. (The books had a pacing that worked, in this respect; the films didn't.) And some of the "epic" battle scenes dragged, as well. Cool eye candy, but after the camera pans over the armies for the fifteenth time, I wanted a more intimate approach to the combat.
I often have this problem with battle scenes in movies. That I had it with Jackson's LOTR trilogy has a lot to do with the fact that the spectacle of combat sometimes distracts from the emotional impact and sheer terror of such scenes.
A director can insert as many reaction shots from heroes and threatened innocents as he or she wants, but once the camera zooms across a tightly-packed field of troops and keeps zooming across the field, the "wow" response is provoked and the terror is somewhat lessened, the viewer goes "Oh" at the effects or staging, and that seems, well, emotionally cheap (regardless of the technological sophistication and expense) and morally empty to me.
I can think of several films dealing with wartime violence that don't have to dwell on spectacle to convey a sense of awe and menace and dread. And if audiences want spectacle, if they need to see how many vicious foes are attacking our heroes, it strikes me as something like a craving for pornography-- although we're talking about special effects porn, and not sex.
Really, one or two shots of the armies would've been enough. Then we could've followed specific characters. We didn't need to pull away every few minutes for more and even more special effects.
Someone might argue that people want to see fantasy films to "escape" reality, or that spectacle makes for a good fantasy film. That's always struck me as a pretty lame argument. Narrative films have the ability to interrogate reality, to make people think about their lives, their world. Fantasy and science fiction stories have that kind of potential, maybe even moreso than "realistic" films, and I love it when genre films do that. But I don't experience that kind of love often. Instead, I have to sit through ten to twenty minutes of special effects, then I'm back to the story-- until the next twenty minutes of special effects. And sometimes that ticks me off-- especially when the film clocks in at two and half-plus or three hours long, and the actual narrative requires two hours, at best.
Does modern culture need to "develop the concept of attention span"? I don't know. People play video games for hours and hours, and that requires attention, whatever the haters say. Jackson's trilogy and Cameron's Titanic did well at the box office, both domestically and internationally, and the films aren't exactly short.
My problem is the emotional distance effects sequences create in some popular long films.
There's a lot of good stuff in Jackson's trilogy, most of which is taken directly or reinterpreted from the source material. But the sense of wonder one experiences when reading the novels isn't predicated on simple strangeness or lengthy and exotic description, it's built on the sense of a realistic and textured world. (It might seem odd that someone can describe a text with elves and whatnot as realistic, but the author provides the reader with a feeling of place and the sense of a fictional history's hold on a fictional present, and that makes the story more believable to the reader-- if the reader's willing to go along with the author in the first place.)
Even when I find the author's attitudes repellent, I can get into the story, because there's a detailed history behind places and things, and the dilemmas facing the characters aren't just archetypal, they're part of history, an ongoing process.
So what about the battles in the novels?
Tolkien's descriptions of battle don't go on and on, and the passages somehow feel realistic because of their relative brevity. But I watch the films and go "wow" at the special effects in the corresponding scenes-- and realize that I'm basically watching the director play a video game, and I'm being asked to admire the graphics.
And I'm taken out of the involvement that narrative provides.
And I get bored.
I would've liked Jackson's films to have had more of the feeling and texture of history, but instead, I got the spectacle of history, a kind of emotional shorthand signalling me, over and over again. "Oh, our heroes are in trouble!" I got gonzo special effects in too-long battle sequences. And after a while, I began muttering, "The heroes are in trouble? Duh. Thanks for showing me the peril repeatedly. Guess I didn't get it the first time." And the effects sequences started to bore the heck out of me.
I don't mind special effects. But sometimes, I wonder if directors are taking Orson Welles a little too seriously and acting like kids with toy train sets and, worse yet, filming the train sets because, well, toy trains are cool, man.
Jackson can use effects sequences well. He did it in non-battle scenes, he did it in some of the action sequences, and he did it with Gollum.
I sit through three hour, four hour, even longer films, both in theaters and at home. And Decalogue is of roughly the same length as Jackson's trilogy. I enjoy a lot of long films.
But I remain unconvinced that any narrative film with long, long digital effects shots interrupting the story for the sake of showcasing cool special effects is equivalent or analogous to Mozart. Every note of Mozart's is essential to his compositions, and many of Jackson's effects sequences are extraneous to, if not distracting from, his narrative.
As I said, I liked the cinematic trilogy just fine. But I didn't love it.