I thought the movies were great. After Fellowship came out, I picked up the book, thinking that since the movie was more or less faithful, I’d been missing out on something fun and cool and imaginative.
…Gah. I think I got 100 pages into it, and it was STILL in the Shire…
Really, the only thing I really like about Tolkien’s fantasy writing itself is the way Gollum talks, and I can get that from watching an adaptation.
I watched about 30 minutes of LOTR, got bored, haven’t attempted to watch it since.
Here now, what’s with all you big folk dissing Mister Frodo? Why, he’s got enought to worry about what with being stabbed, and bitten, stung, stubbed his toes I don’t know how many times running from big awful evil things carrying that awful burdensome ring all the way to Mordor and you all have the gumption to go a’pointing your big ol’ sausage fingers at the “little folk” and makin’ little Hobbit babies weep, and oh…"
(sam bursts into tears and exits left)
Read the books in junior high/high school. Liked them at the time and couldn’t stand reading anything else Tolkien wrote. Wouldn’t re-read them today on a bet. Of FOTR I thought the battle sequences were fantastic but the talky bits were boring as hell. Didn’t go see TTT and have zero interest in seeing it.
To touch on two other writers mentioned in the thread…I really enjoyed Interview With the Vampire, liked TVL all right but had I not been on vacation with the choice between that and a book by John Madden I probably wouldn’t have read it. I ended up reading the Madden book too. Yeesh. QOTD I hated hated hated. Anne was deep in the throes of Successful Writer Disease, aka King syndrome. She sold a bazillion books and her editors lost all power over her, just like King. Who’s going to tell Anne Rice to cut 100 pages out of her 700 page monstrosity, especially since those extra hundred pages mean the publisher can charge $3-4 more dollars for the book? As for Robert Jordan, I started a thread a while ago asking people to help me find nice things to say about him and I don’t recall getting much in the way of a positive response. My brother gave me the first Wheel of Time book for Christmas a few years ago and I ran out of excuses to read it last year and loathed it utterly. I can’t imagine slogging through the rest of them…he’s up to, what, 75 books in the series now?
HERETICS!..mumble, mumble…SAVAGE, HALF-CRAZED VISIGOTHS…mumble, mutter…CHEESE WEASELS!!..don’t talk to self swore not to talk to self anymore…írë ilya nauva nótina, ar ilya hostaina, i mettassë…oh buggerit!
Oh well, de gustibus non disputandum (Latin, not elvish, BTW). But speaking as a JRRT devotee since 1971, the subject matter either grabs you or it doesn’t. And if it does, one learns to disregard quite rapidly the author’s rather less-than-professional-novelist narrative style in favor of the world he describes. And if it doesn’t grab you, no biggie. There’s lots of other interesting divertisements out there, in many wondrous flavors.
(I’m still amazed I’ve gotten so interested in something that doesn’t have anything to do with sex!)
This is so refreshing. It’s nice to read posts from people explaining why LotR doesn’t appeal to them and they do it without resorting to tones of hostility.
Can’t tell you how often threads over at Rotten Tomatoes started by people who hate LotR are filled with such hostility that it’s downright scary. I suspect the ones who start those threads do so just to start a battle.
But I’m serious when I say I’m impressed with the civility shown in this thread.
Nice job, people. Very nice.
Oh, and by the way, I enjoyed the LotR movies. Have not yet read the books, so I cannot give an opinion on those.
I didn’t really like FotR as it was deadly boring, but TTT and RotK are excellent.
Rice : I liked Interview and Lestat, got 500(!) pages into The Witching Hour and just gave the hell up… Ay yi yi, I was only halfway through…
Jordan : Just published the tenth book. I wonder if there is a resolution at the end? Probably not. After about the third book, I gave up on that series. I Liked the first pretty well, thought the second was passable, and read the third out of duty. I lost that sense of duty quickly. Jordan is THE writer whose books just go nowhere.
hrh
It looks like most of the people here who like the books first read them when they were comparatively young. That appears to be a must for Tolkien. As QtM delicately hints, the book (considering all three volumes as one continuous narrative) is oddly written in any number of ways. The pacing is bizarre, the characterization is next to non-existent, every event is capped by a deus ex machina, the first hundred pages are boring beyond belief, and the symbolism, while fascinating to speculate about afterwards, drives the action rather than underlies it. I think most adults, whatever their tastes in literature, can tell what an odd book this is. (Obviously, I read it in its entirely as an adult, having given up 100 pages into it twice when younger.)
But even all this is not necessarily the same thing as saying that it is a terrible book. It has its own individualized charms, a world that is sometimes marvelously thought-out (in the places that were important to Tolkien if not necessarily the reader), a sense of good versus evil that is powerful (even if the villains keep collapsing whenever someone stands up to them directly), a few interesting inventions, and it is fairly page-turning if you can get far enough into it to care.
You do get the sense from some people on these boards that loving Tolkien is a requirement for admission to the right side of life. That attitude is one reason they say the Golden Age of Fantasy [Science Fiction] is 13. Whatever the actual age, many of your childhood enthusiasms mark you for the rest of your life, and I am certainly no exception. But I very much doubt you can fall in love with Tolkien if you read him on the wrong side of 50.
Harpo! Loved your act in Moscow!
Yeah, someone gave me “The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned” and I started reading it. Lost it under my bed for four months and never noticed it was gone.
Hehe, Qadgop. . . .I guess it does either grab you or not grab you, and it really must be a matter of taste, because I can’t imagine, now, having read them, not being in love with Middle-earth. But I lived the first 20 years of my life without them and had only vaguely heard of them (I thought “the ring” referred to rings around a planet or something, like Saturn, since the place was called Middle-earth) up until I read them. Then a fellow fan of another obsession of mine started talking about them, and because she, whom I respected a lot, loved them, I tried them. Now my nickname is a ‘magic’ Elvish ring!
I’ll shut up now, since this is a thread for non-LOTR lovers–but I will say that what I love about it isn’t so much the wiz-bang wizards and fantasy parts, as the awesome quotes about the nature of life that are sprinkled through it. High and mighty, sometimes, yes, but great ideas to chew over in your mind.
“A Hir Annun, gilthoniel, le linnon im Tinuviel…”
Oh, and one more thing: you gotta admit Elvish is prettier than Klingon…
ducks & runs like heck
I read “The Hobbit” in my teen years, and liked it enough. But I never thought it was significantly better than the other children’s fiction I read, such as “The 21 Balloons,” “Bridge to Terebithia,” etc. I have never had the slightest inclination to the read the LotR trilogy.
I’ve also seen both movies. I thought the first one was “decent,” as in, I didn’t feel like I wasted my money. But I did NOT feel this way about the second one. In my opinion, both movies are just a bunch of running around, then a big battle. The only difference in the second movie was that the battle happened in a fortress.
Frankly, I’d rather watch TRON than either of those movies.
[in joke]Yeah, my mine act killed once it was translated properly.[/in joke]
I agree that they did get some good actors in the films. I really like Viggo Mortensen and Ian McKellen, and I was more inclined to to give the movie a chance because of that. But then I think I couldn’t get past what’s-his-face who plays Frodo and an overweight Sean Astin (Put Rudy in the Game!). Also, the prosthetics they had on their feet really creeped me out. I don’t know why, they were just gross.
The only thing worse than a bad movie is a long bad movie. That’s 3 hours I’ll never get back again. Won’t make that mistake again.
Very, very bad acting by everyone. Incredibly stilted. To see so many actors, some of whom are known to be competent, act so badly means the director was at fault. The “tricks” they used to make hobbits look smaller were pathetic. 3rd rate movie making for the most part.
The only nice part was some of the fantasy background shots. Castles with rivers of lava and all that.
Why didn’t some of the reviews warn us of this turkey?
:eek:
does this exist?
To each their own, of course, and I have no desire to convert anyone. But I must poke a hole in your “trendy” argument. Tolkien fanaticism pre-dates the internet age–it even pre-dates computers. The first wave of Tolkien-mania was in the 60’s, when a computer geek would have been the most despised form of humanity.
I know computers are older than the 60’s. I’m trying to make a point, here.
Read The Hobbit when I was 8 or 9, read The Lord of the Rings when I was… 11? 12? Loved 'em then, read 'em at least twenty times more since then.
However, I’ll be the first to admit that Tolkien’s writing style is odd. He’ll spend six paragraphs describing a pebble, and then use a single sentence to describe a 6-day journey in the wilderness. For some reason, this jarring shift didn’t bug me terribly, but I can recognize how it can bug others.
And, yes, it has become trendy to be a “Tolkien lover”. I partially blame the Harry Potter series for that. I’m just proud to say that I was reading the Tolkien books LONG before any of my peers even knew they existed.
Plus, I loved the movies… but then, I love long movies, and I think any movie that’s less than 2 hours is a total ripoff (3 hour movies should be the ideal, in my opinion).