Arwen?

The BBQ Pit
21

The commercial clearly shows that Liv Tyler isn’t just filling in for Glorfindel in that one scene.

She’s introduced before Frodo with words like “Arwen, elf Princess. She will do anything to defend the ringbearer.”

They show her riding with Frodo during the chase to the river, and while Frodo sits unconscious on the side of the river, Liv Tyler, astride a horse in the middle of the river draws her sword defiantly and shouts at the approaching Nazgul “If you want him… Come claim him!”

When I was a the book store, I was looking at one of those Lord of the Rings illustrated movie books, and basically every other picture was Arwen in a variety of scenes and settings.

There’s one picture where she’s sitting in travelling clothes in a tavern, and it doesn’t look like Rivendell.

My guess is that the Hobbits pick her up in Bree, either with Strider or else she substitutes for Strider as their guide from Bree to Rivendell.

Liv Tyler is a bad actress. She can play a love interest or other layabout, but I cringe when I consider how much screen time they’re going to give this hack, and I cringe to consider her playing an action role.

It’s like Danny Devito as the Terminator, accept that Danny can act.

22

I love LotR (the books), and I’m not one who tends to like movie adaptations of any fantasy/sci-fi novel (I hated Dune, for one…not as much as the damn prequel novels, but…), but I think that judgment should be reserved until the movie is actually released.

The trailer is iffy, as far as who does what when. I’ve seen it and it jumps back in forth in the movie all the way through. From the Shire to Moria back to Rivendell to Lothlorien back to Moria…just because it looks like Arwen is taking on an expanded Glorfindel role at the ford doesn’t mean she is. Just because they added a little dialogue doesn’t mean they’ve changed her whole character. Doesn’t Glorfindel basically convey the same concept, just not in so many words? “If you want him, come claim him!”

Admittedly, she’s not going to be the shy and retiring elf maiden recluse that she was in the books. But she’s not XenArwen, as folks on USENET had taken to calling the characterization based on rumors. She’s not going to be a part of the Fellowship. She’s not going to take Eowyn’s place before the gates of Minas Tirith. Apparently, the most screentime she gets in the movie is at the ford, if you don’t count the “moony-eyed moment” with Aragorn in Rivendell.

Just give it a chance…lest you begin to resemble Comic Book Store Guy. “Worst movie ever!”

jayjay

23

Hey, just because I don’t think Tolkien is a genius doesn’t mean he’s not my “cup of tea”. I like Tolkien. I also like Stephen King. And I like J.K. Rowling. And Danielle Steele, and Robert Ludlum, and Jackie Susann, and all of the gazillion other authors of hefty beach-read potboilers, some of which go on (and on and on) into multiple volumes. I like Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber series, but I don’t think he’s a “genius”.

Now, John Updike, he’s a genius. As is John Irving. And P.G. Wodehouse. And John McPhee is a genius and a God, although he writes non-fiction.

I don’t think that “genius” can be measured by the mere ability to crank out pages. August, if you wanted to, and if you were familiar enough with the archetypes involved, trust me, you too could sit right down and crank out a thousand pages. Stephen King has been cranking it out for 25 years–you think he’s a “genius”?

Neither was Tolkien.

And I agree with the OP. One hundred and ten percent.

  1. Liv Tyler is a bad actress.
  2. And the worst part of it is, you people who still don’t “get” why we’re quibbling about this Liv Tyler thing, is that this project is being billed as “the definitive film version”, okay? These folks are saying, in essence, “After we’re done, everyone will know what Middle Earth and Arwen ARE.” And while we’re resigned to the fact that Middle Earth is going to look like a lot of CG and will never come close to what it looks like inside our heads, it’s the fact that Arwen Evenstar, forever after, is going to “be” a two-bit non-acting flavor-of-the-month popsy who’s only in the movie because she’s currently “Hot”, and so’s her old man, that makes us want to jump the security checkpoint at New Line Cinema and run inside screaming, “Stop the madness!”

[sub]notice how i haven’t said anything about the burger king merchandising, aren’t you proud of me?[/sub]

24

Geez, first Bombadil gets cut, and now this? sigh

I understand that concessions have to be made in the movie version of FotR. Hell, if they made it the way I’d like them to it would be about twelve hours long, so I’m expecting it to be different than the book. But at a certain point, I have to wonder whether the integrity of the story is going to be damaged in the interest of making the movie more marketable. FotR would still make a jillion dollars even if Liv Tyler wasn’t in it. What’s the point?

25

Looking at Tolkien’s life as a whole he was one seriously smart bunny. Yes he drew on archetypes but he changed/created a genre when he did so. He was a renowned linguist.

DDG and Guanolad - just what is your definition of genius? Mastery of a domain? High intelligence?

Tolkien certainly mastered the domain of linguistics and he used that to create a world. I don’t think anyone before or since has created a fictional world with a structure and language as consistent and interesting as Middle Earth.

26

Maybe I’m not as incensed by this because I don’t know Liv Tyler’s acting talent or lack thereof. All I know about her is that she’s the daughter of that ugly guy from Aerosmith and that she played Lara Croft in a movie I never saw.

Still, as small as her part really is, what’s the difference? Arwen never loomed large for me when I first read the LotR. She still doesn’t. She has incredible backstory and ancestry, yes, but for the average movie-goer (a category which the studio must strive to get into the theater), Earendil and Melian and Thindol Greycloak are not only characters of a fictional past, they’re non-existent.

This is the dilemma that everyone who tries to adapt or expand any franchise with a devoted group of fanatically loyal fans has to face. You categorically cannot recoup your expenses and make a profit solely off of that group of fanatically loyal fans. Therefore, that group of fanatically loyal fans cannot, in any good business or even artistic sense, be catered to exclusively.

Honestly, look at the rest of the casting. Ian McKellen as Gandalf. Christopher Lee as Saruman. Elijah Wood as Frodo. John Rhys-Davies as Gimli. Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn. Hugo Weaving as Elrond. How horrible is it to have Liv Tyler play a middling-important character?

There are much worse things that could have happened to this film.

jayjay

27

I think there is grave danger if a movie tries to be TOO loyal to the book. They are, after all, different media entirely.

Our characters are about to enter a forest. A book can devote several pages to description of the forest. In the movie, you see the entire forest in seconds, and it can’t take up too much screen time. This is a strength of the visual medium over the verbal medium.

A book can describe a character’s inner thoughts. A movie must show those thoughts visually, or use some lame device (like the actor’s voice as “thoughts”). This is a strength of the verbal medium over the visual medium.

A book may take six or seven hours (or longer) to read. A movie that runs more than about two hours will have most of the audience looking at their watches, shuffling in their seats, and going out to the bathroom. The only way to film an entire book is to do it as a miniseries, and that loses the big bucks and the big screen.

Thus, the filmmakers of LORD OF THE RINGS have every right to, and MUST, make changes. So far, all the stuff I’ve seen LOOKS great: characters, settings, visual effects (I love the shot where the writing on the ring is reflected on Frodo’s face!.. the book doesn’t do that, of course, but that’s using the filmic techniques to convey emotion/situation that the book conveys more directly.)

If they need to drop secondary characters (like Glorfindel) and give the role to another secondary character (like Arwen), well, that’s fine by me. If they wind up stressing Eowyn and downplaying Eomer, that’s fine too. Tolkien was writing great mythic adventures in an era before our current approach to gender equality. If he were writing today, how would he have done it different? That doesn’t bother me.

My only question is whether the movie is good-storytelling, based on the book.

It seems to me silly to prejudge based on the trailers. Trailers are designed to attract attention, and a femal elf warrior attracts the attention of the Xena-set. Fair enough. It seems also silly, IMHO, to prejudge the choice of actor/actress: “OHMIGOD, they’re using a has-been vaudeville actor to play the Scarecrow! That movie will be a disaster!”

If you want an example of a movie that was very faithful to the book and was therefore borrrrrrrrring as a movie, I point you to HARRY POTTER. I can’t imagine going back to see it again. The movie was absolutely faithful to the plot of the book, but lost the heart, the spirit… at least, IMHO.

No, let them take liberties to make a good movie.

28

uhhh, jayjay that was Angie Jolie you didn’t see in “Tomb Raider.”

pesch – taking a wait and see stance about the whole mess

29

:o

Well, I said I never saw it. :slight_smile: Most of the more recent “hot” female actors kind of blur into each other for me, anyway. Not being a big movie-goer doesn’t help, I’m sure. The last film I paid to see in a movie theater was Jurassic Park, I think. Even Harry Potter didn’t get me to reach for my wallet. But I do believe I’m going to see FotR before February.

jayjay

30

If you’re going to produce a ‘definitive representation’ of the book, then you follow the book. Period. You can have some ‘poetic license’ so to speak, but it better pretty much follow the book.

Otherwise, get a ‘screen writer’ and produce something original.

Durn perverts. :wink:

31

Uhhhmmmm… Eowyn?

So she gives Frodo a lift to the riverbank. So we’ll know who the heck she is in movie #3 when Aragorn gets married to her.

We’re talking, what?, 10 minutes of extra Arwen screen time inside 7 or 8 hours of 3 LOTR movies? Big deal. It’s not like Glorfindal was an essential character or anything.

And it’s not like they’re gonna get the plot to Helm’s Deep and give up utterly like that bastard Bakshi did. Now there was a terrible LOTR adaptation. Utterly horrible.

32

Oh, but the glowing, animated elves . . .
(shudder)

33

My definition of “genius” is the same as the U.S. Supreme Court’s definition of “obscenity”–I know it when I see it. :smiley:

John Updike, John Irving, P.G. Wodehouse, and John McPhee (even though he writes non-fiction) have the ability–no, the power–to write something that makes me sit up and go “wow”, something that is just expressed so aptly, or that gives me some new insight on Life, that I just get chills. And also, those I term “geniuses” have the capacity to be read over and over again, with no boredom or staleness. Sorry, but I can’t say that for Tolkien. Tolkien is a compulsive page-turner, granted, but so are the Harry Potter books. I didn’t read anything in either Tolkien or Rowling that made me go “wow”, or that gave me any new insights in Life, or that gave me chills.

Once I’ve read books like Tolkien and Rowling, I’ve “read” it, you know? You come across it while browsing in the library–“Oh, that. I read that.” Move on.

But Updike and Wodehouse and McPhee, and others (John Cheever, short stories), those are the ones I buy, and keep around, and go back to every so often, and read again, and never get bored halfway and think, “Oh, this. I already read this…”

C.S. Forester sets up a complex and fascinating world in his Horatio Hornblower books that IMO is equal to Middle Earth, and I own copies of all of them, and I go back to the and re-read them every so often, but I don’t think he’s a “genius”, because his writing never makes me sit up and go “wow”. His characters never behave in a way that shows me a hitherto unsuspected part of the terrain of the human heart (if you’ll forgive a slight purple tint to my prose there). Neither do Tolkien’s.

Updike’s, Irving’s, Wodehouse’s, and Cheever’s characters do.

So it’s a two-part definition: writing style, and characters. Tolkien has neither, sorry. His writing style is adequate for his storytelling purposes, like Stephen King’s or Rowling’s, and his characters, as I’ve mentioned, are all mythic stereotypes.

34

DDG

what other domains did your ‘genius’ writers achieve in? Tolkien was an extremely smart man who achieved as a writer and as a linguist. I think he’s actually got more credibility as a ‘genius’ than say, PG Wodehouse. I like Wodehouse but I don’t classify him as a genius because I don’t think he transformed or created a genre. Tolkien did. He may use mythic archetypes but he did it in a way which nobody had done before he had. After Tolkien, fantasy literature had changed.

I think it’s a tad unfair to dismiss him as a writer because he is not a writer that you personally would reread. How did Cheever or Updike transform their domains as writers?

You’ll note I won’t argue about whether or not King is a genius. I don’t think he is. He’s a prolific horror writer but IMO he has not substantially transformed the genre into something else.

35

a) I just reread LotR last month to get ready for the movie (last time I read it in was in the beginning of high school). It is definitely compulsive, engrossing, and well written. That’s all I ask for a series of books. I don’t know if he could be called genius, because the majority of his stuff deals with this one world and he never strayed far from the genre. But he sure had some creativity.

b) Chris Tolkein has refused to give the rights to anyone until this movie (besides the animation stuff). From browsing the web site, it will at least be visually stunning. The set and costume design is better than I have ever seen.

c) Liv Tyler is super hot. I don’t care what you say, she is super hot. The running time I heard reported for FotR was just shy of three hours. I am a happily married man but if I have to stare at Elijah Wood and Sean Astin for three hours, goddamn it I want at least 20 minutes of Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchett. Even if Liv Tyler stinks it up.

d) Perhaps the third most powerful character in the LotR series was Galadriel. Eowyn was just as strong as any of the warriors in the book. Sure women were underrepresented, but at no point did Tolkein portray the ones in the book as starry-eyed damsels in distress. He writes about ruling queens of Men and even the hobbit and dwarf women who show up are ones with hands in the struggle. The LotR series is primarily about warfare, and so it should be expected that the majority of players are warrior men.

36

I was going to give my standard speil about how a movie is not just a filmed book and should be judged entirely separate from the source material on which it is based, but I can’t improve on C Dexter’s well-reasoned post.

Lord of the Rings as a movie should be judged relative to other movies of the same type. How faithful it is to the book is entirely irrelevant to its quality as a movie. Faithful isn’t neccesarily good, and unfaithful isn’t neccesarily bad.

Shoeless Joe is one of my favorite books. I reread it every year or so. The movie based on it made wholesale changes to the plot, changed characters, and left out a major character to leave room for expanding the primary female character. An important revelation was moved to from the beginning to the end for dramatic impact. None of it mattered. Field of Dreams, a far from faithful adaptation, is a very good movie.

The definitive screen version of Frankenstein (1931) takes great liberties with Shelley’s work.

Jaws improves over the novel on which it’s based with every single change, though admittedly, the novel is hardly great to begin with.

The best version of “A Christmas Carol” (the one with Alistair Sim) isn’t the most faithful adaptation (which starred George C. Scott.

Great books and movies alike come from great artistry. A director who merely reproduces the page on the screen is a technician, not an artist.

On genius: The word gets misapplied all the time. Isaac Asimov was a genius, but not a literary genius. Tokein may have been a linguistic genius, but what is being discussed here is his literary merit. Compare him to his contemporaries in the writing biz who produced works of literary genius (Steinbeck, Frost, Faulkner) and he comes up short.

37

Quoted from six,

“Compare him to his contemporaries in the writing biz who produced works of literary genius (Steinbeck, Frost, Faulkner) and he comes up short.”

I disagree. Tolkein does his best to enchant readers after his death. Indeed he struggled to collect his due while he was alive.

How dare you list Peter Benchly among authors whose great works have been made into film.

I hope that the film makers can do justice to the ring trilogy

God knows Ive read it more than Of Mice and Men.

And I saw that movie.

38

Honestly, it was sooooo long ago that I read these books that if Darth Maul showed up and started hacking away at Frodo with a double ended light saber, I’d probably just trust that they remembered better than I did and go with it.

Kinda sad, actually.

39

He’s seriously not that good of a writer!

The pacing in LotR is godawful! The characters are inconsistent and shallow, caricatures really. The language goes all over the show. The scene descriptions are not especially evocative, no more than any other writer’s abilities.

The plot is only epic because it involves a whole bunch of big things and a wide variety of races across a vast expanse of land. It isn’t really that special to use such a wide scope.

Why the heck do the Orcs all talk like they are from Cambridge? Why does Aragorn’s mode of speech change depending on which region he’s standing in?

I read a lot of fantasy. Yes, obviously modern fantasy owes a lot to Tolkien for establishing a genre - though lets be honest, really he just expanded fairy tales into epic adventures, not particularly ground-breaking when you think about it. But the thing about modern fantasy is, it’s often a thousand percent better written than Tolkien!

I accept people love his writing style, I accept they like his characters and the world he established, I also acknowledge the research and detail he put into the backstory.

But is he a genius? No he is not. He’s just a writer of great popularity.

And re: the OP - the extent of Arwen’s expanded role has been explained many times by Peter Jackson - he’s just combined a few roles into one, and she is NOT a part of the Fellowship, and is not doing anything out of character. Get a grip people, one tiny role being filled by an actress you don’t like, and you get so upset!

40

I think this a a huge part of it. TLOTR doesn’t have huge appeal to a lot of women (sure fannish female geeks, but even a lot of them think it ignores women). You need something to keep this from being Lawrence of Arabia in Middle Earth. Take a minor character, do some previews on her, and you have a lot more interest from women in going to see it.

(I’ve read LOTR about four times. The first time I thought it was genius. I think I thought the same thing through the next two readings. I went back to it about five years ago and was really, really disappointed. I had to work to get myself through all the books. Part of my problem was the lack of women. Also Tolkein writes setting - his main interest is to communicate his world, he isn’t really that concerned with his characterizations, and I’m currently into authors who’s main concern is character. Reminded me of Victor Hugo - you can skip 60 pages of stuff about the sewers.)