New video blog:
Brian
Details on the extended edition.
3 hours and 4 minutes.
Appendices included, I hope as good as the Lord of the Rings ones?
Posted in a different thread, but I’ll put here for completeness
New DoS trailer:
Brian
I liked this trailer quite a bit.
I can’t believe Richard Armitage is not the number one in-demand actor in Hollywood after the first movie. He looks awesome in this one, too.
Man, I want to be excited for this movie, but I’m just…not.
Maybe I’ll go see it in the cheap theatre or something.
You’re absolutely right about Peter Jackson’s terrible taste in films. The best parts of LotR were the parts he tampered with least.
Indeed.
This new trailer makes me feel even less interested in following the series any further, which makes me very sad. All the love-interest crap between Legolas and what-her-ears is totally yawn-worthy predictable pablum. And the scene of someone (Bilbo? I didn’t bother to replay it to see who it was) cliche-jumping in front of a huge fireball from Smaug just made me laugh. I don’t think it was intended to be comic relief, though. It’s certainly not suspenseful–the suspense afforded by such a cliche has long since morphed into self-conscious parody.
Sorry, I hope this isn’t thread-shitting. I really want to like the movie. The casting is truly brilliant. Martin Freeman, born to play Bilbo. Seriously.
But, dear og, PJ, what awful directing taste you have. Just awful.
As underwhelmed as I was by the first movie (please please please no more rabbit-drawn sleighs, I beg you!), I’ll see this one, too. I’m a completist when it comes to Tolkien.
I liked the rabbits. They were an appropriately fairy-tale touch, and in keeping with the literarily-inspired Radagast.
I was not so keen on the video-game chase sequences.
I am just hoping that once all the episodes are out on blu-ray, some talented fan creates an edit that distills the three movies down to one two-hour adventure film. Like if someone actually made a film of “The Hobbit”.
I hope.
Mr. Lissar sai, of the first movie and the Goblin kingdom, “A few orcs chasing the dwarves- danger. A million orcs chasing the dwarves- no danger at all.” It was just video game setup.
I will see it, because I think that Smaug and Bilbo will be lots of fun together. And because I’m also a completist. And a Tolkien and Sherlock fan.
The extended DVD comes out on November 5, with 13 extra minutes of movie and a full appendices set of discs chronicling the making of the movie.
I fear that I am, too. I’ll have to go see it, but I’m not expecting to go home happy with what I watched.
Fairy-tale, yes; appropriate, no. Winged elves six inches high would also be a fairy-tale touch, but completely out of keeping with Middle-Earth, where the Elves are completely different. As for Radagast, a single mention of the name and a confirmation that Beorn used to see him now and again and considered him not a bad fellow as wizards go is no inspiration at all; it’s just another excuse for Jackson to fill the movie up with something he made up.
(However, since Radagast appears in Gandalf’s back-story in “The Council of Elrond”, perhaps we should look for another cut of The Fellowship of the Ring in which the rabbit-sleigh makes another appearance. :smack: )
Except in the LotR he was riding a horse.
In the book? Yes, but in the book there were no Elves at Helm’s Deep, Denethor was a serious bad-ass and not a drooling incompetent who wouldn’t let the signal beacons be lit, nobody “tossed” Gimli, Aragorn didn’t fall off any cliffs, Elrond didn’t object to getting Narsil reforged into Anduril, Arwen didn’t come riding to the rescue of the hobbits, Gollum didn’t drive a wedge between Sam and Frodo by framing Sam for eating more than his share of the lembasbread, the Army of the Dead didn’t bugger oliphaunts to death, and Faramir was too wise to even let himself see the Ring let alone drag Frodo miles out of his way to Osgiliath. So Radagast turning up on a rabbit-sleigh rather than a horse would be a pretty minor adjustment by comparison.
The literary inspiration I refer to was T.H. White and traditional British folk fairy tales, not the slender reed of the Tolkien text on the character. The point is, the Professor didn’t give a film adaptor much to work with there, so drawing from other literary sources, not too far removed from Tolkien’s own context, was a sensible and artful choice. Unlike most of the other things you mention, which change things that were addressed directly and well in the books.
I think Radagast was included for cutting Tim Benzedrine from Fellowship.
Indeed. Jackson decided to include Radagast on whatever whim seemed good to him, and this (tragically for poor Jackson) meant he had to make just about all of it up - including that rabbit-sleigh nonsense which, whatever its inspiration from other fairy tales, certainly didn’t draw on anything else in Tolkien’s world. And, rather than deciding that a rabbit-sleigh might not be out of place in the Little Girl’s Book of Flower Fairies so it would go well in this film, he might have looked elsewhere in Tolkien’s legendarium for ideas.
There are two sorts of people: those who say to themselves “I’ve got nothing on this character except a name, so better leave him out”, and those who say “I’ve got nothing on this character except a name, so I’m free and clear to play this how I like”.
Those were my objections to the films, particularly Dwarf Tossing.
Legolas surfing on the shield didn’t help, either…