There are actually some pretty astute observations in that. (As an editor, I particularly liked the comment about the opening of _The Hobbit_, in which the poster points out that Tolkien's description of what the hobbit-hole was *not* completely messed with the imagery of what it *was.*) Tolkien's strength was in world-building, never in word-smithing, and trying to boil down his vast history of a world cataclysm into film-sized bites can't help but leaving a lot up to the viewer to fill in. But yes, some of what to include and not to include could have been better chosen, in terms of exposition.
Still, if you don't worry too much about keeping it all straight, they are gorgeous films.
Meanwhile, Frodo and Andy run into two asshole hobbits who'd tried to fuck with Gandalf's fireworks earlier. One of them is Eric Idle and the other is called Mary though he appears to be a dude nevertheless. They get chased by the Ghost of Christmas Future.
And this, my friend, is where I almost snorted cream cheese out my nose.
Sounds more like a dude who needs everything in a movie hand-fed to him and is incapable of making inferences on his own. I say this because despite being a hardcore geek, I too have never read a Tolkien novel. I tried, but only got partway through the first LOTR one and gave up. Besides Gandalf, who I knew was a wizard of some kind because a friend used the character's name as his online handle for awhile, I had literally never heard any of the character names or places before. They were all completely new to me, and I had no trouble following along. And that means that it's not about exposure to LOTR!
It may, however, be about familiarity with fantasy tropes in general, or about each person's individual ability to make inferences during a movie (which, in turn, depends largely on the viewer's ability to recall previous information that got thrown at them, and I know better than most the practical realities of processing/retaining information through different modes than my peers), or about something else.
To refute specific stuff that made me eyeroll and go UGH:
> Take the way that the characters tend to announce the names of monsters before they're revealed. There'll be a deep growl, and everyone does the Spielberg stare, and one of them'll say, "Balrog!", and everyone in the audience is supposed to go, "Ooh, after thirty years I finally get to see a CGI balrog!", and then there it is. But if you've never heard of a balrog before, then that nonsense word doesn't exactly add a whole lot to the suspense.
No, the ominous piece of exposition explaining that the Dwarves "delved too deep" and found something bad in the depths of the earth, followed by the goblin's high-pitched screams and sudden pounding music from the soundtrack are what create the suspense, you idiot. When the characters yelled, "BALROG!" and began running for their lives, and the lighting and camera work and noise effects indicated something very big and stompy and bright glowy red was coming, I assumed that whatever the Balrog was, it was the bad thing Gandalf had given exposition about, and that I would find out what it was in a moment when it appeared. Or maybe it never would, because they'd outrun it, and I'd never get to see it, and then it would be filed away as "so bad it was best to not see it, is a moral lesson about depth of human greed or whatever and consequences you can't undo". Because stories have those.
> I got that the Shire was supposed to be the good place and that Mordor was supposed to be the bad place, but then the movie starts throwing out this bewildering mess of names — there's a Rohan, there's a Gondor, there's an Isengard, there's a Ministirith, there's a Helm's Deep, etc., etc. — and I had no idea what the hell was going on or how these places related to one another.
I also have no clue where the various cities are in relation to each other. Well. Except that we saw clearly from the film that the pretty wooded place where Galadriel's contingent of elves live (and where we meet the Ent who mistakes Merry and Pippin for little orcs) borders on the plains in an area called the "Riddermark" or something, which is a ways away from Rohan but not so far that you can't ride there in what looked like a day. That's about it.
But I didn't care, because you don't need to know where these things are in relation to each other for the story. You really, really don't. "We did this stuff and then we went to this other city where we did more stuff" is a perfectly adequate set of info, so long as it's made clear that Morder, the bad place everyone doesn't want to go to but will have to go to, is a ways away from all of it. And they did that.
So I guess I came away from that blog post feeling like I'd read a critique not from a dude who didn't like Lord of the Rings, but from a dude who just does not like stories. Possibly especially does not like movies. Either that or he has serious trouble processing information through visual or auditory means, which is entirely possible.
Yeah, I laughed at a few points (especially at "They get chased by the ghost of Christmas Future") but I also rolled my eyes pretty much exactly as described above.
It reads like something written by someone who is very clever and funny but also not paying attention. I mean, seriously, who mixes up Sauron's tower and Saruman's tower? One's in a forest. The other is in a flaming volcanic wasteland.
Making fun of a movie based on its faults is funny. Making fun of a movie based on your faults is less so.
[HUMOURLESS NERD MODE: OFF]
However mostly I laughed and now I want to dig out my LotR extended edition and watch the whole thing.
Concurred. :) It's interesting to see what people might not know about, and what he filled the blanks in with was funny. The degree of smugness just put me off a bit, you know?
Let me sum up what you said: this dickwad would probably review any Shakespeare play with, "Why can't these assholes SPEAK ENGLISH?!? Why is everyone rhyming? Let me guess: everyone dies at the end except for the steadfast sidekick."
Read some of his other opinions on book and film plots and it seems to bear out what you say. He harshes on several Sci-fi classics and Hitchcocks "North By North-west"
Yeah, I got that impression as well. I figured we weren't going to agree when he started complaining about how the prose in The Left Hand of Darkness was uninteresting; wondered what the hell he'd actually read when he got into how The Girl That Owned A City was an example of something that only existed so a character could spew up a lot of unpopular opinions; looked at the list of works he'd read and then at his staatement that "Of course, most SF doesn't even aim to be literature"; and finally decided that rather than unpacking all the snobbery in
The redemption of the ludicrous is wonderful. It involves revisiting a work that is either for children or just plain not very good and turning it into a respectable work for adults.
I was going to close his "Patterns" page, watch a movie, and occasionally chat with people.
I figured we weren't going to agree when he started complaining about how the prose in The Left Hand of Darkness was uninteresting
I'm happy to hear counterexamples — it's been ten years since I read that one, so it's entirely possible I'd have a different opinion today.
wondered what the hell he'd actually read when he got into how The Girl That Owned A City was an example of something that only existed so a character could spew up a lot of unpopular opinions
Did you read the article, or just the reference to it on the patterns page? If you found anything of merit in that Rand-Paul-for-Kidz™ manifesto, I do wonder what it could be...
looked at the list of works he'd read and then at his staatement that "Of course, most SF doesn't even aim to be literature"
No, the ominous piece of exposition explaining that the Dwarves "delved too deep" and found something bad in the depths of the earth, followed by the goblin's high-pitched screams and sudden pounding music from the soundtrack are what create the suspense, you idiot.
And yet for those who do know what a "balrog" is, the announcement that it's coming does add to the suspense, and the scene therefore has that much more suspense (and more kinds of suspense) for them than for me. Which is the point that I was trying to make in my typically idiotic way.
But I didn't care, because you don't need to know where these things are in relation to each other for the story. You really, really don't.
I don't think I ever said that I needed to know how to map these places, just how they related to one another. E.g., is Rohan a city in the province of Gondor, or is Gondor a city in the province of Rohan, or are they rival cities, or what? If it doesn't matter, then why distract me from what does matter by giving me useless information? Of course, one of the differences here is that there are people who eat this kind of thing up — they like having a lot of names flying around because it makes it seem like a deeper universe. But I'm not one of those people.
The ironic thing, given that I am apparently "a dude who just does not like stories," is that I'm a writer myself, and more recently a screenwriter, and I've actually been explicitly told to write things full of arbitrary names precisely in order to suggest depth where there really isn't any — the narrative equivalent of a matte painting. One producer pointed me toward the speech in Blade Runner about "C-beams glitter[ing] in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate": "No one knows what C-beams are or what the Tannhauser Gate is," he explained, "but it makes the audience think there's so much more there!" And I can easily churn out this kind of thing (and have). But perhaps because I know firsthand just how tossed-off a lot of this ersatz depth is, I don't think it's actually, y'know, good.
(Whereas my understanding is that Tolkien himself actually did work out every street corner of every city, full grammars for all his invented languages, complete 50-generation family trees for each of his characters, etc. — i.e., the depth was not fake. But because we only see hints here and there, it might as well have been.)
Tolkien was a little.... special that way. But the fact that there was so much backstory doesn't actually improve the film, because *we don't see the backstory*. Keeping it internally consistent across a long-running story is one thing - and I think 9 hours of feature film counts as long-running - but the thing is, we never SEE a chance for internal consistency and predictability-based-on-past-exposures to crop up, because they're throwing in little references to everything and never examining the same thing more than once.
So, I do pretty much agree with you on there, in principle.
Thing is, there's also ANOTHER reason to throw out all those references and names and places and things: Because it's a convention of the genre and one of the style-defining elements of Tolkien's writing. I'm not saying it's good or bad[1], but it IS one of the things that tells you immediately that you are reading Epic Tolkien Fantasty(tm).
Which means that, at least in part, there's a good reason to include it in the movie version - to get the FEEL of the translated work across. Which doesn't exactly help you, since you don't know the translated work and aren't a fan[2] of the kind of things that use the same thematic shortcuts.
[1]: I personally can't stand it and think The Lord Of The Rings was a barely-passable series of books that escaped complete editor-fail-induced unreadability only on the strength of the story, regardless of Tolkien's incompetence at relaying the story, but I am inexplicably in the minority on that one.
[2]: Since you'd never read Tolkien, I feel confident in guessing you're not a fan of the genre.
Tolkien invented an entire universe and presented its history in the form of a vast epic, like the Norse and Old English epics he loved to study. The "unreadability" has more to do with the grim, epic Anglo-Saxon cadence he was invoking than any actual failure on his part, or his editor's.
Accusing Tolkien of being an incompetent novelist is a bit like wailing that da Vinci was rubbish at making stamps, and the Mona Lisa was his worst yet. You'll NEVER fit that damn thing on a letter.
The "unreadability" has more to do with the grim, epic Anglo-Saxon cadence he was invoking than any actual failure on his part, or his editor's.
Also his poor word choice, lousy pacing, extended distracting digressions to cover things unimportant to the story, habit of leaving plot threads hanging for hundreds of pages while he moves on to something else, and the fact that he wrote an entire book set *after* his story ended, in which no new story was begun.
If your argument is that he wasn't TRYING to write a coherent novel, okay, sure - but he was writing a novel, and deliberately doing it badly in a way that a semicompetent editor could have fixed is not really all that different from accidentally doing it badly in a way a semicompetent editor could have fixed.
It's like... doing a "comic book issue" where you have a splash page of an aardvark pope and then 30 pages of white-on-black bricktext explaining why women are evil and exist only to contaminate the author's precious bodily fluids. It might be ART, it might even be an entertaining read - but it ain't a comic book in anything approaching the standard sense.
The fact that you, subjectively, do not like it does not mean that the author, objectively, is an idiot. This is the main point I wish you'd back off on.
Yeah, it's dense, yeah, it errs on the side of using certain types of words in order to maintain a consistent linguistic style. Yeah, sometimes Tolkien forgets he's telling a story and not writing a Middle Earth sourcebook - but it's not a novel, it's an epic, it's not a story so much as it is a slice of the history of a made-up world, rendered in a particular style.
I found LotR unreadable when I picked it up when I was 12, having previously read The Hobbit and loved it, so I can see how anybody picking it up expecting your standard fantasy novel is going to be put off. It wasn't until years later, after I graduated from university, that I finally read it through and saw everything he was trying to do and became enthralled by it.
You keep telling me this orange makes a terrible apple and the farmer was a fucking moron for growing it, and, well, what am I supposed to say to that? It's not what you want it to be. My condolences?
I didn't say he was an idiot, I said his writing was deeply flawed and could have been greatly improved with a few passes from a competent editor, and that even with a few simple cuts and a few rearrangements of scenes and no other textual changes it would flow better, throw the reader out of the story less, and generally not be so much "the book where you slog through the writing to get at the interesting worldbuilding and fantastic story".
You keep telling me this orange makes a terrible apple and the farmer was a fucking moron for growing it
No, I keep saying that this orange is a bad example of an orange, perhaps the orange tree should have been given water and not Brawndo The Thirst Eliminator, and maybe it should have been allowed to ripen fully and not picked while just a bud, but, hey, when you get past that, there are still some really tasty bits on this orange. And if the farmer had, y'know, done any of the things that produce GOOD oranges, this might be one of the best oranges ever.
And you tell me "Well, the farmer was TRYING to grow apples."
That's just it, though, I don't see the writing as flawed, I see it as part of the cool factor. For me the writing style is all the best parts of the stuff we studied in Old English - which was my favourite class in university - with the added advantage that it's in modern English. And I think that was the intent; a modern epic. Fixing the "flaws" would kill the book; what you see as bad writing I see as brilliant.
I don't know, maybe we're two guys standing over a banana yelling "APPLE!" "ORANGE!" "APPLE!". Any minute now someone is going to wade into this thread bellowing "RASPBERRY" and it'll just get ugly. We should probably just agree it's a tasty fruit and move on with our lives.
It's probably, as the two of you have basically said, just a genre thing: some people like those little suggestive hooks which their imaginations can build on, and some people don't.
I don't see those details as being any more fake than the whole rest of the performance; I mean, the sum total of the Balrog's presence in this world was a ping-pong ball suspended in front of a green sheet. It's just another part of the fun.
Why are the names of the places they're going to "useless information"? That absolutely boggles my mind. Would you rather they just ran around random locations and never told you where they were or where they'd just come from or where they were going to? I don't see how that would be less confusing. The names help you figure out what's going on. How else are you supposed to know that the city with the Galadriel elves is a different place from the city with Arwen and her dad's elves? It would be exceptionally confusing to the story ("What, did they go BACK? Why are these elves treating them like strangers if they were just here? I'M CONFUSED.") if they didn't bother to tell you that one is Elfy Chicago and the other is Elfy Caracas.
> But because we only see hints here and there, it might as well have been.
> But perhaps because I know firsthand just how tossed-off a lot of this ersatz depth is, I don't think it's actually, y'know, good.
No, sorry. I completely do not agree. I get that you feel those movies were all about existing fans of The Lord of The Rings, but you seem to want it to be all about you (and viewers like you) instead, and all I can do is roll my eyes. Yes, sure, those hooks were lost on you, same as they were on me. So what? If little extra throwaway details made no difference to you but made existing fans happy, what's the harm? I feel like the script writers did a wonderful job of finding a happy medium that both virgin viewers and old fans of the books could enjoy. I'm sorry that you appear to be someone who only wants it his way ever, and that your way is apparently a die-hard preferences for minimalism in details, but not everybody feels the same way as you do. And while you yourself pointed out that difference in taste, you seem to be missing the equally crucial other half of the idea, where you recognize that "not to my taste" isn't the same thing as "badly made".
Why are the names of the places they're going to "useless information"?
Note that the part that you quoted here was part of a conditional statement, and one that I consider counterfactual. I.e., I said if it doesn't matter — which you seemed to be arguing ("I didn't care," "you don't need to know") — then the information is useless. But for the very reasons that you point out, it's actually very useful to have this information — and for it to actually be clear, rather than treated like "little extra throwaway details." Here's an analogy. You mentioned "Elfy Caracas"; imagine that you knew nothing of real-world geography, and you were watching a movie scene that, a caption told you, was set in Caracas. In this scene, the president of Venezuela is meeting with the prime minister of Canada, and asks the prime minister how Alberta is this time of year; the prime minister replies that he just flew in from Hawaii and that it was a lot warmer than Calgary. Wouldn't it be nice to know that Caracas is in Venezuela, that it's the capital of that country, that Canada is a different country, that Alberta is a province within Canada, that Calgary is a city within Alberta, and that Hawaii is a state in yet a third country? Or would you really rather have these names flying around with no explanation, while scoffing at those who get a little lost as people who "need everything in a movie hand-fed to them and are incapable of making inferences on their own"?
The difference is that, in real life, I'd hope that people in the audience would be familiar enough with real-world geography that these names wouldn't be new to them. And it felt to me as though these movies expected a similar comfort level with the geography of Middle Earth.
you seem to want it to be all about you (and viewers like you) instead [...] you appear to be someone who only wants it his way ever
Whereas you appear to be someone who enjoys making shrill personal judgments about people you don't know.
The article is mainly about why these movies did not seem to me to be designed for newcomers. I don't think that's necessarily bad; if you knew more about me than what you gathered from one article, you'd know that on my interactive fiction page (http://adamcadre.ac/if.html), I make a note of which of my IF stories are good for newcomers to the medium and which ones aren't. I am not thereby saying that the ones that I didn't write for newcomers suck.
I did also think that the Rings movies were bad, for reasons I noted at the end: reactionary ideology, very thin characters, ham-handed style. You can argue back that those things aren't "bad" but rather "not to my taste," but at that point what would qualify as "bad"? A movie that's out of focus? Some people like that! Mike D'Angelo loved Afterschool and Primer! I don't work for a newspaper, and my job isn't to try to convey to readers how much they might like a film; I'm just saying what I thought, and I thought these movies were not so hot. Forgive me if I don't feel compelled to slap an "IMHO" in every sentence in what is quite obviously an opinion essay.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-17 04:54 pm (UTC)Still, if you don't worry too much about keeping it all straight, they are gorgeous films.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-17 05:20 pm (UTC)And this, my friend, is where I almost snorted cream cheese out my nose.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-17 05:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-17 05:25 pm (UTC)I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.
Date: 2011-03-17 07:06 pm (UTC)It may, however, be about familiarity with fantasy tropes in general, or about each person's individual ability to make inferences during a movie (which, in turn, depends largely on the viewer's ability to recall previous information that got thrown at them, and I know better than most the practical realities of processing/retaining information through different modes than my peers), or about something else.
To refute specific stuff that made me eyeroll and go UGH:
> Take the way that the characters tend to announce the names of monsters before they're revealed. There'll be a deep growl, and everyone does the Spielberg stare, and one of them'll say, "Balrog!", and everyone in the audience is supposed to go, "Ooh, after thirty years I finally get to see a CGI balrog!", and then there it is. But if you've never heard of a balrog before, then that nonsense word doesn't exactly add a whole lot to the suspense.
No, the ominous piece of exposition explaining that the Dwarves "delved too deep" and found something bad in the depths of the earth, followed by the goblin's high-pitched screams and sudden pounding music from the soundtrack are what create the suspense, you idiot. When the characters yelled, "BALROG!" and began running for their lives, and the lighting and camera work and noise effects indicated something very big and stompy and bright glowy red was coming, I assumed that whatever the Balrog was, it was the bad thing Gandalf had given exposition about, and that I would find out what it was in a moment when it appeared. Or maybe it never would, because they'd outrun it, and I'd never get to see it, and then it would be filed away as "so bad it was best to not see it, is a moral lesson about depth of human greed or whatever and consequences you can't undo". Because stories have those.
> I got that the Shire was supposed to be the good place and that Mordor was supposed to be the bad place, but then the movie starts throwing out this bewildering mess of names — there's a Rohan, there's a Gondor, there's an Isengard, there's a Ministirith, there's a Helm's Deep, etc., etc. — and I had no idea what the hell was going on or how these places related to one another.
I also have no clue where the various cities are in relation to each other. Well. Except that we saw clearly from the film that the pretty wooded place where Galadriel's contingent of elves live (and where we meet the Ent who mistakes Merry and Pippin for little orcs) borders on the plains in an area called the "Riddermark" or something, which is a ways away from Rohan but not so far that you can't ride there in what looked like a day. That's about it.
But I didn't care, because you don't need to know where these things are in relation to each other for the story. You really, really don't. "We did this stuff and then we went to this other city where we did more stuff" is a perfectly adequate set of info, so long as it's made clear that Morder, the bad place everyone doesn't want to go to but will have to go to, is a ways away from all of it. And they did that.
So I guess I came away from that blog post feeling like I'd read a critique not from a dude who didn't like Lord of the Rings, but from a dude who just does not like stories. Possibly especially does not like movies. Either that or he has serious trouble processing information through visual or auditory means, which is entirely possible.
Re: I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.
Date: 2011-03-17 07:18 pm (UTC)Re: I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.
Date: 2011-03-17 08:01 pm (UTC)It reads like something written by someone who is very clever and funny but also not paying attention. I mean, seriously, who mixes up Sauron's tower and Saruman's tower? One's in a forest. The other is in a flaming volcanic wasteland.
Making fun of a movie based on its faults is funny. Making fun of a movie based on your faults is less so.
[HUMOURLESS NERD MODE: OFF]
However mostly I laughed and now I want to dig out my LotR extended edition and watch the whole thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-18 01:34 am (UTC)Re: I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.
Date: 2011-03-18 10:21 pm (UTC)Re: I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.
Date: 2011-03-20 05:21 pm (UTC)Re: I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.
Date: 2011-03-17 09:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-18 01:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-18 01:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-18 01:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-18 01:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-18 07:45 pm (UTC)This dickwad has in fact said something fairly similar:
http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/12081.html
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-19 12:03 am (UTC)Re: I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.
Date: 2011-03-18 05:29 am (UTC)Re: I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.
Date: 2011-03-20 04:54 pm (UTC)I had a much nicer night.
Re: I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.
Date: 2011-03-21 01:36 am (UTC)I'm happy to hear counterexamples — it's been ten years since I read that one, so it's entirely possible I'd have a different opinion today.
wondered what the hell he'd actually read when he got into how The Girl That Owned A City was an example of something that only existed so a character could spew up a lot of unpopular opinions
Did you read the article, or just the reference to it on the patterns page? If you found anything of merit in that Rand-Paul-for-Kidz™ manifesto, I do wonder what it could be...
looked at the list of works he'd read and then at his staatement that "Of course, most SF doesn't even aim to be literature"
Again, always happy to hear counterexamples.
Re: I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.
Date: 2011-03-18 08:25 pm (UTC)And yet for those who do know what a "balrog" is, the announcement that it's coming does add to the suspense, and the scene therefore has that much more suspense (and more kinds of suspense) for them than for me. Which is the point that I was trying to make in my typically idiotic way.
But I didn't care, because you don't need to know where these things are in relation to each other for the story. You really, really don't.
I don't think I ever said that I needed to know how to map these places, just how they related to one another. E.g., is Rohan a city in the province of Gondor, or is Gondor a city in the province of Rohan, or are they rival cities, or what? If it doesn't matter, then why distract me from what does matter by giving me useless information? Of course, one of the differences here is that there are people who eat this kind of thing up — they like having a lot of names flying around because it makes it seem like a deeper universe. But I'm not one of those people.
The ironic thing, given that I am apparently "a dude who just does not like stories," is that I'm a writer myself, and more recently a screenwriter, and I've actually been explicitly told to write things full of arbitrary names precisely in order to suggest depth where there really isn't any — the narrative equivalent of a matte painting. One producer pointed me toward the speech in Blade Runner about "C-beams glitter[ing] in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate": "No one knows what C-beams are or what the Tannhauser Gate is," he explained, "but it makes the audience think there's so much more there!" And I can easily churn out this kind of thing (and have). But perhaps because I know firsthand just how tossed-off a lot of this ersatz depth is, I don't think it's actually, y'know, good.
(Whereas my understanding is that Tolkien himself actually did work out every street corner of every city, full grammars for all his invented languages, complete 50-generation family trees for each of his characters, etc. — i.e., the depth was not fake. But because we only see hints here and there, it might as well have been.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-18 08:36 pm (UTC)So, I do pretty much agree with you on there, in principle.
Thing is, there's also ANOTHER reason to throw out all those references and names and places and things: Because it's a convention of the genre and one of the style-defining elements of Tolkien's writing. I'm not saying it's good or bad[1], but it IS one of the things that tells you immediately that you are reading Epic Tolkien Fantasty(tm).
Which means that, at least in part, there's a good reason to include it in the movie version - to get the FEEL of the translated work across. Which doesn't exactly help you, since you don't know the translated work and aren't a fan[2] of the kind of things that use the same thematic shortcuts.
[1]: I personally can't stand it and think The Lord Of The Rings was a barely-passable series of books that escaped complete editor-fail-induced unreadability only on the strength of the story, regardless of Tolkien's incompetence at relaying the story, but I am inexplicably in the minority on that one.
[2]: Since you'd never read Tolkien, I feel confident in guessing you're not a fan of the genre.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-19 01:21 am (UTC)Accusing Tolkien of being an incompetent novelist is a bit like wailing that da Vinci was rubbish at making stamps, and the Mona Lisa was his worst yet. You'll NEVER fit that damn thing on a letter.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-19 01:30 am (UTC)Also his poor word choice, lousy pacing, extended distracting digressions to cover things unimportant to the story, habit of leaving plot threads hanging for hundreds of pages while he moves on to something else, and the fact that he wrote an entire book set *after* his story ended, in which no new story was begun.
If your argument is that he wasn't TRYING to write a coherent novel, okay, sure - but he was writing a novel, and deliberately doing it badly in a way that a semicompetent editor could have fixed is not really all that different from accidentally doing it badly in a way a semicompetent editor could have fixed.
It's like... doing a "comic book issue" where you have a splash page of an aardvark pope and then 30 pages of white-on-black bricktext explaining why women are evil and exist only to contaminate the author's precious bodily fluids. It might be ART, it might even be an entertaining read - but it ain't a comic book in anything approaching the standard sense.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-19 02:44 am (UTC)Yeah, it's dense, yeah, it errs on the side of using certain types of words in order to maintain a consistent linguistic style. Yeah, sometimes Tolkien forgets he's telling a story and not writing a Middle Earth sourcebook - but it's not a novel, it's an epic, it's not a story so much as it is a slice of the history of a made-up world, rendered in a particular style.
I found LotR unreadable when I picked it up when I was 12, having previously read The Hobbit and loved it, so I can see how anybody picking it up expecting your standard fantasy novel is going to be put off. It wasn't until years later, after I graduated from university, that I finally read it through and saw everything he was trying to do and became enthralled by it.
You keep telling me this orange makes a terrible apple and the farmer was a fucking moron for growing it, and, well, what am I supposed to say to that? It's not what you want it to be. My condolences?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-19 03:04 am (UTC)You keep telling me this orange makes a terrible apple and the farmer was a fucking moron for growing it
No, I keep saying that this orange is a bad example of an orange, perhaps the orange tree should have been given water and not Brawndo The Thirst Eliminator, and maybe it should have been allowed to ripen fully and not picked while just a bud, but, hey, when you get past that, there are still some really tasty bits on this orange. And if the farmer had, y'know, done any of the things that produce GOOD oranges, this might be one of the best oranges ever.
And you tell me "Well, the farmer was TRYING to grow apples."
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-19 03:26 am (UTC)I don't know, maybe we're two guys standing over a banana yelling "APPLE!" "ORANGE!" "APPLE!". Any minute now someone is going to wade into this thread bellowing "RASPBERRY" and it'll just get ugly. We should probably just agree it's a tasty fruit and move on with our lives.
Re: I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.
Date: 2011-03-19 01:02 am (UTC)I don't see those details as being any more fake than the whole rest of the performance; I mean, the sum total of the Balrog's presence in this world was a ping-pong ball suspended in front of a green sheet. It's just another part of the fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-19 04:44 am (UTC)> But because we only see hints here and there, it might as well have been.
> But perhaps because I know firsthand just how tossed-off a lot of this ersatz depth is, I don't think it's actually, y'know, good.
No, sorry. I completely do not agree. I get that you feel those movies were all about existing fans of The Lord of The Rings, but you seem to want it to be all about you (and viewers like you) instead, and all I can do is roll my eyes. Yes, sure, those hooks were lost on you, same as they were on me. So what? If little extra throwaway details made no difference to you but made existing fans happy, what's the harm? I feel like the script writers did a wonderful job of finding a happy medium that both virgin viewers and old fans of the books could enjoy. I'm sorry that you appear to be someone who only wants it his way ever, and that your way is apparently a die-hard preferences for minimalism in details, but not everybody feels the same way as you do. And while you yourself pointed out that difference in taste, you seem to be missing the equally crucial other half of the idea, where you recognize that "not to my taste" isn't the same thing as "badly made".
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-19 08:06 am (UTC)Note that the part that you quoted here was part of a conditional statement, and one that I consider counterfactual. I.e., I said if it doesn't matter — which you seemed to be arguing ("I didn't care," "you don't need to know") — then the information is useless. But for the very reasons that you point out, it's actually very useful to have this information — and for it to actually be clear, rather than treated like "little extra throwaway details." Here's an analogy. You mentioned "Elfy Caracas"; imagine that you knew nothing of real-world geography, and you were watching a movie scene that, a caption told you, was set in Caracas. In this scene, the president of Venezuela is meeting with the prime minister of Canada, and asks the prime minister how Alberta is this time of year; the prime minister replies that he just flew in from Hawaii and that it was a lot warmer than Calgary. Wouldn't it be nice to know that Caracas is in Venezuela, that it's the capital of that country, that Canada is a different country, that Alberta is a province within Canada, that Calgary is a city within Alberta, and that Hawaii is a state in yet a third country? Or would you really rather have these names flying around with no explanation, while scoffing at those who get a little lost as people who "need everything in a movie hand-fed to them and are incapable of making inferences on their own"?
The difference is that, in real life, I'd hope that people in the audience would be familiar enough with real-world geography that these names wouldn't be new to them. And it felt to me as though these movies expected a similar comfort level with the geography of Middle Earth.
you seem to want it to be all about you (and viewers like you) instead [...] you appear to be someone who only wants it his way ever
Whereas you appear to be someone who enjoys making shrill personal judgments about people you don't know.
The article is mainly about why these movies did not seem to me to be designed for newcomers. I don't think that's necessarily bad; if you knew more about me than what you gathered from one article, you'd know that on my interactive fiction page (http://adamcadre.ac/if.html), I make a note of which of my IF stories are good for newcomers to the medium and which ones aren't. I am not thereby saying that the ones that I didn't write for newcomers suck.
I did also think that the Rings movies were bad, for reasons I noted at the end: reactionary ideology, very thin characters, ham-handed style. You can argue back that those things aren't "bad" but rather "not to my taste," but at that point what would qualify as "bad"? A movie that's out of focus? Some people like that! Mike D'Angelo loved Afterschool and Primer! I don't work for a newspaper, and my job isn't to try to convey to readers how much they might like a film; I'm just saying what I thought, and I thought these movies were not so hot. Forgive me if I don't feel compelled to slap an "IMHO" in every sentence in what is quite obviously an opinion essay.