(no subject)

[theweaselking]

A self-described "Tolkien virgin" watches The Lord Of The Rings.

Comments

[singingnettle.livejournal.com]

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.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

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.

[skington.livejournal.com]

He's got a point about the Two Towers - which two towers are we referring to?

I just woke up. Sorry if this is only half-coherent.

[moiread]

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.