Lunar Threads

I don't mind Tom Bombadil! His chapter was lighthearted and silly. It was out of place tonally in LOTR, and it makes sense that it was cut out for the LOTR movie. It would have fit better in the Hobbit. And it's not like they didn't have space to include some version of Tom Bombadil. They turned a 300 page book into a 7 hour movie trilogy. I mean... he's about at the same level of annoying as Radagast the Brown.

Jenner wrote:Every time someone says, "They should have added Tom" all I'm hearing is, "I have terrible taste and wanted a terrible movie to happen."

Or, "I'm here to troll people who like this thing by pointing out one of the worst things about it."

I'm not saying they should have included him. Just that if for some reason they had included Tom Bombadil, I would've been pleased. That, even though I most likely would say it wasn't a narratologically pleasing move.

I'm bitter. Very, very bitter. I live in a world where I will never see a faithful adaptation to The Hobbit, meaning I will never have an alternative to Peter Hackson's drivel. I'm going to be very, very bitter for a very, very long time.

I understand if others are more forgiving than me, but don't expect me to ever forgive Hacker for what he has done.

The Desolation of Smaug so distorted the essence of the original book so much that it was beyond laughable. An overlong fight scene between the mechanical over enunciated Smaug and Bilbo was the final straw. The film spent so much time on moronic fight scenes when they SHOULD have been including things that actually happened in the book.

I did a good job convincing myself after part one that, as flawed as it was it, was passable but the thought of coming back for a second helping of Smaug just felt like one step towards the walking dead. Some of the individual performances stood out but overall it was a waste of some great actors and everyone's time. I am a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings films, which for the most part got it right with some minor annoyances such as the changes to Faramir. But the Hobbit has just been one big disappointment.
What boggles me even more is that Hackson split a SHORT book into THREE LONG FILMS, and then still decided to gut the poor thing of almost all it's iconic scenes. All the clever humor from Tolkien is gone, replaced by Hackson's dreck.

All I wanted to begin with was a good Hobbit movie that was as like the book as a movie could get. I wasn't asking much, and somehow that arrogant pig Peter Hackson failed to deliver on every imaginable level. Just the sheer egotism required to think that he could tell Tolkien's story better than Tolkien is mind-boggling. How dare he.

By the time The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, was released, I had waited 22 years of my life for the big budget live-action THE HOBBIT movie. 22 YEARS. Ages 5 to 27. Alright, An Unexpected Journey wasn't perfect, but it was very close to the spirit of fun and adventure from the book. Then Part 2 came out and ruined everything. This is "Santa isn't real" all over again for me.
You know, I almost wish Hackson had gone with the idea to just make two Lord of the Rings films. That way I'd have known not to let my guard down. I'd have known not to give him any respect. He doesn't deserve it. Not anymore. I'm not giving Hackson any nickle or minute of my time ever again, not unless he fixes what he broke with The Hobbit.

Hey, Kiz, did you mean to fix the thread title by introducing a different typo?

^ I think every subsequent post should be a permutation of "The Hobbit greenlit" with a slight misspelling.

Isn't it strange that "hack" can be either a term of high praise or of derivative performance, depending on what you're talking about?

I was reading the appendix after Return of the King for a while the other day. Let me just restate that for emphasis - I was reading the appendix of a book that I had not just finished. I specifically returned to the appendix because there's something in those materials that I find as fascinating as Civil War history or the history of the Tudors. The timelines, dates, and narrative accounts in that would make a horrible film. It would not be a film in any conventional sense. It lives best only in text, because so much of it depends on the reader's - my - own impressions and connections to engage with it. The same is true of the Silmarillion; there's not enough of a coherent narrative there, or (what ends up posing the same thing) that narrative is too large and broad in scope.

I think the same is true for The Hobbit, to an extent. It's possible to make the film, but I don't know that it's possible to make it so that everyone likes it. One thought: maybe the issue is tone. The animation was eclectic and has an unadulterated tone that isn't often seen in film today. The three Jackson films veered between something like the tone of The Hobbit to a much darker tone to a kind of moral play that is fun enough but not found so much in the books. They were also eclectic. The tone of the books, meanwhile, is neither silly nor unalloyed joy nor a victorious conflict between light and dark. It's jolly and pensive, adventurous and ... it's a sort of eclecticism that is difficult to reproduce, and I can't think of its like in film. The Lord of the Rings was easier because Hollywood can do fantasy epic well.

Alunissage wrote:Hey, Kiz, did you mean to fix the thread title by introducing a different typo?

Oh crap, sorry... Fixed again. Thanks for pointing that out.

Sonic# wrote:Isn't it strange that "hack" can be either a term of high praise or of derivative performance, depending on what you're talking about?

Yeah, I've always had a problem with the word "decadent" for the same reason.

Sonic# wrote:The tone of the books, meanwhile, is neither silly nor unalloyed joy nor a victorious conflict between light and dark. It's jolly and pensive, adventurous and ... it's a sort of eclecticism that is difficult to reproduce, and I can't think of its like in film. The Lord of the Rings was easier because Hollywood can do fantasy epic well.

And I think this nails it. Big fantasy epics work because, well, Hollywood loves redoing the same thing over and over -- so if you sell (and film) something as high-scales fantasy epic like LotR it's probably much easier to get backing for the movie than if you broke out and did something new or relatively original. (Jackson even tried a few new things here, like the high frame rate version, and got backlash for that.) So, if the film defies genre, given how Hollywood operates, you're more likely to get a disjointed mess that can't decide what it's supposed to be.

...then again, I'm really critical of Hollywood. A generation of seeing them rely on tired stereotypes, and the cyclical nature of finding one thing that works, doing it to death, then moving onto the next thing, has left me kind of hating the general nature of Hollywood. Sure there are exceptions (I do love the LotR trilogy, there are quite a few good sci-fi movies that've come out in the last few years, and I'll begrudgingly admit even a few of the superhero movies are good) but on the whole, I get worried if even the third Hobbit movie falls into the same category of "not worth 2 hours and $10 to see" that 99% of other movies fall into these days. KF

I've been enjoying the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I guess you can say that Hollywood is doing the superhero genre to death, but a shared universe of this magnitude is pretty ambitious and groundbreaking.