The Hype of the Rings

With the Fellowship of the Rings just around the corner, the Slashdot Submissions bin is overflowing with stories about the film since it premiered in the UK already for you lucky brits. If you don't mind a little spoilage, here is the guardian's review, the BBC review, the telegraph review, some pictures from the premiere, and one last review. Also, Scifi.com is reporting that the film has already been pirated. The reviews have their nitpicks, but on the whole its looking good. M : LOTR tattoos!

Comments

Corrected URL

[blamanj]

Actually, the text of the Guardian review is here.

The tattoos

[OblongPlatypus]

The Yahoo article doesn't mention this, but this month's print issue of Empire Magazine did. The Fellowship actors' tattoos all depict the Tengwar symbol for 9. (Tengwar being Tolkien's Elvish alphabet; you can see what it looks like here.)

Re:Why the earlier opening in UK?

[Malc]

Um, just going through the first 10 or so of the main characters listed on IMDB for this film, you might like to reconsider:

Elijah Wood - American
Ian McKellen - British
Viggo Mortensen - American
Sean Astin - American
Liv Tyler - American
Cate Blanchett - Australian
John Rhys-Davies - British
Billy Boyd - British
Dominic Monaghan - German
Orlando Bloom - British
Hugo Weaving - Nigerian/Australian
Sean Bean - British
Ian Holm - British
Christopher Lee - British

The characters aside, this is a very British film. The rights to the films were sold in 1969, but the Tolkien family/estate still has a lot of influence.

Download the fonts!

[PsiPsiStar]

There's a page out there where you can download the font for the various tolkein languages.

http://home.earthlink.net/~darrenv/tolkein.html

It dosen't look quite as cool as the guilded cursive elven runes on all the merchandise, but what do you want for free?

My Sort of Review

[west]

I was fortunate enough to see the movie in late November. (no spoilers follow)

They did not do the impossible. The length and breadth of Fellowship of the Ring could not be compressed into a 3 hour movie. Nor could they manage to please of all us Tolkein fans, each of whom brings a mental picture of what Elves/Frodo/Gandalf/Dwarves/ Aragorn/etc. *really* looked/acted like.

I will guarantee that each of you will walk away disappointed in *some* aspect of the movie. I also expect it to be a *different* piece of the movie for each person.

What they managed was the remarkable. The movie works, and works well. They have successfully translated a book almost totally unsuited for a movie into a rivetting, astonishingly beautiful piece of cinema.

In other words, keep expectations in check, and you should enjoy yourself immensely. Go, waiting to see what part they adulterated/messed up, and you risk letting your inevitable disappointment in one section overshadow the considerable success of the movie as a whole.

As an aside, I suspect that there's a lot of (non-existent) advertising revenue in a site that allows each user to vote on the five things that they feel the film did wrong. I figure there'd be at least five hundred possible complaints. On the other hand, my comparison with other people's list have found an almost complete lack of unity about what the points are! (How could nobody else realize that they've totally destroyed the Shire scenes by making Bilbo's eyes the wrong color :-))

Re:what about the Hobbit?

[OblongPlatypus]

On the contrary, several of his published works (The Father Christmas Letters, Mr. Bliss, Roverandom) originated as stories told to his children. The Hobbit started, famously, on a blank page on one of his students' examination papers, but he read chapters of it to his children during its development. While it's hard to answer the question "did he intend it as a children's novel?", there's no question that he at least considered it appropriate for children.

Re:what about the Hobbit?

[gamgee5273]

Hmmm...I couldn't disagree more. The Hobbit is a children's story, agreed, but it is a prelude of things to come in The Lord of the Rings. For example, the LOTR we know and love would be a different book without its predecessor. Bilbo, the dwarfs (or is it dwarves...I can never remember Tolkien's disclaimer in the front of Hobbit correctly...), Gandalf, Gollum, and much more of Middle-earth were first fleshed-out in Hobbit. If a reader were to pick up LOTR without reading Hobbit I suspect that they would have a difficult time orienting themselves into their surroundings. I just re-read all four books last year and was very happy and satisfied to see how all four still stand up in an adult reader's mind and still complement each other.

I would argue that, while Tolkien probably didn't plan it, the four books help draw the reader into an unwilling adventure, much like Gandalf had to with Bilbo. Going from a children's book - with Bilbo's much less severe adventure - preps you for the detailed and difficult adventure Frodo must face. Children's books - good children's books - are often marked by a quality that makes them good reading for all ages. Thus, children's books by Dr. Suess, J.K. Rowling, Tolkien, etc. are still readable and enjoyable by adults. It's the same impulse that allows many Disney and Pixar movies (and even Sesame Street - remember H. Ross Parrot?) to be enjoyed by parents and their children, while Barney or The Teletubbies don't exist on that level and aren't designed to elicit emotion from parents while entertaining them, too.

I think it is safe to say that Tolkien realized this when writing LOTR and realized that he had characters and a story that were strong in the first book, and that allowed him to build upon that and create a more "adult" book many years later for the readers of the "children's" book of years past.

Basically, what I'm saying, is that the two go hand-in-hand, The Hobbit and LOTR. Just because one was written for children doesn't mean that it doesn't have a major part in the groundwork and preparation of the other.