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Review:Fellowship of the Ring
Everyone has expectations about this movie. I imagine most of you have read the books. You all have ideas about what a Balrog looks like. What Gandalf is like. And yes, hell, even what the ring should look like. And you simply can't expect a movie to meet everyones ideas... but this thing came just as close as I could have hoped.
In short, there aren't many great movies that come out any more... but this is one of them. Everyone seems nearly perfectly cast. The special effects are nothing short of brilliant. The sets from the Shire on out look so wonderful and believable that you just wanna move in... until the Ring Wraiths show up and make everything all miserable.
Elijah Woods pulls off Frodo quite well. Yeah maybe he fell down one to many times, but the angst is believable. And Gandalf? His desire for the ring is intense and his actions are truly heroic.
I can't imagine a film adaptation of perhaps the best book ever written being done better. The first 45 minutes are a bit slow going, but once the Fellowship starts coming together I just didn't want to blink.
I could find things to nitpick about: some scenes the audio mix wasn't quite right, but that could partially have been the mediocre sound system in the theater: dialog was a bit muffled under the music. Some of the effects were noticably CG, but those were rare. Quite frankly nobody has done CG monsters as convincingly in a film to date. There was a handful of shots that looked faked, and all the rest seemed as perfect as could be.
God damn. The hype is warranted. The wait was worth it. But 12 months for the next one? At least I have my copy of FFX to keep me occupied during maybe 40 hours of the next 8,760 or so I have to wait. But who's counting?
A spoiler would be like someone telling you Saruman is really Frodo's father, before you had a chance to see the movie. :)
(Ok, ok, it's The Onion's joke about Harry Potter but I thought it was amusing...)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
They eat seven or eight times a day, like to take naps, have never been far from home and have eyes that grow wide at the sounds of the night. They are like children grown up or grown old, and when they rise to an occasion, it takes true heroism, for they are timid by nature and would rather avoid a fight.
Good god! I never thought of it before, but you have just described the vast majority of the IT department where I work. No wonder geeks love Tolkien so much.
Is there an O'Reilly book on LotR? What's the cover organism -- Gollum???
I know it sounds weird, but the addition of the Ewoks really made sense.
Ok, there really needs to be a peer to Godwin's Law which replaces "mentioning Nazism" with "prefacing the comment with a recantation of a lusty love affair the author had in their youth". Preferably this would be built right into the net, so such posts are automatically purged, and a squad of roughnecks with bats immediately dispatched to the author's place of posting. How about "Pygmalion's Law"...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
My only bitch is that I will have another bunch of dweeb kids who want to have their username/password to be:
SunOS 5.8
login: gandalf
password: 6O11uM
Please, God. Spare me.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Sooo... thumbs up or thumbs down?
I was just shocked to hear about a /. reader getting to second base.
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
Jack Valenti: Gentlemen, we have a problem. I've been surfing some web discussion boards, and it seems that many idealistic Geeks and Nerds of the world are angry about the MPAA and the DMCA! They're calling for boycotts! What can we do?
Studio Exec: Don't worry, Jack. We'll just make some more flashy movies about time travel, robots, and hobbits. These so-called "idealists" will go nuts. They'll line up days in advance to purchase overpriced tickets. They'll brag to one another about how many times they've seen the movie. Then we can use the profits to give our lobbyists salary increases, and to bribe more congressmen.
Jack Valenti: Excellent
I wanna hear more about Denise.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
... no elves were harmed in the making of this film...?
-D.
...Tom Bombadil, is all I have to say.
If LOTR had any "so on begat so on" bible type bits then he was it.
"I'm Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo, something something something, now rhyme with 'Willow'"
In short GREAT CALL! He shat me.
:)