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Updated LOTR Nitpicker's Guide
The LOTR Nitpicker writes "A list of deviations to be found when comparing the text of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and the translation of those texts to film as undertaken by Peter Jackson, et.al. updated to include deviations from the recently released extended edition DVD of The Return of the King. This story originally appeared on Slashdot back in January."
...that building an Apollo guidance computer was a waste of time... ....yawn...
on my gentoo box. Gentoo makes the film sooo much faster, you hardly notice the additional footage at all.
gentoo# emerge -s karma Searching... [ Results for search key : karma ] [ Applications found : 0 ]
Now am I the only person in world that thinks that nitpicking, whilst a fine sport, starts to drag after just a bit. I mean, stuff that had been removed/changed seemed to me like it made the films. True, I'd have loved to have seen the Barrow-Wight (amongst all the others) sequences in the films but hey, you can't have everything.
Whats wrong with just watching the film, and enjoying it...?
(Post not intentionally flame-bait and yes, I DO count myself as a fan).
1. Wait for a slow news day like christmas and resubmit an old story. Even mention, that your story is old. 2. ??? 3. Profit!!!
They're 21st-century movies, not 20th-century books.
The coolest voice ever.
1) I see Saruman throwing fireballs. Now I believe Peter Jackson didn't want to make *that* kind of movie with wizards casting fireballs when I see the original theatrical releases, but now this? Come on. If they wanted awesome effects they could have gone with something that's actually *in* the books, like Gandalf casting lightning from his staff (Gandalf vs. 9 ringwraiths, on Weathertop).
2) This isn't The Return Of The King, it's "Half Of The Two Towers And The Return Of The King". They could have cut out most of the extraneous scenes from the TTT (like the Arwen ones) and kept stuff from TTT in TTT. Then they could use the Extended Release of ROTK to include the Scouring of the Shire. I realize the reason for not including it in the theatrical release (audience would get tired of a second battle etc.), but come on, the DVD release doesn't have those problems (after all, it's the fans who are gobbling up these Extended Editions).
That said, I welcome the new scenes. I always wanted to see the part where Aragorn calls up Sauron with the Palantir, and gives him the finger.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
... shields can not be used as skateboards.
Agreed. Whereas some movie adaptations of great novels do suck (Lynch's Dune), some are good enough to make us forgive the changes required by the new medium (Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). Jackson's Lord of the Rings is simply a perfect interpretation of the books, keeping all the mood, atmosphere and imagination from the original material. Having watched ROTK:EE yesterday, and as a big cinema addict, I can say that few movies have moved me as this trilogy. It transpires the passion of its makers and the soul of Tolkien is omnipresent, in the images, the elvish language, the characters, the epic atmosphere of the whole story.
Nitpicking about adaptation changes is pointless (though the author does somehow acknowledge it is). I cannot imagine anyone making (a) better "Lord of the Rings movie(s)".
Peter Jackson did it, along with an extraordinary film crew, so let's all praise them for it and enjoy these fantastic movies.
theefer
You don't get it. The Nitpicker's Guides are fun to read in and of themselves. You don't have to be an anal-retentive nerd to enjoy one; in fact, it's postmodern surrealist anti-humor in that the joke is that anyone would notice and catalog such an array of minute flaws. They're something to marvel at, but are also incidentally filled with interesting trivia - like a Guinness Book of Records for dweebs. Lighten up.
Dear Santa,
After nearly spending half an eon watching the extended versions of LOTRs and comparing the text of our beloved JRR Tolkein to each and every sound and syllable of the movies, I am writing you in hopes that you deliver to me this very Christmas the following gifts:
1. A life
2. Liv Tyler
3. Liv Tyler naked
4. The Extended version of Dune on DVD
5. The Dune books
Sincerely,
The LOTR Nitpicker
Atmosphere, costume and set design, cinematrography...all are top notch for this triology. Brilliant adaptations of LOTR, perfectly visualised -- a very difficult task indeed.
However...characterisations, plot development and pacing, and dialogue to a large extent are typical hollywood fare, losing alot of the subtley and nuance of the novels.
I couldn't understand why my parents and sister didn't enjoy the movies...they felt it was all noise and action, and a 'typical fantasy hackneyed plot'. I was incredulous, until I rewatched the movies while conciously ignoring what I knew from the novels...and then I realised they were right -- it WAS just another noisy, loud, action-packed, paper-thin plot turned into big-budget spectacle. All the subtley of the novels were not translated to screen. This is particularly apparent in ROTK which moves from action sequence to action sequence for 3+ hours...
I don't blame Jackson too much. At 12+ hours it already is perhaps the longest trilogy filmed by Hollywood. And yet there's so much lost in the film translation... I suspect only an extended 30-60 episode TV series, not worrying about ratings or demographics, could give the novels justice. And the chances of that happening are negligible.
Appreciate the movies for what Jackson contributed to LOTR lore, but recongise its still a minor effort in comparison to the brilliance of the source material.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Douglas Adams was still alive when they started making the movie version of his books, and he happily accepted changes
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Really not!
He rewrote the screen adaptation many times, never finding a balance between his genius and the hollywood lowest-common-denominator dogma, and wrote one last draft that he believed was the best compromise.
He then died, and the studio REWROTE the script, AGAIN, probably to re-insert the stupid changes he fought against.
Do NOT let yourself be fooled when the vultures say he would have liked it. It is their contractual obligation to bullshit us and hype the project as much as they can. When they say it's going to be good, ask yourself: Is it in their financial best interest to lie to us about the quality of the product? Does this person stand to make MILLIONS from those lil' white lies?
Look at the EarthSea thing that happened recently, the producers made a comment that the author really wanted to say what their bastard monstrosity says, forgetting that she's alive and able to tell the world otherwise. She was able to defend herself and her original works from the slander it was subjected to, but Asimov can't, Adams can't, Roddenberry can't...
Look at the hype for Will Smith'S I, Robot! The fresh prince was actually saying in interviews that is was very faithfull to the spirit of Asimov's robot stories, and then he explains "everyone on earth trusts the robots, but my character is the only one that suspects the truth: they are up to no good", followed by rampaging hordes of killbots. That is the OPPOSITE of Asimov's stories! Only the USRobots people trusted their creation, the mundane people of earth didn't trust 'em one bit! They had laws forcing them to be manually operated, and to not be within a certain distance of schools, etc! And not only that, but the whole "robots are not to be trusted and will turn on their masters" is exactly the precise sort of stories that Asimov did NOT write. He made up the 3 laws to get away from that frankenstein crap, dammit!
Enjoying a movie for what it is is fine, really. But you can do it without the delusion that they are faithfull to the spirit of the original when they are virtually raping the author's corpse.
Here's a tip: If you hear of a movie being made that is based on a book, and you haven't yet read that book, wait until you've seen the movie, then read the book. The book is always better, so this way you get to like the movie, then love the book. If you read the book first, you like the book, then hate the movie.
Movie, like. Then: Book, love.
The other way only leads to disapointment.
You can't take the sky from me...
How wonderful it is to see so many complaints, so many nitpicking complaints, about how horrible nitpicking is ... and I, who enjoys nitpicking, and holds these nitpicking complaints (I refer to TFA nitpicks about the movies) as especially worthwhile, am in fact required by the nitpickers' guild rules to applaud the movie nitpicking while laughing at the /. nitpickers who are quite openly violating their own non-nitpckers' guild rules by nitpicking the movie nitpickers.
How many nits should a non-nitpicker pick, if a non-nitpicker picked nits?
Infuriate left and right