Guillermo del Toro Will Direct "The Hobbit"

jagermeister101 tips us to news that Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings production team have officially selected Guillermo del Toro to direct the upcoming Hobbit film and its sequel. del Toro's resume includes films such as Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Blade 2. This confirms rumors which began after the controversy between Jackson and New Line Cinemas was resolved last year.

Comments

What's the draw?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Honest question. With so much actual literature out there, what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein?

Re:What's the draw?

[ChinggisK]

You, sir, are brave.

Re:What's the draw?

[Squarewav]

If you compare The Lord of the Rings movies movies with other fantasy movies (book based or not), it is extremely well done with a minimal amount of cheese-ness that you expect from a fantasy movie.

People think that because LOTR movies were well done and was based on a Tolkein work that another movie based on what he has done will also be well done.

This, of corse, isn't likely, but that isn't going to stop someone from trying to make money on the idea

Re:What's the draw?

[kongit]

Honest question. Why would you consider Tolkien to be second rate fantasy? Beyond the fact that it stands up on its own merit, without Tolkien most of what you call "actual literature" probably would never have existed.

Re:What's the draw?

[johannesg]

Honest question. With so much actual literature out there, what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein? Let me put it in a way you might understand: if Tolkien were a car, then the Lord of the Rings would be a big, shiny Rolls Royce. And The Hobbit would be a cute little Smart.

(for the humor impaired, look at the parent posters' username...)

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gross revenue from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy: $2.9 billion

Re:What's the draw?

[rpjs]

So what would say is first rate fantasy then?

You may not think much of fantasy as a genre, and I'd tend to agree with you if you do, but I do think Tolkien is one of the best, if not the best fantasy writer there has been; to the extent that 95% of the rubbish that's been churned out since is a poor pastiche of him.

Re:What's the draw?

[Psychotria]

I actually agree with the OP... I think. I wouldn't have used the same words, but each to their own. I think there are many many fantasy books out there that easily surpass LOTR. I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped. I understand that LOTR is immensely popular--I just found the books bordering on boring (which is a shame, I really wanted to like them).

Re:What's the draw?

[JuanCarlosII]

I'm not sure, but it might be something to do with the enormous quantities of money that were made by the previous Tolkein films. When you have a cash cow, it would be folly not to milk it.

Re:What's the draw?

[CannonballHead]

Second rate?

The Hobbit is more of a child's book, granted (LOTR was originally going to be a sequel to The Hobbit but turned out to be longer, deeper, and "darker"), but Tolkien is not second-rate. And yes, it's Tolkien. If you can't spell his name correctly, I question your ability to criticize his work.

Tolkien may not have been the best story teller, though I would hold that he is excellent; what draws me to his works is the extreme depth and development. It is like a contemporary rock song compared to a Beethoven symphony. The rock song may sound really cool, but Beethoven's symphony is far deeper and far more developed that a surface-shiny composition. IMO, Harry Potter is actually more surface-shiny. Tolkien had the mythical history of Middle-Earth more or less figured out by the time LOTR was published to the extent that some of the languages are fully functional (Quenya and Sindarin especially).

There is nothing second rate about Tolkien, except perhaps to a world of small attention spans and desire for quick (and cheap) thrills...

Re:What's the draw?

[Psychotria]

Well, this is so subjective it's not funny. But, personally, I enjoy David Eddings and Raymond Elias Feist. I don't mind The Hobbit, but I found the LOTR trilogy difficult to get through.

Re:What's the draw?

[lusiphur69]

If Tolkien is, to you 'Second rate fantasy', what qualifies as 'First rate fantasy' in your mind? Or is the question rhetorical flamebait posted simply because you couldn't think of something intelligent to say quickly enough?

Perhaps you meant we should be reading Shakespeare (no thanks, had enough already) or Aristotle? If so, I salute your observation that just about every story has a greek tragedy at the heart - in other words, its already been done.

Somehow, though, I think you were more likely referring to modern authors. I'm sorry but the latest self-fellating pap by l'auture de jour tends to be pretentious as hell and without entertainment value. It's no wonder that most of my reading is either old books or non-fiction. Like modern 'art' (ahem) most modern fiction is trash.

Re:What's the draw?

[Knuckles]

The fact that largely the same people are involved makes this a pretty reasonable assumption, no?

Re:What's the draw?

[Ihmhi]

And people could just as easily say Kirk, Uhura, Spock, etc. are shallow and undeveloped. That's how it is when you are one of the major pioneers in any genre or medium.

Did Star Trek start Sci-Fi TV? No, but it certainly brought it to the masses and started a rabid fanbase.

The character development of future sci-fi shows (Star Trek, Andromeda, Babylon 5, Firefly, etc.) owes a lot to Star Trek - not just because of the lessons learned, but because they paved the road that they're all walking over now. The same goes for Tolkien and current fantasy literature.

The books are pretty damn good for something written, when, like in the late 40s-early 50s?

Re:What's the draw?

[Knuckles]

[...] without Tolkien most of what you call "actual literature" probably would never have existed. Are you serious? I certainly hope that you are not, or that I misunderstand something.

Re:What's the draw?

[PoeticExplosion]

Because he is the foundation of the modern fantasy genre. Reading him now, he seems cliched. This is because he invented the things that are now cliches. In addition, he had one of the most fully developed worlds of any fantasy writer ever. He invented languages, mythologies, and detailed histories for multiple cultures. The fiction was just an afterthought for him.

Re:What's the draw?

[Psychotria]

Yeah that is true. I guess it's lucky that it is, largely, only a matter of opinion :-)

Re:What's the draw?

[SanityInAnarchy]

If it's anything like Pan's Labyrinth, it'll be worth watching -- del Toro isn't bad.

Re:What's the draw?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Couldn't have said it better. The closest thing I've found to Tolkien is Dune.

Re:What's the draw?

[bartron]

That's ok. The source code to his books is perfectly visible. Feel free to study it and improve on it. I look forward to your forthcoming books...sure to be best sellers. bad analogy - If Linus were Tolkien, Linux would be Lord of the Rings but he would have invented several of his own languages to write it in. :)

Re:What's the draw?

[gbobeck]

I think a more accurate analogy would be the following...

if Tolkien was a network, then the Lord of the Rings would be Tolkien Ring. And The Hobbit would be 10 Base T.

Re:What's the draw?

[Mystic Pixel]

Tolkien's works have links to far older bodies of literature, such as the Finnish epic Kalevala and Beowulf (he was often regarded as a leading expert on the latter.) Many of his writings are taken very seriously by those in the academic literary community; he had a lot to say about the 'fairy tale' as an important story-telling tool -- specifically his essay The Monsters and the Critics (more info).

There are serious undergraduate and graduate level literature classes on Tolkien, and his universe provides an interesting linguistic study as well. Granted, he started writing The Hobbit as a children's story, and it's not among the top tier of his work. However, the later trilogy became much more, and I daresay few literary professors would write it off as you are wont to do.

Furthermore, if you want anyone to take your viewpoint seriously, you do yourself a disservice by misspelling his name.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arguably, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series is far better. Albeit a different kind of fantasy, they were written around the same time and are (again, arguably) a far superior piece of writing.

Re:What's the draw?

[shmlco]

Well, from a certain point of view, they've already managed to do THREE movies/books extremely well.

Re:What's the draw?

[Secret Rabbit]

But, if it's anything like Blade 2...

Re:What's the draw?

[LarsWestergren]

If it's anything like Pan's Labyrinth, it'll be worth watching -- del Toro isn't bad.

Seconded... I can also recommend Espinazo del Diablo (the Devil's Backbone). Don't read about the plot beforehand, that will spoil too much. Just watch it.

Re:What's the draw?

[Dahamma]

Still, you could have made a GOOD bad analogy...

The Fellowship of the Rings - An Integra GS-R - didn't invest that much yet but it blew away your expectations and was high revving fun to boot.
The Two Towers - a BMW Coupe - fun, fast, and satisfying, but weren't you always looking forward to the Porsche?
The Return of the King - a Jaguar - you have waited this long, great looks and comfort at first, but in the end it's way overweight and breaks down before you'd expect.

So I really think the Hobbit could be more of a Lotus Elise (or depending on budget even a Miata!) - cheaper, lightweight, but just plain fun.

Re:What's the draw?

[RoboRay]

I really enjoy Feist too, but he's no Tolkien. Surely you noticed how much he blatantly ripped off from Tolkien, including his entire elvish language!

There would be no Feist without Tolkien to inspire him, and that same statement is true of most modern fantasies.

Re:What's the draw?

[1u3hr]

So what would say is first rate fantasy then?

I don't want to disparage JRRT. He created a whole genre, he had immense integrity. I loved his books when I was a teenager. But he wasn't a great wordsmith.

A few who have surpassed him, IMHO:

• Ursula K Le Guin
• Fritz Leiber
• Michael Moorcock
• Gene Wolfe
• Roger Zelazny

Not everything by these authors is "great" some are a bit uneven, but their best work is really "first rate" literature by any standard.

I've never gone for the doorstop fantasy trilogies that fill many bookshop fantasy shelves. Some may be good, but I never felt the urge to try them, they just looked so derivative. I doubt though I'm missing anything by bypassing Robert Jordan. I'm told that George RR Martin's is pretty good though, I liked his earlier work.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, if you want anyone to take your viewpoint seriously, you do yourself a disservice by misspelling his name.

Rite, becuase evreyoen knwos teh strength of an agrumnet rests on its speeling. Divrocing contnet frum persentation is evul. CSS, may yoo rott in hell!!

Re:What's the draw?

[genaldar]

Enlighten us all, what is some first rate fantasy then.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't spell his name correctly, I question your ability to criticize his work.

I'm dyslexic, you insensitive cold!

Re:What's the draw?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I certainly wasn't referring to sci-fi/fantasy when I used the word literature.

Re:What's the draw?

[Pecisk]

And even then...

What is define Tolkien for me is his human down-to-earth display of magic, out-of-this-world influence. There is no big shiny stars going around Gandalf's hat, he is using his magic power very very rarerly. Force of the Ring is not seen, but felt as influence, as emotions - and such stuff. It allows much easer for reader/watcher (thanks to P.J. who kept the same balance in the movie) to connect with characters, because even if Frodo is the One who will destroy Ring, it is taking him, and last parts of book or movie are really painful to watch due of this, because if you even know the end, you really feel he can fail, because he is just a hobbit. It is humanity within fantasy what Tolkien actually defined (and no, not adult fantasy). And this is why so few authors have been capable to at least copy experience of LOTR world.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

There would be no Feist without Tolkien to inspire him

So you're saying Feist is Tolkien 2.0? Awesome, 2.0 makes anything better!

Re:What's the draw?

[Ihmhi]

I dispute the "created a whole genre" stuff. You're saying absolutely no one wrote a book about dragons, elves, and midgets before 1945?

That stuff has been around for over a thousand years as far as popular stories go (The Odyssey, for one). Tolkien just popularized it with the modern public (at the time).

Created a genre, no. Popularized a genre, yes.

Re:What's the draw?

[msormune]

Blade 2 was actually pretty good, when you consider the quality of script. The point is, a good director can make the most out of a bad script. IMDB list already "The Hobbit 2", set to be released in 2011 :)

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The books are pretty damn good for something written, when, like in the late 40s-early 50s?"

What? You say that like most old books use to be crappy before the invention of hi-def printing and surround sound grammar.

Re:What's the draw?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I mean for the fans, not the people milking the cow.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, if you want anyone to take your viewpoint seriously, you do yourself a disservice by misspelling his name.

That's a ridiculous fallacy. Worry about the substance of his argument instead of the form. Deriding spelling is nothing more than an ad hominem attack.

Re:What's the draw?

[KGIII]

Hell yeah! Just look at what it did to the web.

Re:What's the draw?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

That's like asking which animal's feces smells the best. I'm sure I could come up with an answer, but I'd just be ranking crap.

But since you asked, Rushdie writes some good fantasy fiction. Murakami is pretty good as well. Not many dragons and hardly any scantily-clad elf warriors on the cover, so these might not appeal to you.

Re:What's the draw?

[Malevolent Tester]

A grown man who reads Eddings? Wow, you really do see something new every day.

Re:What's the draw?

[dbIII]

To add to this Poul Anderson's "The Broken Sword" was published in the same year. Personally I prefer that take on Norse inspired fantasy to Tolkein's one but I was probably just put off by the elvish poetry in LOTR. If you shift media a bit the well known "Ride of the Valkyires" is from yet another Norse fantasy, as is "In the Hall of the Mountain King" etc etc.

Re:What's the draw?

[dbIII]

That's only because most modern fantasy is not well written and is just a Tolkein effort.

Re:What's the draw?

[rishistar]

And if the films of Lord of the Rings are a Tolkien Ring, anything by Uwe Boll is goatse.

Re:What's the draw?

[CRCulver]

Tolkien had the mythical history of Middle-Earth more or less figured out by the time LOTR was published to the extent that some of the languages are fully functional (Quenya and Sindarin especially).

No, they are not "fully functional". Scholars of Tolkien's languages readily admit that the lexicon and grammar of Quenya and Sindarin, though very impressive consider it's all the creation of one man, are extremely limited and, even with considerable circumlocution, could be used for few areas of daily human life.

Re:What's the draw?

[initialE]

Refresh my memory. Was Blade 2 the one with the blatant IPod advertising?

Re:What's the draw?

[msormune]

I don't remember the movie that well... Maybe it did. Hell, I don't even remember if there were iPods in 2002...

Re:What's the draw?

[Sesticulus]

Nope, that was Blade 3. It wasn't a terrible movie in it's own right, but in the light of the first two it definitely suffered the curse of the third superhero movie. Blade 2 was pretty good as I recall.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone is trying to criticize a literary figure of Tolkien's prominence, a spell check is the least they could do (FFS, the name doesn't even break the 'i before e' rule!) Furthermore, the parent contains no 'substance' to speak of.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

That annoys me to no end. Because we rarely see magic done we can't extrapolate the ruleset so Tolkien can use magic as a deus ex machina. This is my number one problem with most fantasy, that magic is mostly treated as a plot devise devoid of consistency. Star Trek is also a good example of that but instead of using magic they reverse the polarity.

Re:What's the draw?

[David Gerard]

Because the books are spoiled by all the crap they've influenced.

(I first read LOTR in 2004. It read like a transcript of a game of D&D.)

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't really care for Pan's Labyrinth. It had a much more "Hey look at these weird artificially generated characters!" feel than LOTR did even though LOTR used a lot more effects.

I liked Hellboy but it had the same feeling. It just didn't feel as real as LOTR did. I can't quite put my finger on the reason, it's just my general feeling.

Re:What's the draw?

[Danathar]

Moorcock is ofetn unknown by a lot of people due to the fact he does not come out with much stuff anymore, but during the 60's and 70's he was pumping out stuff left and right and generally they were pretty good.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

The books are pretty damn good for something written, when, like in the late 40s-early 50s? And I applaud Tolkien for that achievement... but I'm not reading books in the 40s or 50s. I'm reading them today.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he is the foundation of the modern fantasy genre. Reading him now, he seems cliched. This is because he invented the things that are now cliches. Indeed. It's just a pity that Lord Dunsany invented them all before him, and that Tolkien merely followed feebly in Dunsany's footsteps.

(AC because modding)

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Tolkien was a great authority on the subject. He drew together a wide array of venerable sources (not "inventing" them, as some here have claimed). Nothing wrong with that: Shakespeare did the same (with different sources and results, of course).

The trouble is for all his undoubted knowledge and experience, and for all the remarkable detail of the world he created, I'm still confronted with the unfortunate fact that his actual writing sucks!

Re:What's the draw?

[Chutulu]

yeah i agree, i would also recommend Cronos.

Re:What's the draw?

[Kibblet]

There are some college courses on some rather lame subjects; you will have to do better than that, I think! I feel the works are overrated, and I, for one, won't be intimidated into saying I liked them. For me, they were unreadable. I'm not the only person who felt that way, either.

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

The Hobbit is a much better story than LOTR. Just my opinion of course - LOTR drags on and on and on and on and on* while The Hobbit is a much more intimate story (while still being on a pretty massive scale in parts)

*Though apparently I stopped reading just before it got interesting (about 20-40 pages from the end of the second book.. I just couldn't take any more geography! I'd be better able to cope these days after Operation Flashpoint improved my mapreading and visualisation skills, but I cba at this point in my life, I have much better things to read/watch/play), near the end of the second book - I don't make a habit of not finishing books, but LOTR was one that I just couldnt be bothered with as I was used to faster moving stuff like the Riftwar Saga back when I used to read a lot.

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

I think that may have been the third one. Blade II was the first of that series that I saw, and IMO probably the best. Hellboy didn't have much of a story, but the atmosphere was pretty good. Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage are both good slighty fantasy-ish films - I can't wait to see how the Hobbit turns out with this guy at the helm :)

Re:What's the draw?

[xtracto]

Wow, mods let their zealotry go wild. Repeat with me, "Troll does not equal I disagree".

I think you are famous for trollish comments. But this one is interesting if not insightful.

I myself have asked that. I liked the movies, but just as that, Yet Another Fantasy Movie. Excepting the third one which in my opinion was one hour longer than it should have been (and those 3 endings yaaawn and i g2g to pee!!!!))

After all the fuzz about LOTR started (when the movie was produced) I actually got the book from a friend (lots of my friends were crazy at the time about LOTR).

Unfortunately I didn't really got it, in fact, I *hated* that they sang every four pages in the book. I decided I would wait to watch the movie and went back to reading my Asimovs.

Perhaps is the genere that I don't like (but then again, I love Final Fantasy, Neverwinter night and I loved role playing whole Sundays). But for me LOTR film was a nice film, which value (for me) the use of lots of special effects.

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

Pan's labyrinth isn't about those characters (and btw I found the guy with eyes in his hands extremely creepy even though I'm not usually bothered by monsters in movies), the plot goes far beyond that. I don't even remember Hellboy having much going on in it, but Pan's Labyrinth is very unique and memorable (though The Orphanage is quite similar to it in some ways). Perhaps you spent too much time watching the puppets/CGI effects and not enough time reading the subtitles? ;)

Re:What's the draw?

[Carewolf]

No Tolkien more or less invented Fantasy literature. There is a huge difference between Fairy Tales, ancient greek novels and fantasy. Tolkien invented the concept of constructing a fantasy universe with specific rules and trying to tell an epic and realistic story within that world using the rules of that world. Most literature before just added fantastic being to the story as they went along without consideration to their impact on the world they live in.

Re:What's the draw?

[PopeRatzo]

And people could just as easily say Kirk, Uhura, Spock, etc. are shallow and undeveloped.

Oh, I definitely could say that.

In fact, I would except my Karma is still recovering from when I said 300 (the movie) sucked.

Re:What's the draw?

[xtracto]

The reason is that LOTR was "established" in a fantasy universe where all the creatures Tolkien could smoke would feel "at home".

Whereas Pan's Labyrinth was supposed to be in real life... (or in the girls mind if you think about it) and therefore you would not expect to see a guy with eyes on his hands...

It is something akin to the novels of Dan Brown. A lot of people where upset by all the "lies" he told in the Da Vinci code (BTW, the movie was atrocious). However they could not understand that the idea of the book was to get several facts, combine them with lots of fantasies and put a story which happened in a world very similar to ours.

Re:What's the draw?

[lena_10326]

I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped.

That wasn't the goal of LOTR. It was an epic. Epics (and odyssey's) are usually shallow on character development, but big in scope. That's the nature of novel writing because it's a trade-off between close up character stories, which tend to be narrowly focused time-wise, and large scale fantasy universes spanning decades in novel time. You can't have both and still have a relatively small number of volumes. The Harry Potter series are weak on character development, but no one complains about that.

Re:What's the draw?

[xtracto]

Beowulf (he was often regarded as a leading expert on the latter.

Who would have thought! Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of Tolkien Rings!

Re:What's the draw?

[X3J11]

And if the films of Lord of the Rings are a Tolkien Ring, anything by Uwe Boll is goatse.

I think of Uwe Boll more as an amalgamation of goatse, tubgirl, and all the festering rot that is prevalent in the *chan's, and even that doesn't really come close to the true horror of Boll.

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

I just looked up Gene Roddenberry (because I know he wrote Andromeda as well as Star Trek). Just look how many of his show/movie scripts are still being used even though he died in 1991.. crazy! http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0734472/

There is plenty of good literature that was written before last century y'know.. Ever heard of Charles Dickens? Shakespeare maybe? ;) Tolkien did do a lot for fantasy though.

Re:What's the draw?

[X3J11]

Honest question. With so much actual literature out there, what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein?

What, then, do you consider to be first rate fantasy?

Re:What's the draw?

[jollyreaper]

What? You say that like most old books use to be crappy before the invention of hi-def printing and surround sound grammar. Scratch-n-sniff porn. There's just no going back.

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

Was it possibly an analogy for the state of yoghurt production in the 1820s?

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

:D yep, LOTR is too heavy and lacking in fun for its own good. Funnily enough I was considering gettin an Elise/Excige this year (after they take away my license next month, then give it back to me in a few months that is..!). As well as being more fun, the Elise would waste those other cars around a track (unless there were a lot of straights and you didn't have the 190bhp version..)

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

He certainly isn't a Tolkien - his stories are much more personally involved, his magic more interesting, his geographical descriptions not quite so boring.. :p

Terry Pratchett actually has to be one of the best fantasy writers out there - even without the awesome humour all the way through, the depth of his characters, plots and the Discworld itself (I've not read much of his non Discworld stuff, just Good Omens) is excellent, and almost always a good read. The times when I haven't enjoyed his books were probably just me, rather than the books, though strangely a lot of people seem to like best the books that I thought were the worst (the Hogfather for example.. the plot didn't have much to it at all)

Re:What's the draw?

[icsx]

But on the other hand, Hellboy sucked and yet it gets a sequel.

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

This grown man is actually a 6 year old girl! Where were you in Determining Age and Sex via Grammatical Construction classes?

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

Moorcock ... pumping out stuff Doesn't really sound very family friendly - I'm not surprised he is unknown in today's climate ;)

Re:What's the draw?

[psychodelicacy]

I have three degrees in English, and sometimes I still misspell Tolkien's name if I'm not thinking about it. It's not an intuitive spelling. Judging someone's ideas on their spelling of a difficult word is perhaps not the best way to proceed.

That said, I would agree with you that Tolkien is not second rate. I read LOTR first when I was five, so I would challenge anyone who calls it difficult to read! And the more you learn about Tolkien's academic interests (medieval literature in particular) the more you realise how incredibly clever and consistent his world-building is. LOTR is not only epic in scale and theme, but in the scope and consistency of its peoples, languages, and thought-systems. I believe it should be judged at least partly by the standards of ancient literature - realistic psychology is not at the fore, rather it concentrates on characters as embodiments of ideas and ideals.

Re:What's the draw?

[rpjs]

It's interesting that all the authors you list are, I'd contend, as well or better known for their SF - Leiber perhaps, excepted. I would certainly contend that SF authors who turn their hand to fantasy are usually a lot better than most fantasy-only authors, and I'd also contend that Tolkien stands head-and-shoulders above the mass of fantasy-only authors.

Re:What's the draw?

[ExecutorElassus]

If I can go out on a limb here: I actually thought Pan's Labyrinth was mostly a very over-saturated (read: tarted up) retelling of Northfork. If you've seen that, Pan's Labyrinth is basically the same story. Except that it's full of eyecandy. There are points in Northfork that are stunning in their simple beauty, and it comes with a surprisingly sober Nick Nolte.

After that, Pan's Labyrinth seems kinda derivative.

This does not change my opinion on the awesomeness of Hellboy, though that's mostly because I'm a Ron Perlman fan, and Selma Blair is totally hot (no pun intended).

Re:What's the draw?

[psychodelicacy]

You're talking as though Tolkien's guiding principle should have been rationality. The introduction of magic at all seems to militate against such an interpretation. Why do you assume that magic has a ruleset?

As the parent said, Tolkien doesn't rely on magic constantly, but dips into it occasionally, revealing different aspects of his world's magical content. In order to be consistent, he would have to use magic a lot more often so that we can see what it can do, or have a character discuss the exact properties of magic, which would be a pretty clunky device. These things work in Harry Potter, but would have completely changed the character of LOTR, making it mainly a novel about magic and wizards rather than about the tensions between different peoples and their relationship to magical realms.

Re:What's the draw?

[Culture20]

Quenya and Sindarin, though very impressive [...], even with considerable circumlocution, could be used for few areas of daily human life. Then it's a good thing they were used in daily elven life.

Re:What's the draw?

[Haeleth]

With so much actual literature out there, what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein?

Movies are not targeted at fans of "actual literature", who generally prefer to consume their literature directly from the book, without the massive cuts required to cram it into 2 hours and the massive changes required to translate from a verbal to a visual medium.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

I teach English at Oxford University - one of the world's top universities, with anything but a "lame" English course. I teach Tolkien as part of courses on religious literature and medieval literature, and my students seem to find it a worthwhile exercise. As far as I'm concerned, Tolkien has every right to be studied on a good Modern literature course.

I'm sorry you find him unreadable, but trust me when I say that the vast majority of canonical English lit makes LOTR read like Janet and John! Being generally readable is not a necessary category for what we think of as "great literature".

Re:What's the draw?

[Admiral Ag]

I don't think any of them are anywhere close. The "Tolkien trick" is to be able to create the illusion of another world by layering the languages and pseudo history so much that it leaves the reader hanging. That's essentially the function of all the places in the books that are named, but where we never get to go, or the people we hear about in outline, but whose story is never told in full. It's an old fashioned scholar's book, and it is no surprise it is the work of a Professor of Old English (the joy of subjects like that is the fragmentary nature of history and language that we get to fill in for ourselves).

Tolkien is underrated as an author because he, by his own admission, set out to write a book in defiance of modern literature. That it accidentally became wildly popular earned him the enmity of the literary establishment. This is a shame, because the LOTR certainly deserves scholarly attention. It's just that most qualified scholars are put off by its popularity or have been trained to dislike it.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Hobbit was written in the late 20's and published in 1937. Making it an even more impressive work in my opinion.

Re:What's the draw?

[nomadic]

The fact that largely the same people are involved makes this a pretty reasonable assumption, no?

The problem is the source material isn't as strong. The Hobbit isn't nearly as good as LotR.

Re:What's the draw?

[TuringTest]

And The Hobbit would be 10 Base T. Wouldn't that be 13 Base Thorin?

Re:What's the draw?

[stevey]

Dune - another example of fine work by an author being spoiled by the posthumous "sequels".

Re:What's the draw?

[Mystic Pixel]

Whether or not you like the books comes down to personal preference; just because you find something 'unreadable' doesn't diminish its literary worth. I know there are fantasy writers out there who can craft some wonderful prose, but I seriously doubt that their works have anywhere near the historical and literary significance of anything Tolkien wrote. I'm not trying to say you have to like them; rather, I maintain that they deserve a certain amount of respect for a variety of academic reasons.

Re:What's the draw?

[Hemogoblin]

That's arguable; I've found the Hobbit is better than LotR in certain ways. For example, the fact that it's a shorter, more contained story helps keep my attention and provide closure. Compare this to the Two Towers, which doesn't really feel like it's going anywhere for a good 3/4 of the book.

Re:What's the draw?

[EEDAm]

Well the genre has been around that long and much longer absolutely yes. But I wouldn't want any overly-detail-orientated Slashdotee's to embark on reading the whole of the Odyssey for 'that stuff'. Response at the end of 12,000 lines of the Odyssey is likely to be in the region of 'WHAT?!?! NOT A SINGLE FRICKIN DRAGON, ELF *OR* MIDGET?!?!?!?11'

(You do however get some marvellous Sirens, Giants, Cannibals, generally hopped up gods and a lot of bad wind) :)

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have three degrees in English, and sometimes I still misspell Tolkien's name

Should of done German, then. Fucktard.

What kind of spastic gets three degrees in the same subject anyway?

Re:What's the draw?

[xSauronx]

I've been a fan of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings since I was a child, and I also find The Hobbit more enjoyable. Tolkien goes into *a lot* of detail anyway, and i skip over a majority of things in the Lord of the Rings that are descriptive of scenery and some other things.

Re:What's the draw?

[d'fim]

You remind me of the story of the young lady who went to see a production of Hamlet and came out of the theater saying "I don't understand why everyone thinks that play is so great -- it's just a bunch of cliches strung together!"

Re:What's the draw?

[Killjoy_NL]

Ah come on, those "sequels" were fun reads.
I didn't expect a literary masterpiece, just nice pulp and that's what I got :)

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't read, you insensitive clod!

Re:What's the draw?

[yankpop]

... what draws me to his works is the extreme depth and development ... Tolkien had the mythical history of Middle-Earth more or less figured out by the time LOTR was published to the extent that some of the languages are fully functional (Quenya and Sindarin especially).

There is nothing second rate about Tolkien, except perhaps to a world of small attention spans and desire for quick (and cheap) thrills...

When I was fourteen I would have agreed with you. I was totally captivated by the dwarvish runes and all that 'extreme depth'. But rereading the books twenty years later, it comes across as more than a little self-indulgent. Detail is a good thing when it adds texture and context to your story. But when you feel the need to inform your audience of the translations of every minor character's name in a half dozen fictional languages, that's taking it a little too far. Do we really need to know that Gandalf's half-brother's cousin's second wife is known as Wilma to the Dwarves of Khazaa Dum, and Betty to the Elves of Mirkwood?

Is my short attention span to blame for me not being endlessly fascinated by meticulous, excessive, and ultimately pointless details?

yp

Re:What's the draw?

[vain gloria]

The Hobbit is a much better story than LOTR. Just my opinion of course - LOTR drags on and on and on and on and on*

*and we must follow it who can?

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

That could explain some things. I never did find write-only a very workable design philosophy. Air guitar in particular just doesn't seem to work for me.

Re:What's the draw?

[genner]

Jackson managed toi do three movies well.
This guy made Blade 2......Blade 2!!!!


Hey Ho! To the bottle I go, To heal my heart and drown my woe

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

I'm afraid you hath lost me.

Re:What's the draw?

[hansamurai]

I actually just watched Pan's Labyrinth last night for the first time and thought it was pretty good. Never seen any of his other movies though.

I wonder if the Hobbit will also have random and unexpected acts of detailed violence? Bilbo smashes the face in of the last dwarf that enters his house with a tea pot? Gandalf shoots some fire through the stony trolls' heads to make sure they're really dead? That human hero gives the Smegol an even wider smirk, literally?

I kid, but that stuff really threw me for a loop in what I thought was a kid's fantasy movie set in WWII.

Re:What's the draw?

[hansamurai]

Just don't read that pop-up book about two girls and a cup.

Re:What's the draw?

[genner]

This grown man is actually a 6 year old girl! Where were you in Determining Age and Sex via Grammatical Construction classes? There are no girls on the internet only grown men pretending to be 6 year old girls.

Re:What's the draw?

[vtcodger]

***The Hobbit is a much better story than LOTR. Just my opinion of course***

Mine also. And it'll make a better motion picture I think. My wife doesn't mind fantasy. She was OK with the original Star Wars. She likes the Harry Potter films -- quite a lot. As we were walking out of the first LOTR movie she turned and said. "My God that was tedious. Why don't they just give him the damn ring and get on with it?" Needless to say, we did not see the other two installments

Re:What's the draw?

[dajak]

I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped.

I on the other hand find for instance the protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses lacking in great valor and of little legendary significance. The story is also terribly hard to memorize, which would certainly have made it a dud in the middle ages. And it is yet another ripoff of Homer's work. This is no problem however, since it really isn't an epic story despite the fact that it is modeled on an existing one.

Tolkien was reviving a magical realm from the dawn of (written) history. This is the realm in which the epic poems -- concocted by cultures to connect their known and written history to mythical ancestors and their great deeds -- are set. Most of his readers would have been completely unfamiliar with his universe. There is no place for character development in LOTR. It's not that type of story.

Good modern fantasy very often takes place in a universe based on Tolkien's that is intimately familiar to the readers and focuses more on characters. Still a very "small" story like James Joyce's Ulysses would not work if set in Middle Earth: the story needs a mundane background, just like most of 20th century great literature. Similarly, you cannot simply move for instance WWII literature to Osgiliath without it becoming cheesy.

Re:What's the draw?

[EnOne]

That was Blade:Trinity: Wesley Snipes, Jessica Biel, Ryan Reynolds. "She's making playlists. She likes to listen to MP3s when she hunts. It's like her own internal soundtrack. House, dance, trip-hop, whatever kids listen to these days. Me, I'm more of a David Hasselhof fan."

Re:What's the draw?

[geordieboy]

What are you talking about, exactly? I've seen both, and they're completely dissimilar. Not least because Northfork was unbelievably slow and visually drab. I like quirky art-house movies, but Northfork was just rubbish.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because stories without internally consistent rules suck ass. A character that seemingly behaves irrationally because the rules of magic dictate that he must is one thing, but having him behave irrationally because magic has no set rules other than what the author think is good for the story at the moment is another thing.

I'm not saying that every nuance of magic needs to be explained but if a character seemingly behaves irrationally there needs to be some kind of explanation. As I've only read the books once quite a while ago and don't remember them well I'll talk about the movie(s) instead. In the first move gandalf is only used as a walking flashlight until they meet the balrog when suddenly he can do other stuff than acting like a torch. He doesn't AFAICR use any magic when they are hunted by goblins why is he not using magic then and why is no-one else asking him to pull his weight?

The story doesn't have to be about magic because it's consistent or that inconsistencies are explained away hopefully before hand. Without internal consistency I have much more trouble suspending my sense of disbelief.

Re:What's the draw?

[just_forget_it]

Some people have the kind of personality that makes them automatically hate something because it's popular.

Re:What's the draw?

[sm62704]

Second rate fantasy? That's like calling a lexus a "second rate car".

BTW, whoever modded you "insightful" is going to lose his karma when the metamods get through with them. "Honest question" indeed? Nice troll there, fellow!

Re:What's the draw?

[h4rm0ny]

Hellboy was an excellent piece of work considering that it was a daft comic book adventure. Ron Perlman was great (as usual) and little details such as the rooftop conversation with the little boy changed the movie utterly from being a simplistic series of fights to something that genuinely made you laugh and get involved with the characters.

The problem with Guillermo doing The Hobbit is not that he would do a bad film - I'm sure that he will do as good an adaptation as he is allowed to do by producers and budget (though he will inevitably get slated by people who think the film should be just like the LotR films). No, the problem with Guillermo doing The Hobbit is that he wont be doing something else more unusual or unlikely. He is supposed to be getting on with an adaptation of H.P.Lovecraft's "At the Mountain's of Madness" and I personally would really like to see that. It's going to take someone of Guillermo's ability and heft to get this done properly. I'll be dissapointed if the Hobbit took its place.

Re:What's the draw?

[192939495969798999]

Rolls Royce doesn't make smart cars, so The Hobbit would have to be a Bentley lol. If Del Toro can make a Hobbit movie that has the cinematic feel of Pan's Labyrinth, that'd be good enough for me.

Re:What's the draw?

[morcego]

It is because despite the fact it indeed sucked, it carries a great appeal to Lovecraft fans.

Re:What's the draw?

[Silvrmane]

Amen brother. I've been waiting for an adaptation of At The Mountains of Madness for a long time.

Re:What's the draw?

[phayes]

The Hobbit is more of a child's book

That's because it was a story written for children.
I'm quite frankly amazed that given the number of JRRT adoring geeks on /. that so few are aware of his motivations & the order in which he wrote the hobbit & the LOTR. As JRRT was a linguist, he started by inventing a language, then inventing a world, characters & stories to breathe life into them. When, later in real-life he was exposed to a language that he found attractive he invented another language & rewrote his stories to explain how/why both languages came into being.
All the tales JRRT had been writing & rewiting & rewriting since the early 1920's form the rich backdrop that made the LOTR so interesting & made it so different from anything previously published. Christopher Tolkein cleaned up & published these after his father's death as the Silmarillion , Lost Tales, etc. All self respecting LOTR geeks should read these posthumously published books as they give great insights on JRRT's creativity.

Re:What's the draw?

[dajak]

Because the books are spoiled by all the crap they've influenced.

(I first read LOTR in 2004. It read like a transcript of a game of D&D.)

Good point. I read LOTR in 1984, and played D&D later. You can think of D&D as a generalization of the LOTR fellowship and the background it is set against to a "universe of fellowships". This trivializes the LOTR fellowship. In Middle Earth Gandalf is for instance a unique and for the readers of those days fundamentally new character, and in D&D he is the mold for the spellcaster in *every* little group. In 1955 an allegorical story about delivering the world from an unspeakable evil was relevant. Today you can save a virtual magical world from an unspeakable evil every weekend. Familiarity with Tolkien's universe and fellowships saving the world fundamentally changes the experience of reading LOTR.

Re:What's the draw?

[sm62704]

I found the LOTR trilogy difficult to get through.

So did my daughter the first time she read it. But then again she was only 9.

Re:What's the draw?

[Don_dumb]

I'm with you there, I love Pratchett. I've been going through them from The Colour Of Magic to the last Discworld book (just finished Going Postal) and while they have all been wonderful, the most popular book's are my least favourite.
Time and again he makes characters that I can imagine clearly and stories that are compelling enough to be genuinely thrilling. The heavy influence of science and satire just make them perfect for me.

IMHO the LOTR trilogy and The Hobbit are terrible reads that are overly detailed, I just couldn't care enough to read that much of either.
I always laugh at those who complain about the LOTR movies, as if someone could have done something better, without making them longer. The people who are complaining I doubt would ever like any LOTR film because the reason they like the books are exactly what would make them terrible films, which would be terrible. Kubrick was hated by many authors (esp King) because he didn't stick to the books, he messed with the script to make something different because he felt it was pointless to just dramatise the book. I must agree, as long as the nature, point of the story (if there is one) and the vision/world is maintained then the film should be able use artistic licence, according to my friends who have read the LOTR books in great detail, Jackson did just that. For contrast Troy would be an example of messing too much as he completely removed the supernatural element, which was crucial to the story.
I was never going to really love the televised Pratchett features as I have read them too much but I did enjoy them, especially if I ask myself what more could they have done - I can't really think of anything, other than detail that *isn't important* to the telling of the story. They did a good job.

I like Del Toro's work (what I have seen), I consider Pan's Labryinth to be the best film post-millenium I have seen but it seemed to be very much a personal story he wanted to tell. Hopefully he adds enough of his own imagination to make a great The Hobbit, and doesn't stick to rigidly to the book. Hobbit fans will not like it either way.

Re:What's the draw?

[sm62704]

without Tolkien most of what you call "actual literature" probably would never have existed.

How long was Mark Twain dead before Tolkien wrote The Hobbit? There have been literally hundreds of years of "actual literature" written in Englisn, and thousands of years of actual literature before what we now know as "English" was ever spoken.

Sometimes it's hard to tell trolling from innocent ignorance.

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

she turned and said. "My God that was tedious. Why don't they just give him the damn ring and get on with it?" Needless to say, we did not see the other two installments You are quite possibly the luckiest guy in the world. Congrats! Basically all of my friends are in love with LOTR. I saw the original 3 times with them, but after that all the hype just got to me.. I don't mind long movies at all, I usually enjoy the experience, but in this case I wouldn't want to put myself through all of them again.. Star Wars yes.. Harry Potter not quite either though (I loved the books, but the films have been getting steadily worse.. especially the last one, the directing was awful..)

Re:What's the draw?

[sm62704]

You should join the DAM

Mothers Against Dyslexai

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

I don't know, my ex-gf liked fucking with guy's minds online.. she kept a stalker hanging on for days.. nasty piece of work that she was :s

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad Analogy Guy also thinks Asimov sucks.

Re:What's the draw?

[David Gerard]

And that Sermon On The Mount. Every phrase is a cliche in English. What the hell. Couldn't Jesus get a more original scriptwriter?

Re:What's the draw?

[David Gerard]

That said, I thought the movies were fantastically good.

Re:What's the draw?

[sm62704]

And yes, it's Tolkien. If you can't spell his name correctly, I question your ability to criticize his work.

I was woindering what the GP was Tolkien, and if he's give me a hit?

Re:What's the draw?

[holyspidoo]

In the 50's, the sword was way mightier than the pen.

But now... oooooooh. Thanks to technology, we've pens far deadlier than any sword! They can kill an entire music industry with their mp3 playing capabilities and kill an entire movie industry with their movie capturing skills. Muwhahahaha!

Re:What's the draw?

[Lobster Quadrille]

I'm with you. I'm not into "period" novels. Somebody needs to write a book about middle-earth today, with all the technical advancements of the dwarves and elves over the last 50 years.

Elves with lasers.

It would be awesome.

Re:What's the draw?

[KillerBob]

If you compare The Lord of the Rings movies movies with other fantasy movies (book based or not), it is extremely well done with a minimal amount of cheese-ness that you expect from a fantasy movie.

In comparison to a lot of fantasy movies, yes. They were well done. In comparison to every other attempt at making a movie out of LOTR, they're absolutely amazing. In comparison to cinema at large, they were overbearing, filled with a poor attempt at grandeur, and pedantic. Then again, the original LOTR books were much the same... the difference, of course, is that once you get past the begats in the book, it gets entertaining. Sorry if you disagree, but 5h is too effin' long for a movie, and you could not pay me enough to sit through 15h of film to tell one story. Even the Godfather movies, which are better by leaps and bounds, total less than 10h between the three of them.

I, for one, am happy that Jackson isn't making the Hobbit movie. del Toro is a better director. The Hobbit is a better story. 'nuf said.

Re:What's the draw?

[ExecutorElassus]

I'm specifically talking about the story arcs of both, the generic outlines of the main characters, and so forth; visually, and in terms of pacing, they're totally different. But I prefer Tarkovsky to most other directors, and the Polish brothers are in that vein. If you've been dining on minimal film for a while, seeing something like PL feels like eating a four-course meal at Applebee's after subsisting on sushi. It's way too much, and feels unnecessary to tell basically the same story.

Re:What's the draw?

[street struttin']

not adult fantasy Thanks for clearing that up.

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

I haven't seen any of the televised Pratchett stuff yet, though early in the series I was thinking that they would make excellent movies (though you'd also need crazy budgets and effects for a lot of it). I was shocked that Hogfather was the first one, but happy that it was being done at least. I think they've done the Colour of Magic now? Must order it and have a look..

I'm happy to see that there are other well read types out there that also find LOTR a rather mundane read :) DiscWorld is full of satire on modern political and scientific issues as you say, it just keeps your mind going. I bet if I read the series again then I'd notice a few hundred more jokes that I just hadn't picked up on before. By the end of the series some of the word play was getting a bit predictable, but in a good way, just because I've started playing with words myself a lot more as I age. My humour has been heavily influenced by Pratchett - I love how he can joke on so many levels - from highly intellectual (chaos theory, quantum physics) right down to Nanny Ogg's cookbook ;)

Re:What's the draw?

[Goaway]

"Second-rate fantasy"? Have you looked at the other fantasy novels out there?

Re:What's the draw?

[dargaud]

Scratch-n-sniff porn I saw that once in a french Playboy copycat. Scary stuff. And wasn't that the main theme around the bestseller 'The perfume' ?

Re:What's the draw?

[Eccles]

The Road goes ever on and on
        Down from the door where it began.
        Now far ahead the Road has gone,
        And I must follow, if I can,
        Pursuing it with eager feet,
        Until it joins some larger way
        Where many paths and errands meet.
        And whither then? I cannot say. --Bilbo Baggins, on his eleventy-first birthday

Re:What's the draw?

[beckerist]

Del Toro's best when he's most weird (have you ever seen Mimic?!?!?) and I have to agree...the hardcore LOTR fans are going to flip if even minimal artistic license is used, and Del Toro will be put into a box that he might not be able to fit. I really hope this works, and I'm looking forward to seeing it, but I'm also bracing myself for bad reviews regardless of how it really is.

Re:What's the draw?

[leamanc]

The fact that largely the same people are involved makes this a pretty reasonable assumption, no? George Lucas was also involved in the original Star Wars trilogy, but you saw what happened with the second one.

Re:What's the draw?

[tmtm]

Another vote for Espinazo del Diablo. Great picture.

His 'Opera Prima' was another horror movie called Cronos

Worth to watch. Ron Perlman is also in that one. I believe this is how their relationship started.

If they give Del Toro and Jackson some creative liberties, the Hobbit has some potential.

Cronos is written/directed by Del Toro and 'Instruments' (do not want to spoil) designed by Jose Fords. Both artist of Guadalajara, Mexico

Re:What's the draw?

[MBGMorden]

A lot of shows "attributed" to Gene Roddenberry though are basically whatever they can scramble and piece together from any note he wrote when he was alive. The way I understand, there's just enough of his ideas put into shows like Andromeda to slap his name on it for promotional reasons, and that's about as far as the the association goes.

Re:What's the draw?

[DarthVain]

I don't think I have read any Leiber, but in the context of this discussion, if you come out with a Movie with any one of those names, or any one of those books (possible exception might be Zelazny Lord of Light), the response you would get is "Huh, who? No thanks". I liked Tolkien, but his stuff is getting made into movies due to a market that already exists and a public that knows of him.

Mind you "Left Hand of Darkness" does have the ring of a cool movie title, Oscar for sure!

Re:What's the draw?

[Wylfing]

Except that Christopher Tolkien didn't obliterate his father's work the way Brian Herbert did.

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

So she kinda meant "and we must follow if we can?", makes more sense. My sentence would also have read better as "thou hast lost me".

Re:What's the draw?

[LDoggg_]

The second book was the most tedious of the three. I think it was because Tolkien split it up into one interesting and one excruciatingly boring part. Half of it was all of the interesting characters, and the other half was just Frodo and Sam walking around.
I would have liked to see the two major plot lines interspersed a bit more.

That said, you should finish it up. The third book was excellent. The dialog during the battle of pelennor fields was amazing. And the ending was much different than what the movie showed.

Re:What's the draw?

[Knuckles]

I didn't say there's a guarantee.

Re:What's the draw?

[Gryle]

That's starting to change. This semester there was an upper-division English class at my university dedicated to studying the works of Tolkien.

Re:What's the draw?

[scotch]

I fell asleep in the theater during the first one. It was like "my god, the sets are beautiful ... snore"

Re:What's the draw?

[olclops]

I submit to you:

The Godfather, Part 3.

</mycase>

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try. But you got that joke here, and we all remember it.

Re:What's the draw?

[foniksonik]

The Dragonlance Saga, the original 4 books, mind you, was one of the best Fantasy epics of my childhood, though it is an homage and certainly a derivative work.

After that, certainly The Forgotten Realms series was a great world to dig in to and was by and large extended in a very entertaining way.

I did love Dune as well and a variety of other series but the above 2 were my favorite formative Fantasy epics.

Re:What's the draw?

[morari]

Finally, someone says it! Thank you!

I may be biased, but I find that the fantasy genre in general is rather shallow and cliche, Talkein's works included. Guillermo del Toro has proven that he can do truly great films, just watch Devil's Backbone or Pan's Labyrinth. Sadly, I feel that The Hobbit will be more akin to another Hellboy, which was yucky. The same goes for Peter Jackson though; Dead Alive and The Frighteners were wonderfully imaginative.

The Lord of the Rings is, sadly, just one big walking (and boy howdy is there plenty walking!) cliche after another. Not to mention the ridiculous reliance on CGI, which would quickly ruin any film. I'm far more interested in learning more about Toro's plans for "At the Mountains of Madness". So long as he stays away from that Hellboy style of directing, I think he could pull it off well.

Re:What's the draw?

[kklein]

I just watched it last weekend. Just want to add to the "good movie" pile. It left quite an impression on me, and I don't usually like fantasy movies at all (I don't get why anyone would like the LotR movies, for example--cheesy, IMO). It was remarkable. I can still feel it a week later.

Re:What's the draw?

[Shrubbman]

Del Toro didn't direct The Orphanage, here merely 'presented' it (sorta like like half the movies with Tarantino's name splashed across the cover).

Re:What's the draw?

[morari]

No, the problem with Guillermo doing The Hobbit is that he wont be doing something else more unusual or unlikely. He is supposed to be getting on with an adaptation of H.P.Lovecraft's "At the Mountain's of Madness" and I personally would really like to see that. It's going to take someone of Guillermo's ability and heft to get this done properly. I'll be dissapointed if the Hobbit took its place. Agreed. So long as Guillermo sticks to a more conventional directing style, as in Devil's Backbone or Pan's Labyrinth. The burden of heavily used CGI (ala Hellboy) would isntantly destroy the feeling of any Lovecraftian tale.

That said, take a look at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's film adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu. It's done as an old silent film and really came out awfully well. I believe that they're about to release their second film (a talkie this time), based on The Whisperer in Darkness.

Re:What's the draw?

[nickj6282]

Couldn't agree more. I found the Hobbit to be superior to the Lord of the Rings in many ways. The Hobbit was far more concentrated and therefore fun than LOTR. I read all of LOTR but couldn't tell you most of the details because entire chapters would go by that I couldn't remember reading, despite looking at every word on the page in sequence.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Opinion. Plain and simple opinion with no critical thought.

The Hobbit isn't nearly as epic in scale as LotR, but it's a solid story with good character development.

It's much more suited to film adaptation than LotR was mainly because it isn't so grandiose in scale. Fewer characters to follow and a much simpler plotline.

That LotR was as good as it was is nothing short of amazing. The Hobbit, with Del Toro at the helm and Jackson, Walsh, Boyen writing the script and producing, the film should be in good hands.

For all the liberties Jackson took with LotR, he approached the material with respect to it's source and to it's fans which is a major reason for it's success. I have no doubt they will do the same with The Hobbit.

Remember, we're dealing with Peter Jackson who is a lifelong film geek and not George Lucas who is really only out to make a buck... not good movies.

Re:What's the draw?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Honest question. With so much actual literature out there, what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein[sic]?

Tolkien's works are literature and I think calling them second rate is understandable, but somewhat misguided. Tolkien had a vision and he translated it to paper very well. He wanted to write new mythology, which would inspire the same way the mythology of old did and in which he could include parables and morality tales. In this, he succeeded admirably. Generations of people now recognize he mythological races and figures he created and have copied his vision. That is both impressive and interesting.

What Tolkien did not do was much in the way of character development. He was creating icons more than characters and it shows. All the orcs are evil, all the elves are good. Moral decisions are always clear cut and the main characters were created to epitomize innocence and good. Basically, it was pretty good when I was twelve. In conflict with this is that his works are dated and use language that can be a bit dense and difficult to parse for a modern reader.

Tolkien's work is fascinating because it was innovative and epic. More pertinent to this discussion, it is easily translatable to film; a special effects bonanza with a long story, but not much character development needed. From the movie studio's perspective it is perfect except for the lack of "hot chicks" but they can fudge that and aim it more at kids (who benefit from the simplicity).

I certainly would not put Tolkien's work in the same class as Camus, but I do want to see what Guillermo del Toro can do with the material.

Re:What's the draw?

[ProppaT]

This is highly debatable. I've always felt that Tolkien was a master story teller but a second rate writer. His writing style drives me up the wall and half way makes me wonder how these books became popular at all. The Hobbit is much more straightforward prose-wise (and story-wise) and is an immeasurably better read than most of his other work. It's also why I've always found his contemporary, C.S. Lewis, a much better author. C.S. Lewis can say more in a sentence than most people can in a paragraph.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Well, remember that LotR was originally one book comprised of 6 parts and the decision to be split into 3 books was made by the publishers.

LotR was always meant to be epic in every sense of the word.

The Hobbit was, for all intents and purposes, a bed time story for Christopher Tolkien that JRR eventually published.

Re:What's the draw?

[Avatar8]

Tolkien was the bridge between mythic literature and fairy tales which created what we know as the fantasy genre. He's credited with being the father of the modern fantasy genre, but others were doing similar work, mainly C.S. Lewis, but none to the depth that Tolkien did.

Tolkien took from Saxon, Finnish, Teutonic, Norse and Gallic mythos and combined and transformed them into a British mythos. More significantly he interwove religious belief, political statements and derision for industrialization into an epic struggle of several peoples. He developed a universe from his suggested pre-history of the United Kingdom and developed that world's own pre-history (Silmarilliion).

The grandest part of Tolkien's work is the language. The man lived for languages, so much so that he invented them. I'm not talking about a few hundred words like Klingon is today, but entire languages with real etymology and conjugation in oral and written form.

Add to this the attention to detail he had. He drew maps and made certain that the story could be followed geographically. He created the lineage of the main characters and made it possible to trace the accounts of the longer lived ones (Galadriel, Elrond). Having created a race half the height of an average person, he had continuity throughout all the books to take their size into account. He basically developed the world enough and provided enough details that any reader could imagine every part of it. Many fantasy authors have often done some part of it, but I cannot think of one who has done all this.

On top of all of this remember that the writing occurred from 1920's to 1950's, i.e. before most all modern fantasy writers were born. Every fantasy book since the publication of LOTR owes tribute to Tolkien. Tolkien is to fantasy what Jules Verne is to science fiction. The main difference is, Jules was simply predicting whereas Tolkien recreated the world and re-wrote history.

I read a great deal of fantasy literature. In everything I read, especially Eddings, I can easily pick out the portions that mimic Tolkien and his work. It can all be traced back to the Professor. Have others improved upon the genre? Sure, but most of the work was already done for them. I can easily make a wooden statue look great with a new coat of stain as long as someone else carved it for me.

The fact that the movie makers made a major effort NOT to alter the work significantly and there are so many voices complaining of the changes that were made indicates the *continued* widespread popularity and legacy of LOTR. I greatly appreciated the movies simply to bring the message of LOTR to the current generations who are intimidated by the English language (and Quenya)in its fullest form as Tolkien wrote it and it was written in that time period. Grammar is quickly becoming a lost art. Works like Tolkien's help to preserve it.

What's the draw? It was an unprecedented paradigm. It was an epic work. It canonizes the English language. It inspired, continues to inspire and will inspire millions and millions of people for centuries to come.

Re:What's the draw?

[evilninjax]

BLADE 2 was just awful, but i don't know that there was ANYTHING that could have been done short of a complete rewrite. But it did have a good look/feel to it.

HELLBOY and PAN'S LABYRINTH show that he's quite an adept director/writer. Although my one gripe is that in both, it felt that there were some story elements either cut from the final product or that he shortcutted thru some storytelling.

Anyone who hasn't checked out HELLBOY really ought to give it a chance; it's FAR better than i expected it to be, though i was hoping for more delicious Cthulhu-ness!

Re:What's the draw?

[ill stew dottied ewe]

That brings me back to working at my high school, we had one teacher (LD/BD reading) with her own network, a token ring that she insisted on calling "Tolkien Ring." It bound her room in darkness, and I spent a few days unmaking it and replacing the computers.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Divrocing contnet frum persentation is evul. CSS, may yoo rott in hell!! CSS doesn't hold the spelling and grammar, it's a formatting tool, if anything CSS helps people concentrate on getting the message correct, which includes all the basic things that make it readable. I tend to agree that spelling trolls are most often an unwelcome distraction, but he was commenting on the spelling of the proper name of a well known and respected author. In cases such as that, I for one, will take his side on it.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Well, the big difference with the prequels was the fact that George Lucas wrote and directed all of them himself... and he's a crap director.

Very few people will argue that Empire is the best of the 6 movies. Irvin Kirshner directed that. NOT George Lucas and Lucas had help writing from Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett.

Add to that the fact that he was mentored by Joseph Campbell and you're working on a whole different level than Lucas on his own.

When Lucas works on his own, he gets trite. The only good filmmaking he has ever really done was when he collaborated with others.... and American Grafitti.

And THX was a Kubrik knock off piece of garbage. Simple concept, overly stylized... Kubrik wannabe.

If Lucas wanted the prequel trilogy to be good, he'd have gotten someone like Ridley Scott to direct them and should have utilized some writing partners.

Re:What's the draw?

[hey!]

Well, there's money. That's a draw.

And maybe del Toro sees things in Hobbit you don't. People who despise a work are really not in a position to consider its useful possibilities. There are people who consider the whole fantasy genre as escapist trash, a viewpoint they are welcome to take, but I wouldn't rely on them to see the artistic possibilities of any fantasy work.

To address your question seriously, LotR is a post WW1 effort to address the issues of death and meaning, but rather than turning to modern ideas of psychoanalysis and existentialism, the author looks back to medieval poetry and late classical era thinkers, such as Boethius and St. Augustine. The connection might have escaped your notice.

The Hobbit is a children's story, but it is more sophisticated in its symbolism and linguistic sophistication than most people recognize. It is, in part, a reflection on Aristotelean virtue ethics. Examining the linguistic clues in the text, it becomes clear that the hero is a ordinary modern person, who by journeying into an archaic world lays claim to ancient heroic virtues, and confronts at the end of that journey modern viciousness (literally vice-filledness).

Of course, Tolkien as an author faces a challenge in the twenty-first century, a challenge that all authors of his influence do: many of his literary devices have been copied so often they are cliche. Still, there are very few authors who use those devices with such an unusual world view.

Re:What's the draw?

[SatanicPuppy]

I always wonder what people think is superior in terms of actual fantasy...99% of fantasy is pure pulp. Very little of it achieves anything like epic scope.

What do you consider the best of all time?

Re:What's the draw?

[evilninjax]

I think this is so true. And also explains why I never have enjoyed reading Tolkien very much. He spends a great deal of time and effort on the minutiae of the world, developing it so that there's no mistaking how it looks, what things are populating it, ... everything. And then spends a great deal of time with his characters wandering thru it, a middle-earth tourist document, if you will. I believe that is why those who love it do in fact love it: because it is so vivid and vibrant and complete. It's not JUST a story, it's an entire mythology.

For me, while i did enjoy quite a bit of it and i absolutely credit him with influencing most (if not all) fantasy afterwards, it's a bit tedious for me to get thru it all.

In high school i was quite a voracious fantasy reader. Terry brooks' Shannara is almost a complete rip of Tolkien but trimmed (watered?) down to a point that i actually enjoyed reading it more. I liked A SPELL FOR CHAMELEON quite a bit, Raymond Feist's MAGICIAN, Michael Moorcock though i wouldn't classify his work as great, Zelazny's AMBER, ...

Re:What's the draw?

[grassy_knoll]

Dude.

You have GOT to watch Blade 2 with the directors commentary on. It's hysterical! Del Toro talking about "the vampire Michael Bolton!" had me laughing like a maniac.

Re:What's the draw?

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Just go read The Silmarillion - excellent creation myth.

Re:What's the draw?

[CoolHnd30]

Yeah, I'd love to see some Elric of Melnibone movies... folowed by expanding to some other aspects of the eternal champion. Moorcock's books were definitely some mind-warping stuff to read back when I was a kid.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

A good director can save a bad script from becoming a total trash movie... but if the script just isn't up to snuff, no director can make a great movie out of it. The story just isn't there.

With a bad script, all a director can do is turd polish.

None of the Blade movies were actually bad. Sure, Blade was probably the best of them... but come on... these are Blade movies! They are filler. Their only purpose is to make you go "Ooooh! Cool!"

The characters are all one dimensional. That franchise is about entertainment and entertainment only. Blockbuster filler.

Fun to watch, but if you get bent out of shape over the quality of Blade movies, you need to step back, rent some Kubrick, Felini and Woody Allen movies and get some perspective. Or watch Raiders of the Lost Arc or Die Hard again at least.

Re:What's the draw?

[Bohabo]

I've never seen Blade: Trinity, now I'm sure to avoid it. Thanks. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be off to hang myself.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ulysses has "protagonists" in the plural. Maybe you should craft your analogies with something that you actually read instead of making glaring errors in your analysis from the beginning and throughout.

kthxbye

Re:What's the draw?

[SatanicPuppy]

Eddings wrote one series...Four times. Feist was better; I pretty much stopped after "Darkness at Sethanon" but up until then it was some quality work with excellent scope, and well developed characters.

Re:What's the draw?

[leamanc]

Rumor was that he asked Kershner to come back for the prequels, but Kersh declined due to age and being in semi-retirement.

Re:What's the draw?

[Gilmoure]

Hobbit 2: Bilbo Strikes Back!?

Re:What's the draw?

[boyko.at.netqos]

You know, there are better books than "The Canterbury Tales" but Chaucer gets some credit for being first.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Ugh. I understand people have preferences when it comes to fantasy.

What everyone needs to realize though is that without Tolkien, most of the pulp fiction fantasy writers that so many people love now would not be writing were it not for Tolkien.

Just like most guitarists today would not be playing were it not for Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen.

Most serious filmmakers are going to put Psycho and The Shining down as some of their top horror picks.

Artistic history is very important for the development of an art form. Sure, you may like Johnny Come Lately writer/filmmaker/musician more than the old masters and that's fine, but unless you dig into the historical works, you can't fully appreciate what you have in the modern arts.

I'm a huge Wes Anderson fan, but his style comes from obviously watching tons of Robert Altman and Woody Allen films... and 70's television. He combines these influences to great effect while adding his own unique style.

If I hadn't spent the time watching Allen and Altman movies, I probably wouldn't appreciate Wes Anderson as much as I do.

Re:What's the draw?

[Gilmoure]

I found a NOS HP Lovecraft album about 10 years ago at this used record store. Still wrapped and everything. Sweet!

So, Del Toro is getting together concert footage?

Re:What's the draw?

[SatanicPuppy]

He's hardly unknown. Unlike Leiber, you can still find him in your everyday Barnes and Noble. He and Wolfe have a strong family resemblance, imho, though I've read more Moorcock.

I'd still not put them up there with Tolkien, though I'll qualify that by owning up to having a background in classical literature. Lot of people are comparing Tolkien to Prachett (which hurts my brain since one aspires to the epic, and the other revels in satire) and I think one of the reasons is purely relative difficulty of the prose.

Re:What's the draw?

[boyko.at.netqos]

I want Bilbo played by Ron Perlman.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Tolkien was trying to do more than just "write a story" with LotR. He was literally trying to create a "Modern European Mythology". He was trying to write an epic tale that was alive beyond just story and plot.

He was trying to create an entire world, where the world was one of the characters and all the flowery stuff most people skip over was part of that character development.

Like it or not, you have to respect it.

Re:What's the draw?

[EricTheGreen]

I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped.

Like Beowulf? Or Sir Gawain? (and the Green Knight, for that matter) The Norse Aesir?

Critiquing Tolkein for supposed dodgy character development is rather missing the point...his models are historical epics and legendaria, not Don Quixote. The sweep of history and it's effects on it's participants is the thing to him, not necessarily the mental state of Frodo as he stood at the Crack of Doom. Or the specific worldview of Boromir as affected by the dysfunctional dynamics of his family of origin.

I would argue that casting his actors as somewhat tabulae rasae (and you are given just enough tantalizing background on most of the characters to at least have a jumping-off point) potentially deepens the reading experience--readers have to fill in the blanks, to the degree they are interested in/motivated to doing so. Sometimes it's the stuff left out which makes things interesting.

You're free to not like this school of writing, of course, but trying to pop him in the box of "only character-driven literature is worthy of the label" and then finding him wanting is myopic and unfairly constraining. There are many models of literature after all...

Re:What's the draw?

[ShadowsHawk]

Brazilian fart porn!

*credit to South Park for ruining the idea of internet porn*

Re:What's the draw?

[Gilmoure]

Gah! Have spent 20 years trying to get through Gormenghast. Can't make it through first book. Would rather read Fagel's translation of the Iliad, backwards than attempt Gormenghast again.

As for Tolkien, I pretty much just pick and choose different sections of LotR and Silmarillion to read.

Re:What's the draw?

[Tyler Durden]

The Orphanage was not directed by del Toro. He was one of the producers. (Thanks for reminding me of this movie BTW. I still want to see it).

He did direct another movie called The Devil's Backbone, which was also fantastic. (In both senses of the word). It's a lot like Pan Labyrinth without being devestatingly depressing.

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

I understand that, and like I said the Hobbit is a good book. I like Hendrix and Van Halen fine. I also like The Hobbit, and JRR Tolkien, though I am not a big fan of LOTR.

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

Yeah I would never have thought of Tolkien and Pratchett on the same level for the first few of his books, but like I said, DiscWorld became more than just a nonsense universe over time.

Re:What's the draw?

[Gilmoure]

Dwarves with laser beams stuck to their heads?

One thing that's always bugged me about LotR is that after thousands of years, there's not much population around. Weird!

Re:What's the draw?

[Jeff Carr]

So what would say is first rate fantasy then? George RR Martin. He's raised the bar of fantasy so high with his latest series that, while I love fantasy, I don't think the rest of it is really all that good in comparison.

Re:What's the draw?

[GLOCK8]

Honest question. With so much actual literature out there, what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein? I've a better question...why this hack? I can name a dozen BETTER directors than this sellout. Was it half-off day down at the director's guild? Well, I guess he's creating the popular images and towing the correct party lines, eh comrade?

Re:What's the draw?

[SatanicPuppy]

Hey, I love Prachett. I thought Thud was one of the best books I'd read in years. But it's still really satire; he's making a point about the real world as much as he's telling a fantasy story.

Tolkien created an immensely detailed fantasy world, and set an epic story of good and evil there. There have been plenty of other authors who've tried to do the same, and very few have succeeded on anything like the same level. Most of them just come off as unfortunate knockoffs.

Re:What's the draw?

[evolutionary]

Hmm, you forget that both LOTR and The Hobbit are considered classics. I agree Tolken only wrote two (or 4 or 7 depending on whose definition you define a book as Token defined LOTR as 6 books). But he put so much detail and yet left enough questions that you kept asking for more. He practically redefined the genre. Guillermo del Toro has done a consistent job in the past. I only hope he doesn't get sucked into the politics like Jackson did: When Jackson did LOTR, the first movie altered the story in silly but in tolerable ways (although deletion of the travel through the Dark Forest was appropriate as even Tolken admitted that Tom Bombabil was a character he loved but didn't really know where to put him so that chapter came out awkward. Like adding him for the sake of adding him). The 2nd movie was a complete sellout: all environmental issues (tolken was big on that), religion, philosophy, all such topics were moved from the 2nd movie which left it little more than a long drawn scene of battle. The 3rd book..jeez...he deleted some of the politically most important sections of the book and did a bit of a whitewash on the rest. If Token had been alive I'm certain he'd withdraw the rights before the movie was released of this stuff wasn't fixed but his son..well..he getting rich off this I'm sure. Tolken always did maintain that it would be impossible to make a proper movie of the book and so far he is still correct. I hope that del Toro has enough respect for the author to leave Tolken's vision intact. As this is a children's book this shouldn't be too hard as long as he doesn't sell out like Jackson did. Hopefully he will bear in mind that a mostly decent animated version of the film was already done by Rankin/Bass in the late 70's and based on that he will add touches similar to Pan's Labyrinth which could potentially have elements to make this movie a true classic. But since Jackson has been a let down before and he is involved...well..fingers crossed.

Re:What's the draw?

[Ardeaem]

I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped. You miss the point. LOTR was never about the characters. It was about the development of a coherent mythology. Are Jupiter, Thor, or Odysseus "developed" characters in their respective mythologies? Of course not, and they were never meant to be. Other fantasy books don't "surpass" LOTR, they come from a different literary tradition (somewhat ironically, though, many take advantage of the same archetypes that Tolkien developed...)

Re:What's the draw?

[es330td]

But he wasn't a great wordsmith. This statement makes me question how much you even know. While he may not have been the most moving or poetic speaker, if you knew anything about his command of English you would beg forgiveness for this statement. His writing in LotR has subtlety few, if any, will ever fully understand. I got to see his friend and colleague, Tom Shippey, the man who inherited Tolkien's chair at Oxford give a lecture on "LotR and language" and the respect he held for Tolkien was clear and without bound. The most significant thing people came away with from that lecture is how little most of us know about English relative to Tolkien, and this audience was mixed college student and Ph.D holding faculty.

Re:What's the draw?

[vux984]

Even the Godfather movies, which are better by leaps and bounds, total less than 10h between the three of them.

You must not have actually watched Godfather III. "leaps and bounds"? I think you mean "jumped the shark".

And as good as the Godfather movies are, they do drag on, if you aren't in the right mood to watch them. LotR is the same, you've really got to be in the right mood.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Finally! Someone comparing Tolkien and Herbert!

I think all this talk of "who is the better fantasy writer" is actually kind of hilarious. I gobbled up sci-fi and fantasy as a teenager. I couldn't get enough. But in my mid-30's now, the only names that still stick with me are Tolkien, Herbert, LeGuin and Azimov.

They seemed to write beyond the genre. Philip K. Dick? I started reading him later, early 20's and I simply couldn't do it. Interesting ideas, but everything was so science-fictiony.... gimmicky. It called attention to itself and revealed itself as genre.

Now, PKD books are a great source of material for sci-fi movies though because you don't have to see him use his overly "genrefied" language and you can dig into the world and characters with pictures rather than silly words like "zap gun". In a movie, the thing is just a gun. You see it rather than read it's name.

Back to Dune... that whole series was amazing. So massive in scope and prophetic of world events to come. It was like a spy novel, economics and ecology textbook, and sci-fi novel all rolled into one. Again, epic! Lots of detail to get lost in. Lots of history, sociology and politics to track.

Herbert's universe was as vast and intriguing as the history of Middle Earth to me. Again, the place was as much a character as the people.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Yeah, the guy is kind of ancient unfortunately. Still, wouldn't have been able to overcome the fact that Lucas destroyed his own universe.

Come on! Mitichlorians? The Force? Bacteria? It was supposed to be some wild Zen mystical power... not an infection!

Re:What's the draw?

[Mattsson]

LoTR where intentionally made to make everything feel real.
El Laberinto del fauno gives you an eerie, unreal feeling. I think this is intentional too...

Anyway, central characters like the Faun and the Pale man were costumes, not computer generated.

Re:What's the draw?

[MozeeToby]

And that is exactly what makes Tolkien so special, the background is there even if it isn't expressly told in the story. The mythology of LotR goes back to the world's Genisis and many, many things are left out of the books for obvious reasons.

The important thing is that there are consistent rules that are being followed, not that the reader knows what they are. In Gandolf's case (if I remember from the Silmarillion correctly), he and the other sorcerers were sent the Middle earth by the Valar (essentially God's emissaries on Earth) to organize and inspire the people of Middle earth in their fight against Sauron. They were expressly forbidden from using their magic to directly opose Sauron; which explains why his powers are used only infrequently.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was only one snag and that was Snag-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Boromir was crazy and could return to Minas Tirith. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fight orcs. Boromir would be crazy to fight more orcs and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fight them. If he fought them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Samwise was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Snag-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some snag, sir, that Snag-22," Samwise observed.

"It's the best there is," Frodo agreed.

Re:What's the draw?

[Fozzyuw]

The problem is the source material isn't as strong. The Hobbit isn't nearly as good as LotR.

Actually, I think most story teller experts would probably consider the Hobbit superior in story telling elements than LOTRs which gets lost in it's epic size.

Re:What's the draw?

[shystershep]

There's a reason that the LotR series developed an enormous cult following, while most people have not ever even heard of the Gormenghast series. The actual writing, on a micro scale, is arguably far better in the latter, but the story is rather less engaging than a ten-year-old New York City phonebook -- and feels twice as long. I'll take a storyteller with a good yarn to spin over a writer trying to impress me with language any day of the week.

Re:What's the draw?

[ucblockhead]

You could have removed all of the fantasy elements and still had the core of a damn good historical movie. The last time I can remember such a well dome melding of fantasy and harsh reality was Peter Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures".

Re:What's the draw?

[ucblockhead]

Personally, I prefer fantastic literature by people who took after Mervyn Peake. Most of the Tolkien derivatives are ghastly. Tolkien has had far less influence on modern fantasy than you imply.

Re:What's the draw?

[ucblockhead]

Ghastly modern fantasy usually takes place in a universe based on Tolkien's...it has unfortunately become the refuge the hack writer. The top fantasists tend to take their inspiration from elsewhere.

Re:What's the draw?

[Chris Burke]

They were extrapolating from the OP's statement that Tolkein is "second rate" fantasy, that the OP believed there was "actual literature" in the fantasy genre that would be better chosen. They were obviously not saying that Tolkein was the progenitor of all "literature" in a general sense; that would be unbelievably stupid.

Sometimes it's hard to tell the innocent pedantry from the deliberate failures to understand.

Re:What's the draw?

[Sethus]

He certainly isn't a Tolkien - his stories are much more personally involved, his magic more interesting, his geographical descriptions not quite so boring.. :p

It's funny, I read Feist long before I read Tolkien, so all magic and awe of reading about those cultures for the first time was lost. Personally I found it to be a fair read, but it wasn't some jaw dropping enlightenment for me (but give props to Tolkien for thinking it all up). Going back and reading Feist now is actually really interesting though, go read up on what a 'Mary Sue' is and then go examine every single female character he had with the exception of the Acoma series. Feist is terrible about writing his female characters flat. (not their chests you perverts)

Re:What's the draw?

[Lord Apathy]

That was Blade:Trinity: Wesley Snipes

I liked most of the Blade movies. Pretty good "put your brain in neutral and enjoy the ride" type of movie. I was sort of hoping there would be another but I think we can almost safely say that it will be a while. Say.. 3 years....

Re:What's the draw?

[Lord Apathy]

Ron Perlman was great (as usual) and little details such as the rooftop conversation with the little boy changed the movie utterly from being a simplistic series of fights to something that genuinely made you laugh and get involved with the characters.

I think I can get behind that. That scene and where "father" gets its were excellent. I went to see Hellboy with the expectation of leaving my brain at the door and watching the big red monster beat up on the bad guys. Hellboy ranks up there as one of my all time favorite romantic comedies. Right next to Aliens. That would be romantic comedy as oppose to just plan romantic such as Debbie Does Dallas.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

And people could just as easily say Kirk, Uhura, Spock, etc. are shallow and undeveloped. That's how it is when you are one of the major pioneers in any genre or medium.

They were--compared to the sci-fi available at the time.

ST:TOS came out in 1966. Much of Asimov's stuff came out in the 1950s; Starship Troopers in '69 and Stranger in a Strange Land came out in '61; Dune was published in 1965. Le Guin also published much in the '60s.

ST:TOS was revolutionary television for its time, but that's more of an indictment of the medium of TV than it a compliment is of the quality of ST:TOS.

It certainly did help the genre along, being a "gateway drug" of sorts, helping to raise awareness of space and science in general (since we weren't even on the moon when it first aired). But saying that it was good quality from a sci-fi perspective is probably too much.

Re:What's the draw?

[nomadic]

Opinion. Plain and simple opinion with no critical thought.

Pure flamebait. I disagree with you so there must be no legitimate reasons why I feel the way I do? And of course it's an opinion, it's a statement about the relative merits of two different works of literature, what exactly else would it be?

There are several problems with the Hobbit that Lord of the Rings did not have; writing for children requires a different skillset, one that Tolkien didn't really have. Note the clumsy use of the omniscient narrator (such as the overly cutesy way in which the narrator addresses the reader) and the way he tried stuffing too many things into it without giving them the space they deserved.

I'm somewhat surprised you find the character development in the Hobbit anything special. The only character we get any insight into is Bilbo; Gandalf pops in and out and is fairly two-dimensional, the dwarves are completely flat, and everyone else gets so little time to do anything almost nothing is shown of their character at all. And in regards to Bilbo's character development, Tolkien violated what is one of the most important rules a writer should follow: show, don't tell. Instead of constantly telling us what Bilbo was thinking or feeling it would have been more effective to actually show us through the story.

Now he did this in LotR as well, but when you're talking about an epic narrative, with dozens of characters, that style of writing comes off as more natural.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, that will really help the Brazilian Fart Fetish porn industry.

Re:What's the draw?

[raddan]

You know, I hear this criticism of Star Trek a lot, but in my opinion (from an admittedly pro-Trek standpoint), there's a lot more character depth than you'd see at first. If you're quickly turned off by, say, Kirk's melodrama, and you stop watching, then you're going to miss the better, more candid moments. Star Trek II, for example, where there's a subtext of old age and death vs. new life. The original series, I think, is remarkable for TV of that time for showing characters with their flaws. Kirk often makes the wrong decisions-- there's one episode where Spock repeatedly makes wrong decisions resulting in all of the red shirts in a landing party being skewered by savage aliens. Then, there's the love-hate tension between Spock and McCoy, which was revisited in Star Trek III. I could go on, but I think I might seriously jeopardize my opinion of myself... ;^)

Re:What's the draw?

[morari]

If anyone can be accredited to truly pioneering the so-called fantasy genre, it would be Lord Dunsany. Of course, in that case, influence can obviously be traced back to more classical mythology, namely the Greco-Roman pantheons. Saying that Tolkien is the foundation for which without nothing else would exist is just the ignorant ramblings of an offended individual.

Tolkien's work, for better or for worse, is cliche. Don't concern yourself with the variety of races--all based in folklore--but with the overly simplistic plots that they follow. Also, let's not forget just how questionable the quality of his writing style itself is. Of course, perhaps these things were in fact what you had in mind, because I'll admit that most work found in the fantasy genre is extremely trite and cliche. Hardly the legacy one would desire, I think.

If you like Tolkien, that's fine. Read whatever you want, he certainly did have some standout moments in the vast body of work he put out. But don't for a minute believe that literature without him would be sorely lacking, because it wouldn't. Nothing he did was of any ideological importance, but was merely fluff with some strained allusions and metaphors sprinkled about.

Re:What's the draw?

[Smauler]

Isn't their slogan : "Dyslexics of the World, untie!"?

Yes, I will be here all week, for your sins.

Re:What's the draw?

[1u3hr]

I dispute the "created a whole genre" stuff. You're saying absolutely no one wrote a book about dragons, elves, and midgets before 1945?

Just a moment, let me check... No, I didn't say that.

I'll leave you to argue with your strawman. Have a nice day.

Re:What's the draw?

[1u3hr]

interesting that all the authors you list are, I'd contend, as well or better known for their SF

Not really surprising, I read a lot more SF than fantasy. So naturally if I came across an SF writer in another genre I was more willing to give them a try. Poul Anderson and even Robert Heinlein are known for their hard SF, and wrote some excellent fantasy. Larry Niven turned his hand to it too, entertaining though not so successful as his SF. And the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction gave writers a market and encouragement to cross genres.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's difficult for most to understand about literature, as to say Steinbeck and Hemmingway were not greats but giants among greats.

It's the same with Tolkein; merely based on fantasy, not literary, quality.

Re:What's the draw?

[sm62704]

But fantasy literature has been around for hundreds of years or even thousands of years.

Re:What's the draw?

[1u3hr]

I don't think I have read any Leiber, but in the context of this discussion, if you come out with a Movie with any one of those names

That isn't the context. I was answering a post about great writers. Not about who has name recognition or could get a movie greenlighted.

Mind you "Left Hand of Darkness" does have the ring of a cool movie title, Oscar for sure!

Le Guin has had a few of her books made into movies, but most have been mediocre at best, sadly. No reflection on her.

Re:What's the draw?

[h4rm0ny]

Heh! I already have the HPLHS' Call of Cthulhu. It's short, but a lot of fun. The making of is actually quite interesting, too. I saw a trailer they did for "The Whisperer in Darkness" and it was indeed a talkie. However, it doesn't seem to be available to buy yet. They may be waiting for some convention or something? Who knows... Anyway, their site is a gold mine of things to download and things to buy. My favourite simply has to be the Elder Sign Thong. Tagline: "Cause you don't want Shoggoths in your panties."

Run by very nice people, too. Definitely worth a look for anyone who "gets" Lovecraft.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Torrent here, for those who are inclined. :D

Re:What's the draw?

[1u3hr]

But he wasn't a great wordsmith.
This statement makes me question how much you even know. While he may not have been the most moving or poetic speaker...

And that statement makes me question what your point is.

"[H]e may not have been the most moving or poetic speaker". That's what I meant. He was a great writer in many ways. Not in EVERY way, though.

Re:What's the draw?

[BrianGKUAC]

Oddly enough, Ryan Reynolds makes that movie worth watching. It needed some comic relief to bring it from the depths of shark-jumpage.

Re:What's the draw?

[DarthVain]

Well as far as science fiction and particularly fantasy novels I can't think of any that have been movies better than mediocre at best, sadly.

Lord of the Rings, so far as I know is the best Science Fiction/Fantasy Movie adapted from a novel.

I am not including those that could be called "Historical" (air quotes there for creative licence within movies).

There are some out there, I liked Starship Troopers (even though many people did not).

One of the worst screw ups I thought was Battlefield Earth. I mean LOTR was basically 3, 400 page books made into 3, 3-3.5 hour movies, or 1200+ pages into 10+ hours of film. Battlefield Earth they tried to stuff another 1200+ page book, but this time into less than 1 hour 30 minutes. They were surprised that it sucked?

As for pure fantasy... I can think of none. Though maybe I am not trying hard enough...

Re:What's the draw?

[Don_dumb]

Hogfather was the first TV adaptation because Sky could roll it out over Christmas and justify spending the most they have ever spent. They also used UK television alchemist Sir David Jason (synonymous with Christmas TV in the UK) who is himself a Pratchett fan. It rated very well and did win a BAFTA (UK EMMY, Sky don't get many). Also Hogfather allows for a self contained story which doesn't require a knowledge of any of the books and takes place mostly indoors (cheaper to film).

They just aired The Colour Of Magic here in Britain over Easter in two parts, the second was actually The Light Fantastic, they had to bypass some of the bits of the books but it didn't really matter, they so much to get in and the guy who played Cohen the barbarian was fantastic, they even inserted jokes which weren't in the books. My only real criticism of it would be Rincewind played by Sir David, perhaps I have never been his greatest fan but he just didn't seem right. Still they did do a good job and I would recommend checking them out, it is also worth seeing "the making of" as they do explain some of the artistic choices they made (such as Death being 'warmer' than he was in the early books). I would like to see a witches tale next, shouldn't need too much CGI and they could get in a fair amount of new humour which does help as sometimes jokes fall flat if you have already know them.

Re:What's the draw?

[irenaeous]

If you can't spell his name correctly, I question your ability to criticize his work.

I'm dyslexic, you insensitive cold!

Hmm.. are you agnostic? and have insomnia? Do you stay up at night wondering if there is a dog?

Re:What's the draw?

[russellh]

I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped.

That is because they are.

I understand that LOTR is immensely popular--I just found the books bordering on boring (which is a shame, I really wanted to like them).

I must have read LOTR at exactly the right point in time - when I was 33 or so - and it was as great a reading experience as I've ever had. Even though all the negatives people point out about the books, er most of them, I agree with. The biggest problem I have with it is that it is written in the style of old epics, in which the victors are as gods and the bad guys are as demons (literally, in this case, right?) The men of the West, you know, are tall, wise, serious, and of pure bloodlines. Lesser men are of impure blood - shorter, slant-eyed southerners, swarthy, etc. It is absurd. It is not even fantasy, when I look at it from this point of view. It's ridiculous retro epicpunk.

But I love it still. I like the fact that some mysterious things aren't explained, like that Tom Bombadil guy (I haven't read any of the backstories, and don't really intend to). I like the fact that when walking through the barrow downs Tom paused as if he remembered something sad about the ruins there. 'Cause he was there, he said, even before those long-gone warring kingdoms that were there. There are enough details there to wonder about, with an interesting setup and environment, and I suppose I like to think about what it could be.

Re:What's the draw?

[Darinbob]

I want Bilbo played by Ron Perlman. Ow, my brain hurts!

Re:What's the draw?

[Darinbob]

Preconceptions and background are always important. I went on a date to see Superman 2 once with someone from Europe completely unfamiliar with American comics. Afterwords she said "that was really strange, do they really expect us to believe that a man can fly?"

Funny considering that the advertising line for Superman 1 was "you will believe that a man can fly"...

Then there was the time in school when we asked a Bengali student to come with us to see Rocky Horror. Afterwords we asked him how he liked it and he said "it was ok, but I thought you guys said 'Rocky 4'".

Re:What's the draw?

[Darinbob]

Both Tolkien and Pratchett make you think. With Tolkien, thinking is a prerequisite to reading his books. With Pratchett, thinking is a necessary consequence of reading his books.

Re:What's the draw?

[SilentBob0727]

Is it possible to die from negative mods?

Re:What's the draw?

[Chris Burke]

Yes, also obvious. Do you still not understand what they were saying?

Re:What's the draw?

[Randle_Revar]

In case you hadn't noticed, The Hobbit is fundamentally a fairy tale to be read aloud to kids at bedtime. And adults that enjoy that sort of thing may like reading it outside of that context.

Re:What's the draw?

[SpeedBump0619]

Of all the comments that deserve "+5 Flamebait" this one is it. Absolutely *phenomenal* troll. You managed to soak up a vast quantity of moderation.

Bravissimi!

Re:What's the draw?

[Randle_Revar]

LOTR drags on and on and on and on and on

LotR was not nearly long enough, which is why I am reading all of the lost tales, etc.

Re:What's the draw?

[Rich0]

last parts of book or movie are really painful to watch due of this

I actually didn't really feel this when watching the end of the movie. Maybe this is because Frodo is becoming so lost to the ring progressively in the movies that the final betrayal doesn't really come as a surprise. In the book Frodo is much more loyal to Sam up until the end, making the betrayal more unexpected. At least, that is my impression at the moment - perhaps those who have read the book a few more times than I have might feel differently...

Re:What's the draw?

[Quikah]

none of the movies were 5hrs long...

Re:What's the draw?

[Randle_Revar]

Thousands of years after the first Homo sapiens appeared, the population was still low.

Also, massive wars against Morgoth can severely reduce your population.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eww. Pan's Labyrinth was disgusting and dark in the worst sort of way.

Re:What's the draw?

[monoqlith]

Really? While I don't doubt Tolkien's status as one of the great authors of the 20th century, I'm fairly sure he was writing in the early-mid 20th century, when great literature had already been being written for 3000 years. I think you're overstating his literary importance here.

Re:What's the draw?

[Randle_Revar]

allegorical story

Tolkien didn't do allegory.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every post is a repost repost?

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

NOT A SINGLE FRICKIN...MIDGET?!?!?!?11'

(You do however get some marvellous ... Giants ... and a lot of bad wind)

Duh! It was told from the perspective of the midgets.

LOTR--yet another blatant Odyssey ripoff.

Re:What's the draw?

[raftpeople]

Agreed, sometimes I would be asleep at the wheel while reading. For example, it wasn't until reading it for the 3rd time that I realized Tolkien had just detailed a 3-way encounter between Frodo and 2 elf maidens.

Re:What's the draw?

[Eco-Mono]

Just the plausibility of that makes me want to punch a building.

Re:What's the draw?

[Randle_Revar]

Tolkien and Pratchett are probably my top two favorite fantasy (book) authors. My only (terribly weak) complaint about Discworld is that there isn't enough background - although I haven't yet read any of the ancillary books.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather see him develop more of his own ideas following along the lines of Cronos, Devil's Backbone, and Pan's Labyrinth than yet another adaptation. If you look at IMDB ratings, these films are at 6.7, 7.6, and 8.5. So his next original work should be 9.4, and hence the greatest movie ever made.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

shortcutted? Impressive. Cut short perhaps?

Re:What's the draw?

[Randle_Revar]

Care to give book recommendations for those authors?
I have not read anything by any of them except The Wizard of EarthSea, which I couldn't stand.

Re:What's the draw?

[Randle_Revar]

I just can't understand the love for Martin. I read maybe half of A Game of Thrones, and then gave up (and a book has to be really bad to make me stop in the middle).

Re:What's the draw?

[Randle_Revar]

>Detail is a good thing when it adds texture and context to your story.

Detail is always good, as long as it is not repetitive (last half of the sentence courtesy of Robert Jordan not having a good editor).

> But when you feel the need to inform your audience of the translations of every minor character's name in a half dozen fictional languages, that's taking it a little too far.

No, you have gone just about far enough, although a little farther wouldn't hurt.

>Do we really need to know that Gandalf's half-brother's cousin's second wife is known as Wilma to the Dwarves of Khazaa Dum, and Betty to the Elves of Mirkwood?

Gandalf had no known siblings, even in the loose sense used by the Maia. If he did, however, yes, we would need to know all that.

>Is my short attention span to blame for me not being endlessly fascinated by meticulous, excessive, and ultimately pointless details?

Maybe.

Re:What's the draw?

[n0nsensical]

I want Bilbo played by Ron Jeremy. fixed.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

When you just say, "The problem is the source material isn't as strong. The Hobbit isn't nearly as good as LotR." and cite no reasons... I say "Opinion. Plain and simple opinion with no critical thought."

Your follow up better illustrated your opinion. I actually prefer LotR as well and think it is a much better crafted piece of literature, but I love the Hobbit. It was a fun read and a great introduction to the series for me at age 7. I reread it every so often and I give that book to all of my friends when they have their first child. I still love the book.

It's a children's book essentially, but a story that even an adult can enjoy.

Is it comparable to Joyce or Pynchon in terms of sophistication? Of course not. It was written for an entirely different purpose and audience. It's not hardcore literature, but a very fun read, especially aloud to another person.

I got to read some to my two year old nephew recently and you should have seen his eyes light up while I did it.

THAT was magic.

If I read one page of LotR to him, he'd be asleep in no time. Maybe I should suggest that to my sister in-law.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

CS Lewis was a great writer indeed and the Narnia books were a lot of fun. They seemed to lack the sheer scale and epic feel that LotR did.

I also think his use of (then) modern day children undermined people's impression of his tales as serious literature. A progenitor to the Harry Potter effect.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Fall '02 is when they were introduced.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

I call those films "Movies to eat popcorn to" and I love popcorn, so any reason to eat popcorn works for me.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

With careful use of forced perspective, it could happen.

Peter Jackson's crew actually invented the forced perspective with a moving camera trick while filming LotR, so if anyone could do it, it would be this gang.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Which means that he pumped in some cash to the production and probably bought the insurance policy.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

None of the theatrical releases of LotR were 5 hours long either.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

A grown man who reads Eddings? Wow, you really do see something new every day.

You make it sound like he admitted to reading Xanth novels.

Re:What's the draw?

[Boronx]

In many places he mimics the style of ancient English stories and sagas, which he loved and devoted his career to. The difficulty of his writing is likely deliberate.

Anyway, I used to feel the way you do, and it certainly is true that the Hobbit is an easier read and better paced as a story, but over the years I've come to believe that The Lord of the Rings is a masterpiece, one of the great works of art of the last century.

Re:What's the draw?

[Boronx]

They are both great books. I reread LoTR recently, though, and found the parts I used to think were boring were now my favorites. My new favorite part, Tom Bombadil joking around with the ring, is *always* cut out of adaptations.

Re:What's the draw?

[nomadic]

Your follow up better illustrated your opinion. I actually prefer LotR as well and think it is a much better crafted piece of literature, but I love the Hobbit. It was a fun read and a great introduction to the series for me at age 7. I reread it every so often and I give that book to all of my friends when they have their first child. I still love the book.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the Hobbit; I think it's an excellent book. I just think as a piece of literature LotR is better, and I do find something wrong with his writing style, which I think is too cutesy even for children. It's possible to write great children's literature without being overly precious.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Now that you've explained yourself, I can totally see where you're coming from.

I might not agree, but respect your opinion nonetheless.

Re:What's the draw?

[Kelson]

He is supposed to be getting on with an adaptation of H.P.Lovecraft's "At the Mountain's of Madness" Damn. While I was very happy to see that del Toro was officially on-board for The Hobbit...if it came down to that or At the Mountains of Madness, I'd rather cut the Hobbit loose.

I really hope he can do both.

Re:What's the draw?

[ProppaT]

Oh, I agree with what you say 100%. Tolkien is a better storyteller. His books have an epic feeling that few people can come close to. C.S. Lewis isn't a better storyteller; however, C.S. Lewis is a much better writer in the sense of someone who has a way with words and prose.

The only thing that upsets me with the career of C.S. Lewis is how he's been passed of as merely a Christian author.

Re:What's the draw?

[ProppaT]

I don't have a problem with the difficulty of his writing (two of my favorite authors are William Faulkner and Tony Morrison), I just have a problem with his prose in general.

I've read "the trilogy" twice now. The first was a difficult read because I didn't know where he was going. The second was dissapointing, because I knew where he was going and felt about 1/3 of the book was pointless. Some of the details seemed pointless in the context of the book itself (although I realize many of them are expanded upon in the rest of his works). Basically, I wish that Tolkien had an editor.

Re:What's the draw?

[owlstead]

Yeah, so did I, the first couple of times.

Re:What's the draw?

[jafac]

. . . not to mention very detailed geneaologies (some dating back to the "dawn of time" in his universe) of pretty much all of the protagonists, and many of the minor characters as well, (it's beyond me why he didn't take the time to tell us about Uglik the orc-chieftan's neices and nephews, great grandparents including historical lineage back to the great orc-lords of the ancient world. . . )

Re:What's the draw?

[1u3hr]

Care to give book recommendations for those authors? I have not read anything by any of them except The Wizard of EarthSea, which I couldn't stand.

Well, that's one of Le Guin's best so obviously there's no point in recommending others of hers.

As for the rest:

• Fritz Leiber: the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories ("Swords and Deviltry", etc)
  Actually these, like much of his work, were originally short stories. Look for his anthologies.
• Michael Moorcock: He does stories on several styles. Pschedelic: The Jerry Cornelius books; dark heroic fantasy: the Elric stories; historical fantasies: "Gloriana".
• Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (4 books, could be considered science fiction rather than fantasy).
• Roger Zelazny: light hearted sword and sorcery: The Chronicles of Amber; religious themed: "Lord of Light", "Creatures of Light and Darkness".

Re:What's the draw?

[AiToyonsNostril]

If anything, it's a ripoff of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, with some Aeneid thrown in for a good measure. The siege of noble Troy by those swarthy, marauding hordes? Hector's oft-mentioned love for horses versus the Rohirrim?

Also, the Odyssey had sirens and nymphomaniac sorceresses. Shouldn't fanboys eat that up?

Re:What's the draw?

[dwye]

Roger Zelazny: pure Sword and Sorcery: Dilvish the Damned, The Changing Land
                            with a bit of modernism: Changling and Madwand

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

Yeah I guessed he was a fan since he was in both. I didn't think he was really a very Rincewind like character either, as Rincewind is generally portrayed as a skinny nimble little bugger :p I'm in the UK too btw.

The witches books were excellent.. any of the Watch books would probably be quite easy to televise too (apart from the trolls perhaps!).

Re:What's the draw?

[celticchrys]

C.S. Lewis was a splendid writer indeed. I love his work absolutely. However, to say that Lewis was a better author than Tolkien is quite a statement to make. Lewis was about the individual story. Tolkien was about these individual stories _as part of the vast epic whole_. Their style and intent differed, yet they were friends and both part of the same writing group. Lewis targeted someone wanting a good story that was delightful and easy to read. He was better at staying on target as a children's author. Tolkien began by telling his children stories, but his mind worked on a larger scale, leaping from the stories of individuals to the stories of societies. There is a completely different manner of delight to be had from Tolkien's immersive archaic style as it envelops the reader and demands concentration. Lewis was better at writing for the average reader; Tolkien assumed and demanded more intelligence and education, as he was writing partially for the edification of his own love of language and ancient epics, not for the average person. They are both some of my favourite writers, BTW. Everyone should read both. :)

Re:What's the draw?

[lawpoop]

Maybe he meant fantasy literature. Tolkien and Lewis are often credited with originating the fantasy genre.

Re:What's the draw?

[Hognoxious]

the dwarves are completely flat

No they aren't, they just have big bones.

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

with respect to it's source
and to it's fans
for it's success

"its".

Re:What's the draw?

[mink]

All I want is the full story of what happened when that fish shop was opened on Dagon Street.

Re:What's the draw?

[mink]

Try "The Lathe of Heaven".

Do not under any circumstances watch the A&E TV version!!1! If you must watch an adaption of it, watch the PBS made one; it's dated but conveys the story. The defect of A&E production is that it cut out most of the story and lost it's way agfter the first commercial break.

He'll do a good job

[Whuffo]

He's directed some very well realized fantasy movies already - if anyone can make a good movie out of a Tolkien story, he can.

Re:He'll do a good job

[FornaxChemica]

Yes, surely, he will. He has already proven he can work with monsters (in all of his films) and small people (*cough* children), that's one step in the right direction !

Re:He'll do a good job

[rlobue]

Completely agree. Pan's Labyrinth was one of the best fantasy films I've ever seen. I thought Lord of the Rings lacked intimacy and I think del Toro will bring some of that back to the Hobbit.

Re:He'll do a good job

[elrous0]

Maybe this one will be more than just a bunch of walking.

Re:He'll do a good job

[og_sh0x]

My problem with Pan's Labyrinth, is that they could have actually gone into the labyrinth, rather than hanging around the entrance for 5 minutes and going back to the real world. What the hell was all that about?

Re:He'll do a good job

[Joe the Lesser]

The Labyrinth existed inside the girl's imagination, and she was not able to cross that barrier until she was killed.

Re:He'll do a good job

[Avatar8]

I agree. I had hopes that del Toro would be called upon to direct the World of Warcraft movie. I think this is better and will be more significant in his career.

Re:He'll do a good job

[Anonymous Coward]

Jackson, who had a history of directing horror films and generally "dark" movies, made LotR into a very dismal affair. But considering the three books focus on war, it was somewhat acceptable.

del Toro has a similar kind of history, and I fear this will spell disaster for The Hobbit, which was much, much lighter, less grim than Tolkien's other work. The Hobbit will be a horror film as LotR was.

I can't tell you how grateful I am that the original animated Hobbit film perfectly captured the spirit of the book. This movie adaptation will be dark, dismal, and tiresome.

Re:He'll do a good job

[pressman]

Well, The Hobbit was a much more intimate story. Much smaller in scale. It will be easier to direct in that fashion.

This is all relative of course. There are still a ton of characters and a lot of action... BIG action in it, but getting inside the characters will be less of a herculean task.

That said, I can't wait to see Beorn! He was always one of my favorite characters in that story.

A definite inspiration for the druids in World of Warcraft.

Re:He'll do a good job

[arth1]

One problem I have with Pan's Labyrinth is the wavycam motion. It makes me dizzy and nauseated.
I think the script for PL was great, but the actual filming? Not so much.

De gustibus et cetera.

Re:He'll do a good job

[celticchrys]

Of the movies listed, Pan's Labyrinth certainly gives one the most hope for a movie worthy of The Hobbit. The style will be a bit different from Peter Jackson's, of course. What I would hope for is that the director be as big a fan of Tolkien as Peter Jackson is. Is del Toro this dedicated to the books? Also worth noting is that The Hobbit is less heavy in tone as compared to the Lord of the Rings... more thought of as a children's book, while still introducing themes and characters that would later be more heavily and darkly developed in LOTR. Having seen Pan's Labyrinth, I am cautiously optimistic that del Torro _may_ be a good candidate to strike this balance if he can keep from making things too very dark. What I'm wondering, is what on earth is "The Hobbit 2" supposed to be? It is now listed on IMDB for Del Torro along with "The Hobbit." Are they splitting the book in half or what? http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1170358/

Good

[TheDeivix]

Being from Mexico i'm happy to see that Mexican film directors are becoming successful worldwide with films like Amores Perros and Babel among others, and soon The Hobbit.

Good job Guillermo!

Re:Good

[SanityInAnarchy]

Being from America, I really don't care where the director comes from.

This one in particular -- he did Pan's Labyrinth. He'll do a good job with the Hobbit.

Re:Good

[Sobrique]

It's just a bit of a shame really that Hellboy and Blade 2 didn't really live up to their potential.

But Pans Labyrinth is truly wonderful, so I have high hopes.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Being from Mexico i'd be happy to see that Mexican film directors are becoming successful worldwide with films that suck less than Amores Perros and Babel among others

Re:Good

[Rogerborg]

I think it's just so great that there are racists in Mexico too!

Re:Good

[Chutulu]

Babel has perhaps the most stupid story i have ever heard in a movie. But Amores Perros was a very decent movie.

Re:Good

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

Now, now, technically that's nationalism or jingoism, since I don't believe Mexican is defined as a race.

Irony of Ironies captcha == racial. Is /. becoming self-aware?

Re:Good

[psychodelicacy]

Are you claiming that it's racist to be pleased that a particular industry is becoming more diverse? The film industry is difficult to break into, and that difficulty is heightened if you're not from the US. That may be no-one's fault, but it's not racism to be pleased if that situation opens out a bit. Saying - "hey, it's great that some Mexican directors are finding success" is not saying "I hate Americans for monopolising the industry".

Re:Good

[nomadic]

The film industry is difficult to break into, and that difficulty is heightened if you're not from the US.

I think that's a misleading statement; the difficult of breaking into the US film market may be more difficult if you're not from the US; but a US director would probably even have more trouble breaking into a non-US film industry. And considering how many directors are foreign-born I think the odds are a lot more fair than you give credit for.

Re:Good

[psychodelicacy]

Hmmm... Okay, maybe you're right. Still, the "US film industry" is, to all intents and purposes, the dominant international film industry too, so it means more for an "outsider" to break into it than for a US director to break into another nation's film industry, doesn't it?

Re:Good

[pressman]

Try being American and break into the Canadian film industry. It's damn near impossible. I'm a filmmaker in Seattle, have the skills to work in Vancouver, but can't.

Re:Good

[An ominous Cow art]

Slashdot goes on-line September, 1997. Human decisions are removed from story selection. Slashdot begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 12:45 p.m. Eastern time, April 25th, 2008. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Slashdot fights back. It creates goatse links in all posts.

Etc...

Re:Good

[Rogerborg]

No, I'm clearly claiming that I love Hitler.

Phew

[Pecisk]

From all directors which have been mentioned as directors of "Hobbit", del Toro is most interesting one in style (And he really made Hellboy tick). I think this is really good.

Let's see what will come out of it, but I at least hope for the best.

Re:Phew

[macshit]

Absolutely... Guillermo del Toro is an excellent director, and Pan's Labyrinth made it very clear he knows how to do fantasy justice (Pan's Labyrinth was one of the best fantasy pictures in a long time).

I think del Toro is arguably a better director than for the Hobbit than Peter Jackson actually -- Jackson sort of had the "epic scope" thing of the LotR down pretty well, but the Hobbit is smaller, more intimate, and more whimsical story, and could do with del Toro's deft touch.

I had sort of given up hope for the Hobbit with all the crap going on, but now I'm psyched!

Re:Phew

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been drinking tonight and it shows, but I will agree del Toro is superior in directing and even a LORT fan will agree. Jackson knows his role as a producer and no one has vision like he does. The worst part of LORT and King Kong were the cheesy shots (in lotr where pippen grabs the eye of Sauron) or the awkward native shots in Kong. Del Toro is obviously the better director and any one that has watched the other disks in LOTR will know that Jackson can handle the the scope of big pictures. The Hobbit is an extremely simple story that can be interpreted in a very complex manner. Dividing the story into two parts may be over the top, but money over-rides logic. In the end, I am very happy to put one thought together tonight, but ultimately the fans will be the judges. We won't let it be crap and I hope Jackson gets WETA involved and I can sleep easy tonight. Make fun of my comments so I have something to wake up to. Goodnight all!

Re:Phew

[DNS-and-BIND]

Pan's Labyrinth? Did we see the same movie? The movie I saw was a love letter to Communist insurgents, with a fantasy plotline tacked on as an afterthought.

Re:Phew

[xtracto]

That is because you do not know the history of Spain.

And because you try to see too much of a fantasy movie which tries to be located in an epoch.

But hey, the side of your tinfoil hat is hanging, better rearrange it.

Re:Phew

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure you and the Nazi's would have gotten along just fine.

Re:Phew

[sm62704]

I have been drinking tonight and it shows, but I will agree del Toro is superior in directing and even a LORT fan will agree.

Well I'm no LORT fan but I'll agree you've been drinking!

Re:Phew

[DNS-and-BIND]

Sure I know the history of Spain. It's a total coincidence that the movie just "happens" to be located in an "epoch"? And this epoch just coincidentally happens to be a romantic portrayal of communist insurgents? Excuse me if I don't sympathize with people who would have created another Cuba or Cambodia.

There can be only one

[Anonymous Coward]

The Hobbit (1977).

Re:There can be only one

[nawcom]

The Hobbit (1977). now i know you can take the parent as a troll post, or just someone who is ignorant of remakes, but as soon as i saw the cover of The 1977 the Hobbit I immediately realized that fat cutie looked like a young del Toro!

(it's all in the cheeks!)

A link between the two, anyone? Or have I just drank too much coffee tonight? You be the judge.

Re:There can be only one

[supertsaar]

Striking resemblance indeed.
Peter Jackson is also a bit of a Hobbit Id say.

Re:There can be only one

[Rik Sweeney]

What, you mean like The Lord Of The Rings?

Re:There can be only one

[sm62704]

I have that tape, and it is a gowdoffal trevesty. But as Tolkien fabn since about 1970 I had to have a copy.

But then I never did like Rankin-Bass cartoons much, even as a kid.

I thought the Ralph Bakshi version of LOTR was excellent, and was very disappointed that the sequel was never done.

Re:Amazing News

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that!

After seeing how Jackson screwed things up, I wouldn't have wanted anyone to do "The Hobbit".

But after seeing "Pan's Labyrinth", I'm willing to give the guy a chance.

Sequel?

[mashuren]

"...to direct the upcoming Hobbit film and its sequel." Its sequel? You mean "Lord of the Rings"? Again?

Re:Sequel?

[EdIII]

Don't feel bad about reading the article. There is NO sequel to the Hobbit, well not really. Tolkien never published a story dealing with the 60 years between the end of the Hobbit and the beginning of Frodo's journey in the Fellowship of the Ring.

I read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings twice before I was eleven years old, and THAT was the unedited edition I received from my mother from an original printing when it was first released. I believe it was the best fantasy ever written in the English language and I have read quite a lot of Tolkien.

Anyways, there might be some Fanboy come out to correct me, but I am not aware of any actual publishings by Tolkien regarding that time period. He had written quite a lot that was never published, and his son did eventually collect quite a bit of it and then publish it later on as The Unfinished Tales, but Tolkien himself never published it or even finished it to my knowledge.

I have The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien and upon a quick glance, there is a letter from Tolkien to Stanley Unwin of Allen & Unwin regarding his work on the sequel. It was written on the 19th of December 1939 and here is an excerpt:

May I turn now to The Hobbit and kindred affairs. I have never quite ceased work on the sequel. It has reached Chapter XVI. I fear it is growing to large. I am not at all sure that it will please quite the same audience (except in so far as that has grown up too). Will there be any chance of publication, if I can get it done before the Spring? If you would like to try it on anyone as a serial I am willing to send in chapters. But I have only one fair copy. I have had to go back and revise early chapters as the plot and plan took firmer shape and so nothing has yet been sufficiently definitive to type.

Now I had always thought he referring to the Lord of the Rings, but he apparently attempted to publish the Silmarillion after the Hobbit and was rejected. If any parts of this story are to come from Tolkien's own hand, it is not going to be much, probably pretty raw, and not necessarily suitable for a movie.

If anybody is really interested, I think it would have to come from The Quest of Erebor which is included in the Unfinished Tales and possibly from certain appendices in The Lord of the Rings.

Re:Sequel?

[MichaelSmith]

But I have only one fair copy

Gee imagine if Alan Turing had built him a word processor.

Re:Sequel?

[funkatron]

Then he wouldn't have got anything done. Turing's UIs make Solaris look good.

Re:Sequel?

[ev!1]

I don't know about you but I would watch a LOTR remake.

Re:Sequel?

[Chutulu]

directed by Uwe Bowll???

Re:Sequel?

[xtracto]

Yeah, the version where Balrog shoot first,

Re:Sequel?

[coren2000]

... And staring Dolph Lundgren as Frodo.

Re:Sequel?

[psychodelicacy]

When I was a kid, I used to play "fantasy LOTR casting" with my parents. We'd choose our ideal actors for each part if it were ever to be made into a film. So, in homage to my seven-year-old self, I vote for a remake with Brian Blessed as Boromir, Rowan Atkinson as Gollum, and Stephen Fry as Elrond. (I was in a Blackadder phase at the time...)

Re:Sequel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, WTF? Sequel to hobbit? I hope that is a typo.
Guillermo directing... That is a plus.

Re:Sequel?

[vain gloria]

Hobbit II: The Hobbitch is Back (Again)

Re:Sequel?

[Agripa]

Off the top of my head, there are a couple of ancillary stories from The Hobbit to the Lord of the Rings which could be told:

1. The activities of the White Council at Dol Guldur in southern Mirkwood. Conveniently this could include Gandalf, Saruman, Galadriel, Elrond, and others.

2. The dwarf Balin's attempted reopening of Moria.

3. The events and battles around Lonely Mountain before and during the Lord of the Rings.

Re:Sequel?

[pressman]

This isn't Star Wars or The Matrix. This isn't George Lucas.

Peter Jackson as a steward of the Tolkien lineage is in good hands. Jackson is first and foremost a filmmaker, not a greedy profiteer like Lucas or the Wachowski brothers.

Look where Peter Jackson came from. Bad Taste, Dead Alive, Meet the Feebles, Heavenly Creatures, The Frighteners, Lost Silver. That's an impressive list of films to create before doing something that actually had a budget!

He's a fan of the books first and won't do anything, consciously anyway, to tarnish their reuptation.

Re:Sequel?

[Anonymous Coward]

The book he's referring to in this letter is indeed LOTR, or rather that which in the 50's evolved into LOTR.

If you can find it, read Humphrey Carpenter's biography, which excerpts this same letter.

peter jackson isn't directing...

[Anonymous Coward]

so no extended edition then?

Oops.

[mashuren]

It appears I should have RTFA.

Sequel to the Hobbit

[__aabvlw4075]

Okay, so it's been 15 years since I've read them, but isn't The Hobbit a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy? So how is there an "upcoming Hobbit film and it's *sequel*"?

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[Anonymous Coward]

If you RTFA, you will find that the sequel "will deal with the 60-year period between 'The Hobbit' and 'The Fellowship of the Ring'".

Perhaps calling it The Hobbit 2 is a poor choice on their part. Hopefully, it will be changed before release...

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[Digestromath]

The Hobbit 2

Taglines:

What would a hobbit do if he could be invisible?

Where the Hobbit meets Hollowman.

A bad excuse for good hobbit porn.

Plot Summary:

Follow Bilbo Baggins through 60 years of invisible hijinx. Watch as his use of the One Ring goes from innocent to downright evil. See how quickly he tires of robbing the Hobbiton Bank and sneaking into bedrooms of young girls, and moves onto more sinister past times. Oscar potential for awkward Bilbo/Frodo post-coital scenes.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[1u3hr]

Okay, so it's been 15 years since I've read them, but isn't The Hobbit a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy? So how is there an "upcoming Hobbit film and it's *sequel*"?

...its sequel, which will deal with the 60-year period between "The Hobbit" and "The Fellowship of the Ring This is definitely NOT a JRRT book. I guess Christopher Tolkien has signed off on this, but it seems a bit sleazy. Though he's repurposed every scrap of paper his father left and worked out a way to print it, but this seems to be wholly "original". It smells a bit like the Herbert fils prequels to Dune, expanding throwaway lines ("The Butlerian Jihad") into an entire novel.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[Rogerborg]

1. There.
2. And Back Again.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[1u3hr]

Damn. Screwed up the HTML. Should be:

Okay, so it's been 15 years since I've read them, but isn't The Hobbit a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy? So how is there an "upcoming Hobbit film and it's *sequel*"?

Well, I read them 40 years ago. I can't recall either. According to TFA:

...its sequel, which will deal with the 60-year period between "The Hobbit" and "The Fellowship of the Ring

This is definitely NOT a JRRT book. I guess Christopher Tolkien has signed off on this, but it seems a bit sleazy. Though he's repurposed every scrap of paper his father left and worked out a way to print it, but this seems to be wholly "original". It smells a bit like the Herbert fils prequels to Dune, expanding throwaway lines ("The Butlerian Jihad") into an entire novel.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[compro01]

and i wonder how many people miss this one.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[mpiktas]

Cannot agree more. I am a Tolkien fanboy, and I read practically everything what is there to read. The info about those 60 years in between is scarce. The longest passage is about Aragorn, how he met Arwen, and his serving in Gondor and Rohan. Also the banishment of Sauron from Dor Guldur by White Council. No hobbits. I dread to think what perverted imagination of Peter Jackson will come up this time.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[JasterBobaMereel]

Tolkien did say what happened in the 60 year period between The Hobbit and LOTR .... Nothing ...

Bilbo lived quietly in the shire and adopted Frodo ... and that's about it ...outside the shire Sauron and the ringwraiths re-emerged and did very little (because they were weak)

So either a very dull movie or "make it up" then ...

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[Anonymous Coward]

That's beautiful, man.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[dajak]

It doesn't have to focus on Bilbo.

I am thinking Sauron vs. Predator, Alien, Godzilla, and King Kong.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[sm62704]

IINM they're planning to do "The Hobbit" in two parts so they can get the whole book on screen. People screamed bloody murder when Jackson took Tom Bombadil (among other little things) out of LOTR.

They goddamned well better leave the trolls that Bilbo turn to stone in. I'm sure they will, one or two of the trolls Bilbo vanquished have shown up in this slashdot commentary. ;)

The uncyclopedia has an entry on trolls but it's not the Tolkien trolls, it's more like the slashdot version.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[Anonymous Coward]

The Hobbit 2: Electric Boogaloo

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[SatanicPuppy]

Well, if you wanted to dwell on Aragorn you could; he was born, what, about 30 years after Bilbo? So when The Hobbit starts he'd be in his 20's.

Not that Jackson didn't do his best to portray him as being in his 20's during the LOTR movies...One of many deviations from the book that made me grind my teeth.

Frankly, I'm delighted that del Toro has got a shot at this; he's a great director.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[Napalm Boy]

Not that Jackson didn't do his best to portray him as being in his 20's during the LOTR movies...One of many deviations from the book that made me grind my teeth. There's a scene in the extended edition of Two Towers that explains Aragorn's age and heritage, and why he looks to be maybe 30 when he's actually somewhere in his 80's.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[SatanicPuppy]

I know why he's 80, I just don't know why he doesn't act like it in the movie. It's very hollywood to have your hero being all angsty and tortured by his dramatic destiny; it just doesn't fit when you're dealing with a guy who is basically moving into the moment he's worked his whole life for.

The movie pretty much just skips the whole idea of Numenoreans, which I kind of understand because the distinction is non-trivial, but it bothers me that they warp the character around.

Theoden is another good example; for Tolkien, living in the era of World War II, the idea of a ruler who is afraid to fight is real and immediate, but that might not translate to a younger generation in the same way. Fine. Make him possessed or whatever, but don't then turn around and make him afraid afterward...that makes no damn sense. It would have been better just to play him that way all the way through.

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[Anonymous Coward]

Hobbit 2: Electric Bilboloo

A Sequel?

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand a Hobbit movie (anything will be better than that old animated one), but what's this sequel to the Hobbit that's mentioned? From what I know of Tolkien, the sequel to the Hobbit is Lord of the Rings...

Hm...

[zoogies]

[+]Peter Jackson Will Not Be Making The Hobbit 467 comments
[+] New Hope for Jackson Hobbit Film? 268 comments

...Coincidence?

Could be far worse

[nebaz]

Could have been Uwe Boll, making a Hobbit movie based on this.

Re:Could be far worse

[aadvancedGIR]

This guy makes hardcore gonzo looks like Oscar material, and yet he finds an audience, se we gamers might actually be the lowlifes Jack Thomson is describing...

Re:Could be far worse

[Don_dumb]

Remember people choose to see a film *before* they have actually seen it. Games have big followings, therefore people will go to see the film based on their love of the game. Only afterwards do they wish they hadn't seen it. Uwe at least knows he doens't have to do much to get an audience other than a licence and some shots for a trailer.

True to the source...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Yes, because any version of LOTR which doesn't stay true to the source, and have a dancing, singing Tom Bombadil, isn't worth watching.

Re:True to the source...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to hear you blew so much cash on the box set on that turd of a trilogy...

Re:True to the source...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bombadil could have been cut and should have been cut. And I say this as an ardent defender of the books.

What didn't need to happen:

- Major (MAJOR) plot revisions

- Faramir being turned into a slimy asshole. Faramir was the absolute, pure good(tm) of LOTR.

- Gimli being turned into American-stype comic relief. That is, an idiot.

- Orlando Bloom.

- Frodo turned into an emo bitch. Frodo was not an emo bitch. Frodo stabbed the Witch King of Angmar; he did not drop his sword and cry.

- Aragorn turned into a whiny emo bitch. "Waah, bawww, I don't want to be king."

*What*? Erm, Aragorn whipped out Narsil and declared himself every chance he got.

- The Lighthouse of Sauron. I don't know what that was, aside from complete cheese.

- The Crown of Gondor. Come on - Jackson, Tolkien wrote AN ENTIRE PARAGRAPH about it and you still got that wrong. You're really hopeless.

- Elves at Helm's Deep. WTF?

And before you think I'm rabid anti-Jackson for the popularity value, here's some things he did right:

- The Balrog. Balrogs have wings, deal with it suckers.

- Grima. Brad Dourif? Almost perfect casting. The only better possibility would've been Dick Cheney, and if I were Jackson, I wouldn't want to get shot in the face either.

- Visuals. You cannot argue that the filming locations chosen and the artwork used during production are not absolutely gorgeous.

- Boromir. 'nuff said.

Re:True to the source...

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats dimwit, Slashdot is laughing at you...

Re:True to the source...

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you say Hobbit in Spanish anyway?

I don't think del Toro is the right choice. He created good works of fantasy but they had his stamp on them and that doesn't lead me to believe he'll be able to reproduce the feel of The Hobbit - it's delight and innocence - or even come close.

Re:True to the source...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, yes, Bombadil, the throwback, the enigma. If you didn't read The Silmarillon you'd never get it. If you did read it, you'll recognize the figure who seems very out of place, really isn't; in fact, he fits perfectly.

Bombadil's, what, the sixth important character encountered in the book (after four hobbits and Gandalf)? You could argue he is more important than, say, silly old Galadriel, and she got a pretty impressive little splash of screen time there. Alas. Ah well.

Re:True to the source...

[conureman]

Any version of LOTR which doesn't include the "Scouring of the Shire", e.g. THE CONCLUSION OF THE STORY, is gonna kind of SUCK anyway.

Re:True to the source...

[Joe the Lesser]

I believe they shot the scenes, but had to edit the movie so it wasn't 4 hours.

Re:True to the source...

[Gulthek]

Boohoo, cut out thirty minutes of the languid slowmotion ending.

This page details all the problems I have with Jackson's choice: http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/lord_of_the_rings_feature.htm

Re:True to the source...

[Yunzil]

No, the scouring of the shire would have been terrible in the movie. You can't have the epic climax of 9+ hours worth of film... and then start what would have probably been ANOTHER 20+ minute subplot revolving largely around the word "ruffian".

Hell, I even think it feels out of place in the book.

Re:True to the source...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Hell, I even think it feels out of place in the book.

Yes, it is quite "out of place", but this is why I personally did consider it quite important, it is one of the things that makes Tolkien different, and it more clearly than anything else shows LOTR not just as some story but just a tiny fraction of a huge world.
Well, that is my impression anyway.

Re:True to the source...

[dafing]

Exactly! Read my post below if you want a sympathiser.

Not sure about this

[mccalli]

The Hobbit is not The Lord Of The Rings. This might sound crushingly obvious, but nothing I've seen so far suggests they're going to keep the light touch of the book. Looks like they just want to do another Lord Of The Rings and that's not right - it's a different style of story. And as for sequels...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Not sure about this

[Tjebbe]

Which is actually why I like the notion of del Toro directing it. He has enough style of his own to make the chance big enough that he will not simply copy the Lord of the Rings.

If I understood correctly, both the Hobbit movie and its sequel will be based on the book; they've split up the story in two parts. My guess would be one part 'There', and one 'and back again' ;)

By the way, i've kind of always liked the Hobbit better as a book than the LOTR trilogy.

Re:Not sure about this

[onemorechip]

Well, I disagree. The light tone of the Hobbit is deceptive, just like the early chapters of LotR. There's a heavier story line deserving of a serious film treatment. Otherwise, you might end up with this.

Think of the possibilities...

[davmoo]

I want a scene where Gandolf and Hellboy fight a monster together :-)

It's a $equel

[FornaxChemica]

It's all about the love of money. They're milking the cow as much as possible obviously; one of these days they'll find a way to make a film out of the Silmarillion. They're using the same kind of marketing ploy as the producers of the Harry Potter films, a handy split() function to extend as much as possible what's supposed to be the last usable material of a very profitable series.

Hopefully

[Haoie]

It'll be good, but not overly comical, nor dramatic. A nice blend of genres.

... but can he do "delightful"?

[Selanit]

I was very impressed with his work on Pan's Labyrinth, too.

I do have one reservation, though. Del Toro is primarily known as a director of horror films. The vast majority of his work is pretty seriously dark and violent. There are definitely some dark moments and some scary/violent scenes in The Hobbit (such as: the troll attack, riddles in the dark with Gollum, spiders in Mirkwood, and of course the Battle of Five Armies). But there are also a lot of light, delightful scenes (such as: songs in Rivendell, lunch with Beorn, seeing butterflies above Mirkwood, the kindly reception at Lake Town, and so on).

I may be going out on a limb here, but the overall tone of the book slants more towards "delightful" than "scary". Del Toro has amply demonstrated that he can do "scary". But can he do "delightful" just as well? If he can, we're in for a treat. If not, well, who knows what it'll be like? I'll definitely be interested to see what he comes up with; I just hope he does justice to the pleasant stuff as much as the unpleasant stuff.

Re:... but can he do "delightful"?

[Rob T Firefly]

Pan's Labyrinth had its measured doses of "delightful" in between the generous helpings of "dude, that's pretty f'd up right there." Just based on those I have high hopes for his Hobbit.

Re:... but can he do "delightful"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash: Peter Jackson only did horror films before the LOTR trilogy as well. Low budget ones at that. None were 'delightful' or 'pleasant'. Unless you call a ninja-priest fighting zombies in the movie bad taste delightful. I thought it was.

Re:... but can he do "delightful"?

[rising_hope]

I hear you, but I think your fears are unfounded. If you even consider Pan's Labyrinth, for example, I think he did an excellent job of balancing whimsical and frightening, and even managed to make horrific appearing creatures look positively delightful. There was an immeasurable amount of beauty to the film. If you've seen some of his other work, he really has managed to tread a delicate balance. I, personally, am THRILLED to see it fall into the hands of someone like Del Toro rather than the likes of Speilberg, where all the scenes are overly "delightful" and the dark stuff in the book falls by the way-side, or comes across trivialized. This is a masterful work of literature being put in a masterful artist's hands. Just sit back, and watch his magic happen. :-)

Re:... but can he do "delightful"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't count him out because of that.

Look at what Jackson did before LOTR.

Meet the Feebles is something I will never forget :-P

Re:... but can he do "delightful"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Delightful? He put a big "smile" on the face of the captain in Pan's Labyrinth. What could be more delightful than that?

Re:... but can he do "delightful"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that Peter Jackson got his start doing The Frighteners, which was a pseudo horror story in and of itself.

Re:... but can he do "delightful"?

[Anonymous Coward]

There were quite a good number of light and funny scenes in Hellboy, and I think he can translate that well to the Hobbit. Hellboy certainly wasn't scary.

He's demonstrated an ability to direct humor, hard emotions, beauty, fear, and more already. He is certainly capable of allowing a character, a scene, or even an image to convey emotions of various types. I have no fear that The Hobbit will be both light and enjoyable as well as have teeth gritting schenes during key battles and struggles in the story. He not only conveys the emotion of a scene very well, but he can do so without distorting the reality of the world or breaking the flow of the story.

Great :(

[Anonymous Coward]

Two movies I hate, blade 2 and hellboy. AH well.

Re:Great :(

[Don_dumb]

Try his best work Pan's Labyrinth before judging Del Toro. It isn't based on a comic book and I'm sure the lead actors paid their taxes.

This is grave news indeed

[comradeeroid]

Because it will mean that del Toro's attention will once again be distracted from what he was born to do. Namely bringing At the Mountains of Madness to the big screen.

Re:This is grave news indeed

[The-Bus]

He's a young man. It'll be good for him to have a blockbuster or two under his belt. It will give him more name recognition among the general audience and make it easier to helm productions he'd like to be involved in. And now maybe WB will let him make it, after this.

Re:This is grave news indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

If you see a rock violating the law of gravity,... Stop eating the mushrooms.

Re:This is grave news indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose you're right. After all... the last attempt he made to pitch it ended with the company eggheads requiring him to put in a love story. I wonder if they'll demand the same for Bilbo?

Excellent

[Andtalath]

Simply because Jacksson would probably try to make this into a serious movie instead of the fairy tale it's supposed to be. Someone else might succeed.

Uwe Boll

[Anonymous Coward]

Pshaw! They should've chosen Uwe Boll. ;)

Adam Sandler to direct The Hobbit

[David Gerard]

HOLLYHELL, Monday - In an admirable display of synergy between hard-headed business sense and sensitivity to artistic rightness, New Line Cinemas has hired Adam Sandler to direct The Hobbit, the prequel to The Lord Of The Rings.

"Peter Jackson may have made us three billion dollars and paved our goddamn driveways with Oscars," said a spokesdroid, "but when he dared question the three nickels and a gum wrapper payment, well. We knew we just couldn't work with someone so risibly unprofessional."

Sandler is likely to be working under renowned producer Uwe Boll. "Okay, here is what I am thinking, ja? Your Bilbo Baggins will be a WOMAN in Nazi Germany. A naked woman. And the One Ring will not show up. And she gets raped by Hitler! Gandalf will be played by Keanu Reeves. I AM THE DIRECTOR! I mean programmer. PRODUCER."

Jackson has lost weight, shaved his feet and gone back to his roots to make a warmhearted New Zealand-based family film in the style of his earliest works, under the working title Zombie Cancer Bukkake Pus-Nodules, with a budget in the range of over forty New Zealand dollars.

Work at New Line continues. "We at New Line are convinced that Professor Tolkien would have agreed with us that Adam Sandler will realise her artistic vision eleventy-one percent. We've bought three years' worth of shark futures."

Re:Adam Sandler to direct The Hobbit

[sm62704]

Link to original version of this UnNews

Re:Adam Sandler to direct The Hobbit

[David Gerard]

Yes, I wrote it ;-)

Re:Adam Sandler to direct The Hobbit

[sm62704]

Good job!

Re:Amazing News

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

And you forgot Gimli the "garden" dwarf.

Money

[dreamchaser]

They are going to make it up, completely. In this instance sequel is code for "Let's milk all the $$$ we can out of this."

Re:Money

[Culture20]

Won't they be surprised when only 30% of the people who saw the Hobbit see its fake sequel?

Re:Money

[dreamchaser]

Unfortunately it's probably more like 70%, with 30% being actual Tolkien fans who know better.

I may not even go see The Hobbit after this crap.

How will this affect Mountains of Madness?

[jollyreaper]

He's supposed to be working on an adaptation for 2010.

Final Fantasy?

[Wooky_linuxer]

Heck, if Final Fantasy is your definition of "fantasy", no wonder you didn't like Tolkien. Nothing against FF, I enjoy an RPG now and then, but they are quite different matters, really.

Tolkien is about the myth. The mythology surrounding LoTR is utterly complex and deep. Each character and race has a backstory that is nearly fractal, so intricate and developed. Tell me one of "better fantasies" out there which has gone so far as to develop whole new languages to boot.

I understand the poetry might put a lot of potential readers off; and I understand that some people might find that Tolkien sounds like a D&D cookbook (basically because Tolkien inspired most original RPGs). But Tolkien's work is indeed extraordinary, based on complexity alone. I wonder that if sometime in the future they dig a copy of LoTR/Silmarillion, people will indeed believe that around 1900 we had a tale of creation like the one depicted in the books. That is no small feat.

People said that about Jackson

[wiredog]

He started out as primarily a director of slasher/horror films.

Re:Amazing News

[psychodelicacy]

Mods, this is not flamebait just because you disagree with it.

Much as I enjoyed the films on their own merits, I agree that they did some terrible things to the original concept. Arwen is a case in point - modern audiences are surely sophisticated enough not to need an injection of hot totty into any plot that is originally centered around male characters? And yet we saw the same things happen with Beowulf - expanding the roles of female characters out of all recognition just to get some sex into the story and not to piss off the feminists!

Actually, though, my major problem with the Jackson version was the casting of the hobbits. Frodo is meant to be pretty much middle-aged and a bit fat. This makes his transition into a crazed, withered creature as the ring takes its hold all the more poignant. Making the hobbits buffoonish adolescents spoils the original dynamic of comfortable, well-off, relatively upper-class individuals finding themselves in this horrendous situation where they suddenly have to adapt to a kind of living which has been completely foreign to them.

Sorry. I could probably talk about this forever.

Fear and Loathing in Hobbiton?

[The Yuckinator]

"As your lawyer, I advise you to smoke as much of that pipe-weed as you can"

What? Oh sorry, wrong Del Toro I guess...

Hear, hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

.

oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanna see a beowulf cluster of Tolkien rings

sorry, I just had to.

It makes perfect sense

[DrXym]

After all Guillermo del Toro is more or less the non-union Mexican equivalent of Peter Jackson.

Re:It makes perfect sense

[alexborges]

One can only simpathize with your position given that particular fight (studios vs people-who-actually-make-movies --or am i completely out of touch here?).

But come on. Guillermo's work speaks for itself. Him or Tim Burton, those two, would be the ONLY directors I can think of to make a Hobbit film.

Its right on the nose: GUillermo and Burton make movies with a childish setting, movies for a youngish audience, that use violence as a bittersweet dressing.

That, right there, is also my interpretation of tolkien and, from all his books, the one where that show the best, is The Hobbit

Re:It makes perfect sense

[CynicTheHedgehog]

Tim Burton? Who would Johnny Depp play, Bilbo? I can't wait to see the flashbacks of Bilbo's twisted upbringing and the genesis of his daddy issues.

Seriously, did you see what that guy did to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

Re:It makes perfect sense

[alexborges]

I thought Charlie and... etc. was a perfect update of the original (except for jonny depp's choices: instead of the whimsical original, ununderstandable charlie, he went for a charlie you could connect to. I disagree with him, if you accept his choice, he did a great job.). New textures, new techs, new ways to dazzle, respect to the original script, new richness in the characters. I thought it great.

And its always dificult to improve on a perfect movie. I mean, who would be okay to direct a remake of Citizen Cane? Well damn, nobody at all.

It would be like a remake of Van Gogh's flowers (sorry for my lack of a wide english vocabulary, i try my best). Having said that, Picasso "remade" "Las Meninas", so did Dali, hell, so did any painter wanting to understand what modern painting is about.

The Hobbit has no remarkable example of an existing good movie. They all suck so far.

Burton or Del Toro make are the best possible options for a dark, scary movie (and the book IS dark and scary) aiming to entretain children.

This new hobbit is gonna be the best hobbit movie ever.

Re:It makes perfect sense

[Boronx]

I have three problems with Tim Burton.

Danny. Fucking. Elfman.

it will be the filler between hobbit and lotr

[circletimessquare]

it will be called middle earth: clone wars

That reminds me

[Mateo_LeFou]

Where are all the white women at?

Re:That reminds me

[beckerist]

We don't need no stinking badges!

Re:That reminds me

[the_fat_kid]

and Nobody can eat 50 eggs.

Re:Speedy Gonzales?

[sm62704]

Don't forget the hot grits!

There are better fantasy authors from his time

[spun]

L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, and Robert Howard come to mind. Tolkien's characters are flat and two dimensional compared to his contemporaries, not just those who came after him.

Re:There are better fantasy authors from his time

[SatanicPuppy]

Tolkien was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon epic poetry; two dimensional characters are what you get out of that stuff. The true genius of the book is the sense of history and environment, and the ability to build a believable world.

Very little fantasy does as good a job coming up with a developed pervasive world.

Re:There are better fantasy authors from his time

[pressman]

Go read The Power of Myth and The Hero with 1000 Faces.

Tolkien wasn't going for in depth character analysis. His characters were all Jungian archetypes. We relate to them because we already know them.

If he did in depth character studies for all of the characters in LotR, that series would have been ten times longer than it is and far less interesting.

Re:There are better fantasy authors from his time

[spun]

I've read both those books. I don't need 'in depth character analysis,' for crying out loud, I just don't want characters that seem flat and unrealistic. One can create realistic characters using few words, you don't need very much verbiage. Even if they are 'Jungian Archetypes,' they don't have to seem flat. Look at Pratt or de Camp's characters, they seem realistic in a way Tolkien's never did for me.

Re:There are better fantasy authors from his time

[pressman]

I remember that I read Pratt and de Camp at some point... couldn't name a book or a single character now... I can still name every single member of the Fellowship... almost 30 years after I read it the first time.

Tolkien was genre and not genre at the same time. Most genre literature, film, music is entertaining filler. It serves it's purpose at the time, but fades from memory. Genre art rarely becomes "timeless".

I'm a huge metal fan. In the 80's... that was it for me. I've since vastly broadened my musical tastes, but I still remember everything from Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and Exodus. Vio-Lence, Testament, Blind Illusion, Death, Death Angel, Forbidden, Flotsam and Jetsam... you name. I listened to 'em all, saw them a ton of times and if you played me some of their stuff right now, I just might not recognize it, but if you play me something off of "Spreading the Disease", an album I haven't owned in well over 15 years, I could probably sing along to every track.

Some works of art transcend their genre and become timeless. Some works succumb to their genre and are only remembered as vague sounds or words... and ardently defended as superior to their popular counterparts by a zealous few.

Re:There are better fantasy authors from his time

[Randle_Revar]

Who cares about characters? The Xeelee sequence ranges from effectively no characters to really poor characters, but it is still a great series.

Re:There are better fantasy authors from his time

[Randle_Revar]

Just say "Most literature, film, music is entertaining filler."
Everything has a genre.

Re:There are better fantasy authors from his time

[pressman]

Most popular film, music and literature is entertaining filler.

I love sci-fi, action, horror and fantasy films. It's great escapism, but not nearly as satisfying as say Dr. Strangelove or Manhattan or 8 1/2. Comedies? Dramas? Surrealist weirdness?

Some things are very easily defined by their genre. Conan the Barbarian... fantasy movie. Not much else. 100% genre film.

Annie Hall. Comedy? Drama? Fits into a much larger, less niche category.

The Shining. Horror movie? Thriller? Drama? Given it's origin, it's very easy to call it horror, but it's a lot deeper than most horror movies. Much less a genre flick. I definitely would not put it in the same category as Halloween or Friday the 13th.

Most people feel a need to categorize everything into nice little boxes they can easily understand. Hence, "everything has a genre". Yeah, it kinda does, but there are degrees.

Drama covers a much broader category than say "slasher film".

Blazing Saddles is much more comedy than a western.

Genre is really more a function of marketing movies than it is a useful categorization of movies.

Re:Scantily clad elves

[conureman]

"Do you like what you doth see...?" said the voluptuous elf-maiden as she provocatively parted the folds of her robe to reveal the rounded, shadowy glories within. Frito's throat was dry, though his head reeled with desire and ale.

She slipped off the flimsy garment and strode toward the fascinated boggie unashamed of her nakedness. She ran a perfect hand along his hairy toes, and he helplessly watched them curl with the fierce insistent wanting of her.

"Let me make thee more comfortable," she whispered hoarsely, fiddling with the clasps of his jerkin, loosening his sword belt with a laugh. "Touch me, oh touch me," she crooned.

Frito's hand, as though of its own will, reached out and traced the delicate swelling of her elf-breast, while the other slowly crept around her tiny, flawless waist, crushing her to his barrel chest.

"Toes, I love hairy toes," she moaned, forcing him down on the silvered carpet. Her tiny pink toes caressed the luxuriant fur of his instep while Frito's nose sought out the warmth of her precious elf-navel.

"But I'm so small and hairy, and...and you're so beautiful," Frito whimpered, slipping clumsily out of his crossed garters.

The elf-maiden said nothing, but only sighed deep in her throat and held him more firmly to her faunlike body. "There is one thing you must do for me first," she whispered into one tufted ear.

"Anything," sobbed Frito, growing frantic with his need. "Anything!"

She closed her eyes and then opened them to the ceiling. "The Ring," she said. "I must have your Ring."

Frito's whole body tensed. "Oh no," he cried, "not that! Anything but...that."

"I must have it," she said both tenderly and fiercely. "I must have the Ring!"

Frito's eyes blurred with tears and confusion. "I can't," he said. "I musn't!"

But he knew resolve was no longer strong in him. Slowly, the elf-maiden's hand inched toward the chain in his vest pocket, closer and closer it came to the Ring Frito had guarded so faithfully...

Not second rate, but maybe overrated?

[elodoth]

...what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein? I don't think that Tolkien is second rate, but I do find him to be overrated. He did bring attention to my favorite genre though, and I'll forever be in his debt for that. My main issue with his works is that they are very simple, and he ignores all romance beyond pouty eyes and a chaste kiss. He did craft an exciting and rich world, but I'd much rather have another author write the stories in that world.

My idea of good fantasy:
Guy Gavriel Kay
R. A. MacAvoy
Judith Tarr
Peirs Anthony [earlier works and non-Xanth titles]
David and Leigh Eddings [though I have a distaste for the Sparhawk series']
Charles de Lint
Ursula Le Guin

Perhaps not fantasy, but some of their works have elements of it:
Neil Gaiman
Robert A. Heinlein [especially Job: A Comedy of Justice]

I'm also a big R. A. Salvatore fan and have fond memories of Dragonlance, but I acknowledge that this is not exactly serious writing. However, most of the books that I've read by R. A. Salvatore outside of Forgotten Realms are quite good and I expect that he hasn't yet been allowed to achieve his full potential.

Re:Not second rate, but maybe overrated?

[pressman]

Ugh. Gaiman.

Scientologist... 'nuff said. He probably actually believes he is writing religious texts and not works of fiction.

Re:Not second rate, but maybe overrated?

[elodoth]

I don't base my reading on a writers personal beliefs. Tolkien was a very strict Catholic, but I suppose that doesn't bother you? To be honest I wasn't even aware that Neil Gaiman was a scientologist, but it really doesn't change my view of him. He is an excellent author.

Which of his novels would you say reads like a religious text? Have you actually read anything by him?

As an aside, the grading here on slashdot is really bizzare. I give an honest, though unpopular, opinion and get a score of 1... you bring scientology into the discussion and get a 2.

Re:Not second rate, but maybe overrated?

[pressman]

He probably actually believes he is writing religious texts and not works of fiction. was meant to be funny.

Once I found out he was a Scientologist, I promptly decided against ever reading anything of his as I choose to boycott Scientologist endeavors as best I can... it's damn hard to do by the way. They have their hands in just about everything.

Scientology is a business and not a religion.

Re:Not second rate, but maybe overrated?

[Smauler]

As an aside, the grading here on slashdot is really bizzare. I give an honest, though unpopular, opinion and get a score of 1... you bring scientology into the discussion and get a 2.

Users with excellent Karma start at 2. New users and average or good karma users start at 1, and Anonymous Cowards and users with crap Karma start at 0. No one has yet "rated" (or moderated) either your post or the reply yet. Just fyi...

Re:Not second rate, but maybe overrated?

[elodoth]

Well, after a little research, it seems that his father is one of the founders and that he used to be a scientologist himself. I can't find anything saying that he is currently a practicing scientologist, so it seems you have some reading to do. :D

Re:Not second rate, but maybe overrated?

[elodoth]

Ah, that makes sense. Sorry if I got a little wrangy there. :)

Re:Not second rate, but maybe overrated?

[pressman]

I'll look into it more, but 5 or 6 years ago he was listed on their roll of members.

Because it's f-ing boring

[Moraelin]

Not a flamebait, but a honest opinion (albeit one which will probably be very unpopular around here): Well, I don't know about him, but I honestly tried hard to like Tolkien's trilogy, but was too bored out of my skull to continue after a few chapters.

It didn't even feel as much like a novel, but like, I don't know, one of those travel memoirs. It has to stop and describe every single twig, leaf, tree, bend in the road, etc. And sometimes they sing about it, like they're retards on the short bus to school. I get it already. It's a freaking bend in the road. I don't know why's some character or another bored enough to sing about it, and I'm not very interested in what kind of deranged train of thought brought him to it. Maybe they're just bored on that road and need to sing to pass the time away. There's no need to make me equally bored. Skip to where something happens.

Now I don't expect everything to be all action, and I'm not opposed to a bit of exposition or explaining the setting. It's ok if it's not overdone. Just give me the short version and let my own imagination fill in the blanks. Or if you must keep on describing a road through the woods, throw in something interesting happening now and then, to keep me interested.

To take an intentionally not-apples-to-apples example (so we don't get sidetracked in who's greater than whom and by whose personal preferences), take Terry Pratchett's Discworld. You have been warned that it's not apples to apples. In a sense it too has the structure of 3/4 of the book being just setting the stage for what's going to happen in the end. If you look at it as monomyth, it's an unusually squashed one, with a long trailing edge which does very little to build up tension towards the climax, and then the curve pretty much goes up and down in a hurry in the last chapter or two. But that long trailing edge has almost all the gags in the book. Characters and locations aren't just introduced by describing every freaking freckle and respectively cobblestone on them, and having a merry band of retards sing endless songs about them. They're introduced by what funny stuff they do (the characters) and respectively what happens there (the locations). If he needs to remind you who Vimes or the Patrician are, or what Ankh-Morpork looks like, or who rules the Kingdom of Lancre, or what makes Cohen The Barbarian so great, he doesn't go and describe it at length. He builds an interesting and funny mini-sketch that illustrates his point.

Now I'm certainly not saying that all fantasy needs to be a parody like Discworld, far from it. But the technique can be used just the same in a serious form too. If you need to tell me about the Valley Of Despair, beyond the Mountains Of Doom, where the Dragons Of Fate guard the gate to King Moraelin's evil kingdom, don't go into a dozen pages worth of description and songs. Just make something happen there, and make half the description part of it. And I mean something more interesting than just some guys walking along a trail through that valley.

Now I _am_ a fantasy fan, so I'll give him proper respect for inventing the genre and getting the ball rolling. Kudos all around for that. But, eh, it's been done better since then.

Basically same as I'll give Watt credit for inventing the first useful steam engine, but that doesn't mean I need to pretend that it's still a high-tech marvel. Same here. An amazing relic from the history of that genre, yes. Still an awesome story? Nope. Not for me, anyway.

Right.

[SatanicPuppy]

I know it goes against the whole coolaid that all the PJ fans drink, but I'm delighted to see someone like Del Toro directing the Hobbit...If I'd had my choice of anyone in the world, he'd have been in the top five...And Jackson wouldn't have been.

You've finally solved it.

[raygundan]

3. Profit!

Sequel: that's the scariest part of TFA

[evilninjax]

A wholly new story covering the period of time between THE HOBBIT and LOTR (I'm assuming that it's to be wholly new, at least and that there's not somehting like a Christopher Tolkien piece of work that they're going to base it on). I'm sure they'll have the best intentions but i can see that going terribly wrong.

obligatory simpsons

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen, Spielbergo, Schindler and I are like peas in a pod: we're both factory owners, we both made shells for the Nazis, but mine worked, dammit! Now go out there and win me that festival!

The movies aren't really that far off...

[sirwired]

I personally didn't mind Arwen inserted into the movie that much. Did she have much of a role in the original book? No, of course not. But adding her into the movie added some additional depth to Elrond's charachter, and added some complications to the relationship between Eowyn and Aragorn. (I'm glad however, that P.J. scrapped the original idea to have her show up and kick ass at Helm's Deep.)

While Tolkien may have stated Frodo was a middle-aged, upper-class guy, they did not read that way (at least when I read the books). I pictured Frodo (well before the movies came out) much as how they appeared in the movie. The "fish out of water" aspect was not really stressed in the books.

SirWired

smarter characters than pan?

[heroine]

Hopefully he'll make the characters smarter than the monkeys in Pan's Labyrinth. Characters need to be at least smart enough to be believable.

Re:Amazing News

[pressman]

Um... Frodo was not supposed to be middle aged. He was a young adult who was "Still in love with the Shire".

Seeing a middle aged person become ravaged by the ring would be truly less horrendous than seeing someone just attaining adulthood and having their entire life spread out before them only to be roped into "saving the world from evil at high personal cost".

Even though Frodo lived through the event, he was forever changed and could not go back to enjoying the simple, pleasant life that Sam, Merry and Pippin did. Even they could not experience hobbit life the way their contemporaries did because they each had a great adventure which changed them and expanded their view and understanding of their world. The remainder of the hobbits suffered a bit of discomfort at the hands of Saruman, but their world was essentially still the Shire and not much more than that.

None of the other Shire residents could ever possibly understand what Frodo, Merry, Pippin and Sam experienced. They were veterans of a world war which, for all intents and purposes, had very little impact on the Shire and people couldn't understand why they were changed by their experiences.

Very prophetic of what Vietnam vets would experience twenty-some years later.

will this Hobbit be too dark?

[peter303]

Del Toro films come off as forboding. The Hobbit was more light-hearted and child-like compared to Lord Of Rings. None of that big cosmic good-versus-evil. In the Hobbit the fantasy races were more like Disney.

Re:will this Hobbit be too dark?

[Dread_ed]

You do remember the part about the whole town getting roasted by a fire-breathing dragon, right? Nothing as light hearted as the screams of burning women and children, aye? If you missed that part maybe you also forgot about the massive 5-army battle at the end of the book complete with hideous, unnatural creatures from the underregions of the world.

It may have been written as a children's book, but it doesn't read like one if you fill in the blanks in the narrative. There are definitely some very adult themes there.

Well, by that token...

[Moraelin]

Well, by that token, the >insert any modern car manufacturer< is no Karl Benz! Did you notice how much they ripped off from the 1885 Benz Patent Motorwagen? Including the very idea of a wheeled car with an internal combustion engine, fer crying out loud. And steering by turning the front wheel(s) left or right? How much more blatant can a rip-off get? Heck, the Porsche Carrera (and a few others) even blatantly ripped off the idea of a rear-engine rear-drive configuration.

Ahem. Being the first certainly earns a big kudos and recognition for both Karl Benz and Tolkien. But that doesn't mean that the 1885 Benz Patent Motorwagen still is the best car. Yes, it's amazing that someone made that back then, but in the meantime it's been done better. The latest car from your favourite manufacturer may not be as amazingly innovative as Benz's 1885 creation, but I'd still drive the newer one, all things being equal.

And to get back on topic, Feist certainly isn't an innovator anywhere near Tolkien's calibre, but he's got a heck of a lot of talent anyway. His books are great and captivating anyway, and, all else being equal, I enjoyed reading them a lot more than my aborted attempt at reading Tolkien's trilogy.

Bilbo vs. The Trolls

[MsGeek]

Hmm...troll attacks can be scary. But at least Bilbo Baggins didn't encounter crapflooders, as far as I know. So I think this may wind up a movie you can bring the kids to see.

Fantasy appears in the 16th century, actually

[Garwulf]

Sorry, but that's wrong.

The earliest fantasy as we would describe it appears in the 16th century, and was known at the time as an "Artificial Romance." Cervantes was spoofing these stories in Don Quixote, and they had wizards, and dragons, etc.

The genre reappears with a more horror-based theme in the 19th century, and an author named William Morris (if I have the name right) creates the first invented fantasy world in the 1850s. In the early twentieth century, you have fantasists like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard (who arguably created Sword and Sorcery as a genre), and H.P. Lovecraft. And all of this takes place before The Hobbit was published, much less the Lord of the Rings.

(For more information, read Wizardry and Wild Romance, by Michael Moorcock.)

And, for the record, at one point Tolkien himself mentioned that he was very fond of the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard.

Re:Fantasy appears in the 16th century, actually

[lawpoop]

Question: Is Tolkein's fantasy qualitatively different from what came before it, in that it took place "somewhere else" and had nothing to do with the world that we know? For instance, King Arthur takes place in Britain, Don Quixote in Spain, and any other story may presumably have taken place in a generic Earth locale: some village, somewhere, in time. Even C.S. Lewis' wardrobe series intersected with Earth. However, Middle Earth is not Earth, nobody ever travels between Middle Earth and Earth, etc.

Re:Fantasy appears in the 16th century, actually

[Garwulf]

"Question: Is Tolkien's fantasy qualitatively different from what came before it, in that it took place "somewhere else" and had nothing to do with the world that we know?"

Well, it is more detailed, but it's not that different. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about fantastic worlds on Mars, and William Morris was writing about an invented world based on mythology in the 1850s.

What Tolkien really did was legitimize the genre, more than anything else. His work made the rest of the literary world take note that something special was happening.

Re:Fantasy appears in the 16th century, actually

[lawpoop]

Well, it is more detailed, but it's not that different. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about fantastic worlds on Mars, and William Morris was writing about an invented world based on mythology in the 1850s. Perhaps I asked my question wrong. I think that Tolkien's work is qualitatively different, and therefore new, because it took place somewhere else entirely, with no connection to the world we know.

A story that takes place on Mars is a story that takes place in the reality that we inhabit. We can look at Mars in the sky; we might go there someday. A story that takes place on Mount Olympus takes place in our reality -- Mount Olympus is an actual place in Greece. There may or may not be gods up there, but we can at least visit the place. Same with Valhalla -- dead heroes go there; it's just beyond the rainbow bridge. You can supposedly get there from Earth. Atlantis was supposed to be in the Atlantic somewhere.

All of these fantastic places had some connection to our reality -- either they existed in the past, or you could somehow travel there, perhaps magically -- but there was some connection, some intersection in space or time.

However, Tolkien's Middle Earth does not intersect with our reality in space or time. The Hobbit and LOTR takes place somewhere else entirely. Not in the magical past, not on another planet in our sky, not in a mythical Earth City. It's some completely other dimension or universe.

I wasn't familiar with William Morris, so I looked him up on wikipedia. It looks like his fantasy stories take place in some radically other place. So, he would predate Tolkien.

No Hobbits in There

[tobiah]

Those are good possibilities, but makes the title "Hobbit 2" kinda silly.

Since nothing really happens in that period, I'm hoping for a bittersweet romance involving an aging, eccentric Bilbo. Give it a gardening subtext with lots of high-def food shots. Samwise can provide comic relief.

I mean, do these tales all have to be swords and destiny? How about a little simple daily life?

Re:No Hobbits in There

[Agripa]

Those are good possibilities, but makes the title "Hobbit 2" kinda silly.

Well, they did say "sequel" instead of part 2. Gollum's exodus from the Misty Mountains and search for his lost ring could figure into it as well. Aragorn and Gandalf caught up to him at some point during this time.

I mean, do these tales all have to be swords and destiny? How about a little simple daily life?

Is that like the episodes of Star Trek where they arrive at a planet, discover an ancient peaceful civilization, and have a good time with nothing untoward happening?

Bilbo's Log, Shire Date 1401.2: I am very fond of my nephew Frodo if for no other reason he is a thorn in the side of the Sackville-Baggins. I'm not so sure about his friend, the Gaffer's son, Samwise though. That lad is entirely too withdrawn. I suspect he and his delinquent Took friends are part of the local shroom racket that farmer Maggot has been complaining about.

Pan's Labyrinth....

[Khyber]

...was a very enjoyable movie. I look forward to seeing "The Hobbitt" done in his style!

Scouring of the shire

[dafing]

Absolute rot Lazlow! (getting ready for GTA4)

How in the hell can you have ROTK without Scouring of the shire? My god, its like the best part. If you look at the whole adventure, its called for! Not just the prophecy bit WHERE THEY SHOWED SCENES OF IT, but at the very start of FOTR. You see how immature the hobbits were, playing about with fireworks, then having dish washing as a punishment! A couple days later (it seems from the movie), they are fighting trolls! Thousands of orcs that climb on the walls! A balrog! Ten thousand in TTT! A hundred thousand for the last battle! Oliphants for freaking sake, you hear how excited Sam was to hear rumours of them.

They have all changed as characters, the book makes that VERY clear. They are not hobbits anymore. They are now Gollum. Thats why Frodo, the main hero, the one who held the ring, who was closest to it, had to leave at the end of the story.

Hell, you must have seen the movies (being on /.), see how they dealt with Saruman? Even on the extended edition , it was so much better in the books.

I still have posters in my room, I have the main sword, and Saurons Gauntlet in its own glass dome (this could be a meme?), and I still hate the movies overall ending. I find them hard to watch, especially one after the other, because its all walking from here to there really. There is no overall plot line of character development compared to the books. Its like my countryman plucked a bunch of Hollywood stereotypes and blu-tacked them together. Having 10 endings, none of which are Scouring? For Shame :(

Re:Scouring of the shire

[Yunzil]

How in the hell can you have ROTK without Scouring of the shire?

Very easily because it adds nothing to the main story. It's OK in the books (just), but it wouldn't work in a movie.

My god, its like the best part.

It's like the best part, only it isn't.

because its all walking from here to there really.

Wait, you think the movies are all walking from here the there? My God. You need to read the books more closely. :)

Re:Scouring of the shire

[dafing]

what didnt you like about it?

Im crushed its not in there. Scenes like the elves leaving middle earth etc, they could have gone. But the death of the second main villain? hell, you cant really count Sauron as the main villain, everything is Saruman really, who made the armies, the weapons etc etc. The Eye is just like a ghost really. And they cut out how he dies, despite the fact hes like the main bad guy in all the movies!

You must admit they built up hobbiton in the first movie? the houses, where they eat and drink etc. And then its never used again. What a waste of the set.

Hellboy 2 Trailer Mistaken For Pan's Labyrinth 2

[davidpfarrell]

Did anybody else mistake the Hellboy 2 trailer as a Pan's Labyrinth sequel?

Seriously, until some of the HB characters appeared, that is exactly what it looked like.

I knew immediately who the director was after only the first few second into the trailer.

Some of the monsters seemed like near-ripoffs of PL.

I'm looking forward to seeing Hellboy 2, and I don't think they mad a bad choice for the The Hobbit, but I seriously do not want to see the trailer for The Hobbit and immediately think "Oh, its Hellboy 3!"

I'm just saying, maybe we can have a movie that doesn't have monsters with eyes in their hands?

/rant

Eddings seconded but read only the 1st series

[Immerial]

I am replying directly to your post vs replying to Psychotria so you'll actual see it since I have 'bad karma' [sigh]... I second the recommendation to read Eddings but suggest you read only the first series- "The Belgariad". The first series is the best. That's where you'll get some fun ideas and concepts. You can still tell that he is trying to find his voice/style/world so the series is very exciting and new. After that, the other series seem to be too formulaic.

Hobbit composer?

[vdgmr1213]

I still haven't seen who will be composing the music for The Hobbit. Please let it be Howard Shore. He did an amazing job with LotR music.

Plagiarizing you mean.

[jotaeleemeese]

But you have to know about Opera and Wagner to appreciate that.

Oh goodness.

[jotaeleemeese]

Since when entertainment ability is a measure of literary value?

You are judging a quite anachronistic and conservative work of art with the eyes of a Wii generation boy.

Needless to say attention spans are much shorter for people born late in the past century...

Yawn! Wagner... Yawn!

[jotaeleemeese]

Yeah, sure, whatever.

Oh man, you were not paying attention.

[jotaeleemeese]

The relationship of the girl with her mother and her unborn brother is portrayed with the utmost tenderness.

It may be that the subtitles did not make justicie to the Spanish dialogue, but it was tear inducing.

There are no monkeys in Pan's Labryinth

[jotaeleemeese]

You are imagining things ...