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MGM and Warner Near On Deal For Hobbit Films
Jamie found an NYT story that says "After months of negotiation and delay, Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer are on the verge of an agreement that would allow the director Peter Jackson to begin shooting a two-part version of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit early next year." The production has struggled recently with issues with unions, and a fire.
Nothing can ever beat that cartoon.
I swear I read that as "The production has struggled recently with issues with Unicorns, and a fire."
Let's wait until there actually is an agreement made before we start celebrating. This thing has been "real close" to taking the next step too many times now.
With the producers, director, actors, production crews, and distributors facing off in a lawsuit -- a great Battle of Five Armies over a huge pile of gold.
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to throwing my $10 on the pile. I'm sure the film itself will be great.
Magic Palantír Says: DON'T COUNT ON IT
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
ie. They're going to milk this for all it's worth.
No sig today...
I'd almost forgotten the skateboarding elf, thanks.
Yet another opportunity to wear funny glasses for three hours and have pointy objects thrust at me repeatedly.
Maybe he'll buck the trend and NOT do it in 3D?
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
It began with the forging of the Great Rings. Three were given to the artists and writers; wisest and most creative of all beings. Seven, to the union actors, great visionaries and craftsmen of the stage. And nine, nine rings were gifted to the studio execs, who above all else desire power. For within these rings was bound the strength and the will to govern over each group. But they were all of them deceived, for a new ring was made. In the land of New Zealand, in the fires of Mount Cook, the Dark Lord Peter Jackson forged in secret, a master ring, to control all others.
The Hobbit was the most boring of the Tolkien books, but hey, I'm all for a movie!
Isn't that like saying the Pacific Ocean is the most wet of the oceans?
Sure... if you're illiterate ;p
I'll agree with that...
Other than about 20 seconds worth of film, I think the LOTR films were a far better adaptation of the books than I thought possible.
When I heard that the story was coming out on film, I was expecting a treatment like "I, Robot" got - schlock only vaguely related to the book. Instead, we got a movie that captured the feel of the books almost perfectly, and told the same story. The movie was better for the visuals - it fleshed the world out much better than my puny imagination had been able to do.
I've never quite understood the haters, either.
And the worms ate into his brain.
The studios pulled the infamous Hollywood Accounting scam, of trying to pretend that LOTR didn't make any money, in order to keep from paying Jackson his contractual shares of profits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting#Examples
I'd suspect that they must have come to some sort of an agreement with Jackson. Either setting up payment on what they owe in LOTR, or sweetening the $ from the Hobbit in some way in order to make up for it.
What's even more interesting to me, is that the article doesn't mention this at all. The article reads so much like a press release that I wonder if it's cribbed directly from a couple of different press releases.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
So I suppose you didn't read Silmarillion?
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Neither of those chapters contribute to the story as a whole. Remember that (in the movies) Saruman died at Isengard, so the episode of the Shire wouldn't make sense. Also Tom Bombadil IMHO doesn't make sense with the darkish setting of the story.
Tim, Tim Benzidrine
Hash, Boo, Valvoline
Clean, Clean, Clean for Gene
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Hie thee Hence, you leafy Narc!
(always wanted to do that)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Okay, but cutting short Bill the Pony's story is unforgivable.
I always wondered if the fact that Hobbits were used to eating 'shrooms and smoking their special tobacco is what made them slightly more resilient to the promises of the ring, and therefore the ideal ring-bearers, but the movie pretty much strips out all of that without really explaining why Hobbits are better suited to carry the ring than, say, the giant eagle (who presumably could have dropped off the ring in a couple of hours and been back in time for tea).
I think this is well explained in the books and in the movie, though somewhat in the subcontext: hobbits have so little power and are so devoid of ambitions (other than living a very simple life) that the Ring doesn't have a strong effect on them. It would corrupt a powerful being such as a Maia (such as Gandalf) or a great Eagle. Moreover, that might explain why the Ring has absolutely no effect on Tom Bombadil. But maybe I'm seeing too much.
It wasn't what was cut so much as what was changed:
Merri and Pippin weren't bumbling fools who accidentally kinna tagged along, they were dear friends who wanted to help and wouldn't let Frodo go without them.
There were no elves at Helm's Deep.
Faramir was a better man than his brother and didn't try to take Frodo or the ring back to Minas Tirith.
Shelob was a fabulous ending to the Two Towers but lost drama in the middle of RotK.
Aragon wasn't hiding from his heritage, he carried the broken blade with him as a reminder of his destiny (although he was cynical about it).
Arwen wasn't a bad-ass who could out-class the wraiths, Glorfindal was the bad-ass warrior who afforded the hobbits some protection so they could get to Rivendell.
Just a few examples off the top of my head, the main thing was how many character that were fundamentally "wrong" when compared to the books.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
I was always under the impression that the hobbits were not so easily corrupted by the ring, because their race had never wielded rings of power nor had any made for them, unlike the elves, dwarves and men.
Gollum was a Hobbit
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What I got from both the books and the movie on that was simply that Hobbits don't really give two shits about power. Tolkien hammered on this concept until it hurt, and Jackson remained pretty true to that concept. They intentionally choose a simple life, they have little interest in controlling (or, let's be honest, even helping) anyone outside their borders, so the whole concept of a ring that gives absolute power has little meaning. The Ring can corrupt them (see Smeagol/Gollum and Frodo). Hell, even Bilbo got corrupted by it to an extent, but he managed to hold out for quite a while because he didn't know what it was.
The only people who could bear the Ring are those who could wield it (limited to a population of one, named "Sauron") and those to whom it would not occur to try.
Bilbo never had a clue what the Ring was, or what it represented. At least not until long after it was out of his hands, and I'm not sure he really knew anything other that it was a burden to Frodo, then forgot about that soon after. To him, it was a magical little shiny that allowed him to avoid unpleasant encounters and skulk around. He didn't have buttons the Ring could have pushed to seek absolute power. He didn't know about it, and didn't care, other than the small and insignificant uses he put it to. Even so, it took threats from Gandalf to get him to set it aside, and it still gnawed at him.
Frodo knew what he had from fairly early on, but lacked the sort of desire for power the Ring could leverage. Even so, the Ring did work on Frodo at the end. He was unable to cast it into the fires and actually started to try and wield it, and it fell on Gollum and a bit of clumsiness and happy chance to finally destroy the Ring.
Hobbits are also insignificant to the powerful to the point of near invisibility. Give the Ring to an Eagle, and he'd be spotted and intercepted, probably before he crossed the border into Mordor, if his own sense of power didn't turn his purposes to that of the Ring's first. No one could wield it without Sauron being aware of it (and eventually being subverted by it), and no one could openly fight past Sauron and into Mordor without wielding it. It was only through stealth that Frodo managed to get the Ring into Mordor without being immediately caught.
Remember, all of the people who understood the ring and understood power (Gandalf, Elrond, Aragorn, Faramir, Galadriel, etc) were strong enough to reject the ring but wise enough to understand that they were not strong enough to control it or even handle it. Boromir was weak enough to be unable to reject the ring, and though he managed to reject it briefly it was really only Saruman's orcs killing him off that saved him from eventually succumbing to its appeal and attempting to wield it. Denethor was weak enough that the mere concept that it slipped through Faramir's fingers was enough to drive him batshit crazy.
No one who was strong enough to understand what the Ring truly was would be strong enough to carry it for any length of time. Its power was too appealing.
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Not to mention that the undead army never made it to Pelannor Fields. They defeated the Corsairs of Umbar, were released from service, and the reinforcements came from the freed slaves and the now un-besieged coastal region.
Allowing Saruman his final chance of redemption (to wait out the war & think about why he (and other Istari) was sent to middle earth), show that even Fangorn was susceptible to Saruman's final evil skill (voice), and show the damage which can still be caused by a hollowed out "powerless" voice set loose among a good-natured group such as the Shire, cheats Gandalf and Saruman of character and Tolkien of some of his more subtle points. Not to mention cheating the Shire of it's endurance before and hard-will after the rising sparked by the returning hobbits.
I don't know how I stumbled across this but here is an interesting theory about Tom Bombadil being Sauron. It's from a Usenet posting circa 1996.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
And did he use it to seek power? No. He crawled into a hole in the earth and ate cave fish.
The lesser Rings weren't (exactly) related. It was apparently an innate property of Hobbits - even Gollum should have faded away a long time before the story began. Speculations on why the Hobbits should have such a property I think everyone else in this thread explained better than I could.
The Rings for the other races are an interesting question, though. The Elves alone made their three rings, so it's understandable they wouldn't corrupt the Elves, and there's no reason why the Ring of Power wouldn't corrupt Elves, especially High Elves like Galadriel. Men need no explanation. But Dwarves...we learn in the Lord of the Rings that Dwarves could not be corrupted by the rings Sauron gave them, and they would not fade away. The only thing Sauron could get them to do was inflame the Dwarves' natural greed for wealth, which Sauron could then manipulate (if he was lucky) to bring about their demise. But as far as we are told, it's a perfectly natural Dwarven greed, not the evil corrupting greed we would expect. So to what degree would Dwarves be affected by the One Ring, anyway? Unlike Elves and Men, Dwarves were designed by their creator Aule to specifically have a lot of endurance and incorruptibility. So would they have the same kind of Hobbit One Ring-resistance?
The Scourging of the Shire is a _major_ point of the LoTR story--it's not only that you must stand up against evil, but that once your innocence is lost in the fight, you can never go home again. The hobbits have been changed by their adventures and are no longer who they were when they left home, and their home has changed too... none of them (though most poignantly Frodo) can have the life they had in the way it was when they left.
Hollywood is forever getting this wrong. When I was a youngster, I walked out of a movie (Labyrinth, if anyone's seen it) at the end because after all the heroine goes through to move on beyond her childish world and take responsibility, she's allowed to go right back into the imaginary world. So what was the point of her learning maturity during her quest if she's just going to shrug it off?
I do wonder what they're teaching in the schools these days...
I had a similar experience, but I did eventually get through the Silmarillion. I think I read it twice, eventually.
The first half is basically the Middle Earth version of Genesis. Most of it could probably be compressed into a genealogy chart without losing too much. The second half is a lot more interesting. But you have to slog through the first half so you know who everyone is. Otherwise you'll just get lost of in a sea of near-identical names.
If you're a big LotR fan, it's probably worth the effort.
Not Sauron, but the Witch-king of Angmar, who is the leader of the Nazgul. Interesting link though, thanks.
Honestly, If you think Tom doesn't belong, that's fine. But you're missing a whole depth to the story by thinking that.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Tolkien wrote LoTR as one large book. His editors made him break it into six sub-books, which were then combined and edited into the three books.
They couldn't have done this with LoTR because there wasn't enough movie-ready material in there. LoTR is a deeply complex story with a lot of subtle subplots going on. Jackson chose the destruction of the Ring as the primary thrust of his story. Bombadil was not a part of that storyline. Bombadil would have been (to a movie-going audience) a complete non-sequitur. He's too subtle and interwoven into the ending of the Third Age. He's an example of the powerful but uninterested, which is a great narrative on why Hobbits are perfect Ringbearers, but is more of a sociological point than an add-on to the Quest to destroy the One Ring. He's a plot device to expose the dangers of some of the remaining bits of the Second Age (barrow-wights) while not killing off any important characters, but again Jackson didn't really cover the differences between the Ages. Bombadil neither contributed toward nor hindered the mission to destroy the One Ring.
The scouring of the Shire would have been drama after the happy ending, which is hard to pull off in movies, and as a 4th (or 6th) movie it would have been largely ignored as a "tidying up loose ends" bit. In the books, it's an interesting afterthought of the lingering consequences of allowing Saruman to live, and the fact that the destruction of the Ring didn't destroy all evil, and even unleashed a little here and there. It was also sort of a final nail in the Third Age's coffin, and the ending of the implied innocence of the Shire, the descent of all other species (elves, dwarves, hobbits) and the powers they wielded, and the ascent of Men and mechanical power. Again, though, none of that has anything to do with the Ring story.
Expressing all of that in movies would put an audience to sleep, and still come off as inadequate. Movies are stories told with a broad and unsubtle brush, and you have to make your stories less subtle as a result. Jackson chose the interesting storyline and dropped the rest.
I mean, look at what Jackson had to do to make The Two Towers interesting to a movie audience. They should have changed the name to "Helm's Deep: A Love Story". Jackson took a largely insignificant battle and made a whole movie out of it, invented a love interest thread between Aragorn and Arwen, and completely recast the Ents in order to add some conflict between them and the other protagonists, and to give them more screen time because the effects were cool. And, let's be honest, it was probably just as well. You'd want to see more "Frodo and Sam trudging through vast empty boringness?" Coverage of Sam's rescue, floor by floor, of Frodo from the Tower of Cirith Ungol?
Jackson took all the important but boring bits as vignettes rather than bits of information woven into a complex story.
The whole dichotomy of Smeagol attempting and failing to assert his personality over the Ring-induced Gollum persona was done in one utterly brilliant self-argument rather than as bits of interwoven story throughout. It was oversimplified, but that's what you do in a movie, and it expressed the complexity of what Smeagol/Gollum was as a character without becoming boring.
Frodo's sympathy with Smeagol and Sam's distrust of Gollum was handled by a few quick events, culminating in the trick Gollum played on Sam, rather than by many small-but-subtle interplays as seen in the books. As a result, Sam was rewritten as a bit thick and foolish enough to leave Frodo's side, rather than the one smart enough to wield Galadriel's Phial after Frodo was already taken out by Shelob.
I certainly have my complaints with the movies. But, given the unsubtle form that is a movie, I think Jackson did a remarkable job of making a movie that non-LoTR geeks could still enjoy, while still telling a story that is true to at least one storyline in the books. The natural result of this, however, is that bits that don't fit the main storyline need to go, or you risk making the movie boring to anyone but a LoTR geek. And you gotta sell lots of asses in seats to pay for an epic production like Jackson's LoTR.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
So would they have the same kind of Hobbit One Ring-resistance?
No. Even the lesser rings they had did corrupt them and brought Evil to the Dwarves. Sauron could not control them, the way he could Men so his plot "failed'. But research what happened to each of the 7 Ring Bearers of the Dwarves...
In Letters, JRRT says there are only a few beings in Arda that can control and use the 1 ring - pretty much Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel.
You had to have Great Power yourself to master the One Ring. No mortal could do it and dwarves are technically mortals.
Every one else attempting to use the Ring would eventually fail and Sauron would eventually prevail. The Ring is part of Sauron after all...
make it in 3D!
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
And in The Shining [1980], Kubrick left out the explosion of the boiler. God that movie sucks.
The books are good, the movie adaptations are good. The movie doesn't suck because a character that isn't integral to the plot is missing.
Yeah, you liked Tom Bombadil like a favourite uncle but he didn't contribute to the story.
What was more annoying was the Aragorn/Arwen angle that took away from the momentum of the story. Still not worth the hate.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Bad Theory. Frodo gave the ring to Bombadil to look at and Bombadil showed that he had power over the ring, something the Witch King would not have, so Bombadil is not the Witch King. If he was then he would have taken it immediately back to his master, Sauron, but he didn't, he gave it back to Frodo, something the Witch King would never have done. Elrond's refusal to let Bombadil keep the ring is more out of his understanding that Bombadil, though powerful, could not be trusted as he would just as easily misplace it as keep it safe. (An alternative no better than throwing it in the deep ocean hoping it lost forever. Elrond wanted the ring destroyed and guided the council to that purpose.)
Bombadil is an enigma that Tolkien purposefully never wanted explained. The theory I prefer is that he and Goldberry are one of the Aniur that was appointed to do a task, probably by Manwë, in that area of Middle Earth in the Third Age.