Go read these two chapters - they're not long and they're worth it.
I have read the whole of both books; that material is "nice to know" and rounds off the life stories of the cast but it is not relevant (beyond the amount it is mentioned in the main text) to the story of the War of the Ring. Aragorn's main motive is as the King Who Will Return. As I said, his love interest (which, thank god, Tolkien left out of the main text) is largely symbolic of the cost to the elves of Frodo's success and, as you imply, is largely a rerun of Beren and Luthien.
If Tolkien had been a braver writer I think the Aragorn and Arwen stroy would have been dropped altogether from the back of the book but Jackson has shown the folly of trying to shoehorn it into the main action. Although someone with more talent might not have made quite such a hash of as Jackson, I still think it distracts from the significent "King Arthur" story line that lies at the heart of Aragorn.
You seem to be forgetting that the moronic version of the story that Jackson put on the screen bears little resembance to what is in LotR. Jackson's "light of the Valar" guff is total nonsense both in terms of the characters and in terms of adapting the original work.
Tolkien mythology takes a lot from das Nibelungenlied (and viking sagas).
It does, and a lot of Scandinavian culture can be found in Britain, but the framing of that and the mingling of it with other threads such as the Woses and Rohan makes for something much more of the rolling Downs than of the fjords.
and so long as Jackson was true to the world, the details can lay to the side somewhat?
That's fair enough but every change Jackson made made things worse, not better. A quick example: the nazgul could have been made more impressive in the movie; instead they were reduced to figures of fun (highly inflamable figures of fun). If Frodo had really shown a Nazgul the ring then the game would have been over within the hour.
I agree that LotR could actually be improved but it would take someone with talent, not Peter Jackson.
Arwen's role was critically important and was rightly amplified in the films.
No, Arwen's original relationship with Aragorn was important and symbolic of the risks and meaning of the whole story but the version of it put on by Jackson was shit from start to end. It made no sense, was boring and intrusive and involved mangling Elrond's character to the point where one had to wonder if Jackson had ever actually read any of Elrond's parts in the books. "I've waited thousands of years to see Sauron overthrown...Fuck it, I'm SO depressed - I'm off. Sorry about all that giving you false hope and all, but hey: so sue me!" Utter crap.
Arwen's part constantly undermined the other characters (not just Elrond but Aragorn and Frodo suffered from this tedious sub-plot) and the plot itself. It was a total mess and the current vogue for saying "ah, well it was all in Appendix A, you know" doesn't wash: Tolkien's version was in the appendix and was a powerful and moving final end to the saga, not a load of Hollywood clap-trap.
Sorry, but failing to grasp this fundamental point is to fail to understand a primary motive for most human beings: the protection of our loved ones.
Just as you fail to see the point of Aragorn's story: he's not "most human beings", he has a destiny that presses him beyond the normally small circle of friends and family and encompasses his nation and people too. "Duty" is the key word here. His personal love affair is important enough to be placed into the appendix but is a side-show in his saga.
the books are hardly perfect
True.
poorly written
False.
I have a degree in English
Oh, that must have been hard.
Given the wealth of world mythology, of which Tolkien's work is part redaction and part recreation, I'll take the mythology myself.
That's a fair point, but I personally find that the original myths do not speak to me either clearly - due to the masses of various translations of various levels of ability - nor as a British person, whose own mythos was largely destroyed by the Roman and Christian invasions. The Ring of the Neibeling (spelling guess) is a great story but very, very German. LotR is much more about where I come from, and I like that about it.
I find his use of lengthy appendices and created languages fatuous and self-congratulatory.
Tell your fucking story, Tolkien - don't make us hunt around for it.
He did: the appendices were not at all required reading to follow the story (that's why things like Arwen ended up there: they add to it without being required). As to the language thing: the language came first and the stories later, so it would have been a different book with less depth the other way around; just look at the masses of Tolkien-wannabes that followed with huge volumes of shallow crap. Also, Tolkien was a linguist, not a professional writer, so you're attacking him for using his personal area of expertise in writing his first major book. That seems petty and self-indulgent to me.
There certainly has been a log of oh-hum stuff since Tolkien but LotRs was pretty unique when it came out. There's not much Tolkien can do about what followed him, is there?
Were the movie producers a bunch of self-serving flaming juice-boxes who couldn't make a movie without putting their grubby little fingers over every little thing
Yep.
Basic rule of thumb on Jackson's versions: what they took out for time pressure generally was sensible, what they kept was done well, what they added, changed or amplified stunk. Unfortunately the last category covers much of the actual script so as a story the result is a wash out, but it still looks great if you turn the sound off.
the Outlook web client is an excellent piece of work.
Depends on your taste; I've seen employees threaten to quit if they had to "use that piece of shit any longer", and the issue was the web client, not crashes or lost email or anything like that. I have to say that I agree with them: I think Outlook's web client is next to unusable. But, then, I don't have to use it.
Word processing and web surfing don't require that much snap and pop.
Nor does it require anything like 900 bucks! The eMac serves no useful purpose that I can see; I do think it's Apples worst machine since the Apple III (or maybe the Lisa, although it was more of a prototype than a serious machine. Sort of John the Baptist to the Mac's Jesus).
Those figures are not comparable: Microsoft's is for the year, IBM's is for the quarter. IBM's consulting devision takes in more than then whole of Microsoft. IBM can't match Microsoft's profit margin, though, so MS is still the richer company. But I'd bet on IBM still being around in 50 years when MS is long gone.
It's always worth remembering that DRM is about preventing legitimate copies, not illegal ones. The vast majority of people are not comfortable with the idea of their favourite band etc not getting even the pathetic cut of the cover price that they do at the moment and are happy to pay a fair price for a decent product. On the other hand, everyone likes to make compilations or at least take their existing music collection to different locations.
Logically, then, the market for selling the same product multiple times (ie, using DRM to force you to buy two or more CDs if you want to have one in work/car/etc. and one at home) is vastly more valuable than the illegal recording market, which has been in existance for a long time anyway.
The people behind DRM are not idiots; they know as well as anyone (or better) that sales figures show downloaders buy more music than any other group whether their downloads are iTunes or BitTorrent. They couldn't care less about stopping that - they just want to have the same bonanza that they did with the vinyl->CD repeat buying period, but now they want it every year.
I didn't catch any continuity errors with the staff.
I'm pretty sure (although I've only seen the film once) that he didn't have it when banished to the top of Orthanc then he did have it when he was rescued.
What changes there do you see as tragic to the story?
Very quickly, as I'm off out: Frodo makes an arse of himself in the book and nearly gets killed. By the time of the ford the reader should be doubting Gandalf's choice; certainly the other characters should be. Suddenly, he's alone, separated from the other travellers and finds himself facing the Nazgul, led by the dread Lord himself, with no one to save him, no Aragorn, no Gandalf, no one. And he defies them. Alone against the pwoer of Sauron's agaents and the calling of the Ring for its master he faces them down and refuses their bidding. He comes through and is vindicated.
In the film, he's rescued. Bah!
In the book Frodo makes the choice to split off from the Fellowship on his own, without council. He is able to face his fate after Boromir's attack and do what he know he has to, no matter how hard.
In the film, he asks Aragorn if it's okay. Double bah!!
WHile some of us would have prefered to see a real wizard's duel with the two of them standing and doing nothing for 15 minutes, it isn't good movie making.
The Bakshi version got this bit right: lighting, voices, and music for about 15 seconds carried the idea of great wills struggling against each other "behind the scenes" quite well. And he didn't have the continuity error of Gandalf's staff either.
Gandalf waiting at the main gate of Minas Tirith after Grond had shattered it while the Lord of the Nazgul crossed the theshold and mocked, only to have the horns of Rohan come sounding from afar and delay that potential confrontation.
That omission alone is enough to show that Jackson couldn't direct traffic in a ghostown. One of the greatest moments in fantasy literature so that we can have dwarf-tossing jokes and elves surfing down stairs.
The most notable example was Grima, who in the books was an incredibly two-dimensional character, but who in the movies achieved some actual depth.
Well, Grima...you know. He's a great character but totally unrealistic. He would have had an "accident" years ago. So I'm ambivilent. I would have loved to have seen the sequence from "Unfinished Tales" where the Lord of the Nazgul meets Grima on the road to Isengard. And the following bit where a very worried Saruman manages to get the Lord to go away using his voice through the gateway of Orthanc.
Anyway, Frodo is the main character and was relly badly done by in the script. Almost as badly done by as the poor old Balrog, who ends up saving them all from certain death. Sheesh!
but the themes were left in tact, most of the characters maintained their selfness
I think you need to read the book again. Frodo's development was totally undermined by the changes, none of which made the film any more watchable.
The changes to Elrod, Aragorn and Arwen were totally awful, and the break-dancing wizards scene will haunt me for the rest of my life as bad film-making at it's worst.
Perhaps you should take some of your bullshit rhetoric, and back it up with facts.
Er, perhaps you should just watch what he does. The facts speak for themselves. He acts like a retard, he is in fact a crook, and the invasion of Iraq, which has killed over a thousand Americans had no apparent motive other than the oil, which is exactly what Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz said, in 1999, was the reason Clinton should have invaded Iraq.
None of this is even close to secret; indeed I have seen Rumsfeld talk about the need to invade Iraq to secure "US Economic interests", ie: oil. He's not even got enough moral spine to be ashamed of what he does or who he kills in the process. This is the man that sold WMD to Saddam - he was filmed doing it and the receipt is recorded in the Senate Banking committee's records. Itemised! Again: public record. Make some attempt to justify having a vote.
Go read the rightwing bullshit that the Project for the New American Century has on its website, some of it is actually by the loonies that are in power now. I'll not link to it as searching for information about your politicians is obviously a skill you need to practice.
No, the movies were not 100% the same as the books.
That's not the issue: no adaptation could be 100% faithful to the book. The problem is not what they took out or even re-arranged, it's that all the stuff they added was garbage. I'm not sure which film was the worst, particularly as my girlfriend failed to make me go to the third one, but Fellowship was a travesty particularly in respect of Frodo's character which was constantly undermined.
They were just bad movies almost saved by fantastic visuals.
The LotR movies were different, not necessarily worse.
I agree that it wasn't necessary for them to be worse, they just were.
The movies actually improved on the book in some ways.
Story-wise, I don't think so. They were visually almost perfect; stunning even, if that's not abusing a semi-colon.. But as a version of JRRT's story, and particularly characters, they were worthless.
" They said they had already secured Philippa Boyens (who wrote the scripts for The Fellowship of the Rings) as principal script writer. The script was, to me, all-important, so Boyens' presence was the key factor in my decision to sell this group the option to the film rights."
Given just how mangled Fellowship of the Ring was in terms of the original characters and meaning of the book, I can only assume that UKlG has never read Lord of the Rings. Boyens' presence was a guarantee that the characters would be unrecognisable and that the story would be reduced to a shallow and meaningless shadow of its former self.
Some people will use any excuse to bash the man that WON THE ELECTION (OWNED!!!)
The fact that he's a retarded crook with a cabinet of liars that are prepared to let Americans die to secure oil contracts is the only excuse I need. But I'm prepared to believe that there are others.
Here's a hint for the hard of thinking: the terrorists won on 911 and Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld couldn't be happier about it
I don't, I just think that one day they will have to or the gravy train will stop as the EU is dismembered from within by nationalists stirring up anti-EU feelings in their own countries. At the moment such feelings, while justified by the total uselessness of the EU, are still too weak to cause any difficulties but they will mount the longer the corruption continues.
Slashdot Mirror
I have read the whole of both books; that material is "nice to know" and rounds off the life stories of the cast but it is not relevant (beyond the amount it is mentioned in the main text) to the story of the War of the Ring. Aragorn's main motive is as the King Who Will Return. As I said, his love interest (which, thank god, Tolkien left out of the main text) is largely symbolic of the cost to the elves of Frodo's success and, as you imply, is largely a rerun of Beren and Luthien.
If Tolkien had been a braver writer I think the Aragorn and Arwen stroy would have been dropped altogether from the back of the book but Jackson has shown the folly of trying to shoehorn it into the main action. Although someone with more talent might not have made quite such a hash of as Jackson, I still think it distracts from the significent "King Arthur" story line that lies at the heart of Aragorn.
You seem to be forgetting that the moronic version of the story that Jackson put on the screen bears little resembance to what is in LotR. Jackson's "light of the Valar" guff is total nonsense both in terms of the characters and in terms of adapting the original work.
TWW
It does, and a lot of Scandinavian culture can be found in Britain, but the framing of that and the mingling of it with other threads such as the Woses and Rohan makes for something much more of the rolling Downs than of the fjords.
TWW
That's fair enough but every change Jackson made made things worse, not better. A quick example: the nazgul could have been made more impressive in the movie; instead they were reduced to figures of fun (highly inflamable figures of fun). If Frodo had really shown a Nazgul the ring then the game would have been over within the hour.
I agree that LotR could actually be improved but it would take someone with talent, not Peter Jackson.
TWW
No, Arwen's original relationship with Aragorn was important and symbolic of the risks and meaning of the whole story but the version of it put on by Jackson was shit from start to end. It made no sense, was boring and intrusive and involved mangling Elrond's character to the point where one had to wonder if Jackson had ever actually read any of Elrond's parts in the books. "I've waited thousands of years to see Sauron overthrown...Fuck it, I'm SO depressed - I'm off. Sorry about all that giving you false hope and all, but hey: so sue me!" Utter crap.
Arwen's part constantly undermined the other characters (not just Elrond but Aragorn and Frodo suffered from this tedious sub-plot) and the plot itself. It was a total mess and the current vogue for saying "ah, well it was all in Appendix A, you know" doesn't wash: Tolkien's version was in the appendix and was a powerful and moving final end to the saga, not a load of Hollywood clap-trap.
Sorry, but failing to grasp this fundamental point is to fail to understand a primary motive for most human beings: the protection of our loved ones.
Just as you fail to see the point of Aragorn's story: he's not "most human beings", he has a destiny that presses him beyond the normally small circle of friends and family and encompasses his nation and people too. "Duty" is the key word here. His personal love affair is important enough to be placed into the appendix but is a side-show in his saga.
the books are hardly perfect
True.
poorly written
False.
I have a degree in English
Oh, that must have been hard.
Given the wealth of world mythology, of which Tolkien's work is part redaction and part recreation, I'll take the mythology myself.
That's a fair point, but I personally find that the original myths do not speak to me either clearly - due to the masses of various translations of various levels of ability - nor as a British person, whose own mythos was largely destroyed by the Roman and Christian invasions. The Ring of the Neibeling (spelling guess) is a great story but very, very German. LotR is much more about where I come from, and I like that about it.
I find his use of lengthy appendices and created languages fatuous and self-congratulatory.
Tell your fucking story, Tolkien - don't make us hunt around for it.
He did: the appendices were not at all required reading to follow the story (that's why things like Arwen ended up there: they add to it without being required). As to the language thing: the language came first and the stories later, so it would have been a different book with less depth the other way around; just look at the masses of Tolkien-wannabes that followed with huge volumes of shallow crap. Also, Tolkien was a linguist, not a professional writer, so you're attacking him for using his personal area of expertise in writing his first major book. That seems petty and self-indulgent to me.
There certainly has been a log of oh-hum stuff since Tolkien but LotRs was pretty unique when it came out. There's not much Tolkien can do about what followed him, is there?
TWW
Yep.
Basic rule of thumb on Jackson's versions: what they took out for time pressure generally was sensible, what they kept was done well, what they added, changed or amplified stunk. Unfortunately the last category covers much of the actual script so as a story the result is a wash out, but it still looks great if you turn the sound off.
TWW
Hey! Some of us are eating breakfast here, you know!
Depends on your taste; I've seen employees threaten to quit if they had to "use that piece of shit any longer", and the issue was the web client, not crashes or lost email or anything like that. I have to say that I agree with them: I think Outlook's web client is next to unusable. But, then, I don't have to use it.
TWW
TWW
Nor does it require anything like 900 bucks! The eMac serves no useful purpose that I can see; I do think it's Apples worst machine since the Apple III (or maybe the Lisa, although it was more of a prototype than a serious machine. Sort of John the Baptist to the Mac's Jesus).
TWW
TWW
Logically, then, the market for selling the same product multiple times (ie, using DRM to force you to buy two or more CDs if you want to have one in work/car/etc. and one at home) is vastly more valuable than the illegal recording market, which has been in existance for a long time anyway.
The people behind DRM are not idiots; they know as well as anyone (or better) that sales figures show downloaders buy more music than any other group whether their downloads are iTunes or BitTorrent. They couldn't care less about stopping that - they just want to have the same bonanza that they did with the vinyl->CD repeat buying period, but now they want it every year.
TWW
I'm pretty sure (although I've only seen the film once) that he didn't have it when banished to the top of Orthanc then he did have it when he was rescued.
TWW
Very quickly, as I'm off out: Frodo makes an arse of himself in the book and nearly gets killed. By the time of the ford the reader should be doubting Gandalf's choice; certainly the other characters should be. Suddenly, he's alone, separated from the other travellers and finds himself facing the Nazgul, led by the dread Lord himself, with no one to save him, no Aragorn, no Gandalf, no one. And he defies them. Alone against the pwoer of Sauron's agaents and the calling of the Ring for its master he faces them down and refuses their bidding. He comes through and is vindicated.
In the film, he's rescued. Bah!
In the book Frodo makes the choice to split off from the Fellowship on his own, without council. He is able to face his fate after Boromir's attack and do what he know he has to, no matter how hard.
In the film, he asks Aragorn if it's okay. Double bah!!
Got to go sorry about the typing.
TWW
The Bakshi version got this bit right: lighting, voices, and music for about 15 seconds carried the idea of great wills struggling against each other "behind the scenes" quite well. And he didn't have the continuity error of Gandalf's staff either.
TWW
That omission alone is enough to show that Jackson couldn't direct traffic in a ghostown. One of the greatest moments in fantasy literature so that we can have dwarf-tossing jokes and elves surfing down stairs.
TWW
Well, Grima...you know. He's a great character but totally unrealistic. He would have had an "accident" years ago. So I'm ambivilent. I would have loved to have seen the sequence from "Unfinished Tales" where the Lord of the Nazgul meets Grima on the road to Isengard. And the following bit where a very worried Saruman manages to get the Lord to go away using his voice through the gateway of Orthanc.
Anyway, Frodo is the main character and was relly badly done by in the script. Almost as badly done by as the poor old Balrog, who ends up saving them all from certain death. Sheesh!
TWW
I think you need to read the book again. Frodo's development was totally undermined by the changes, none of which made the film any more watchable.
The changes to Elrod, Aragorn and Arwen were totally awful, and the break-dancing wizards scene will haunt me for the rest of my life as bad film-making at it's worst.
TWW
Er, perhaps you should just watch what he does. The facts speak for themselves. He acts like a retard, he is in fact a crook, and the invasion of Iraq, which has killed over a thousand Americans had no apparent motive other than the oil, which is exactly what Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz said, in 1999, was the reason Clinton should have invaded Iraq.
None of this is even close to secret; indeed I have seen Rumsfeld talk about the need to invade Iraq to secure "US Economic interests", ie: oil. He's not even got enough moral spine to be ashamed of what he does or who he kills in the process. This is the man that sold WMD to Saddam - he was filmed doing it and the receipt is recorded in the Senate Banking committee's records. Itemised! Again: public record. Make some attempt to justify having a vote.
Go read the rightwing bullshit that the Project for the New American Century has on its website, some of it is actually by the loonies that are in power now. I'll not link to it as searching for information about your politicians is obviously a skill you need to practice.
Stupid asshole.
Truth hurts, don't it?
TWW
That's not the issue: no adaptation could be 100% faithful to the book. The problem is not what they took out or even re-arranged, it's that all the stuff they added was garbage. I'm not sure which film was the worst, particularly as my girlfriend failed to make me go to the third one, but Fellowship was a travesty particularly in respect of Frodo's character which was constantly undermined.
They were just bad movies almost saved by fantastic visuals.
TWW
I agree that it wasn't necessary for them to be worse, they just were.
The movies actually improved on the book in some ways.
Story-wise, I don't think so. They were visually almost perfect; stunning even, if that's not abusing a semi-colon.. But as a version of JRRT's story, and particularly characters, they were worthless.
TWW
Given just how mangled Fellowship of the Ring was in terms of the original characters and meaning of the book, I can only assume that UKlG has never read Lord of the Rings. Boyens' presence was a guarantee that the characters would be unrecognisable and that the story would be reduced to a shallow and meaningless shadow of its former self.
TWW
The fact that he's a retarded crook with a cabinet of liars that are prepared to let Americans die to secure oil contracts is the only excuse I need. But I'm prepared to believe that there are others.
Here's a hint for the hard of thinking: the terrorists won on 911 and Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld couldn't be happier about it
TWW
Okay, fair enough. PTWW
On the server, perhaps. On the thousands of desktops, they are a pain that few sys admins have the resources to eliminate.
TWW
I don't, I just think that one day they will have to or the gravy train will stop as the EU is dismembered from within by nationalists stirring up anti-EU feelings in their own countries. At the moment such feelings, while justified by the total uselessness of the EU, are still too weak to cause any difficulties but they will mount the longer the corruption continues.
TWW