Or leave the game, play by yourself, get ignored, and never change a thing.
Or, stay in the game, play with Apple, get ignored and never change a thing. At least if you leave you're not doing someone else's work for them for free.
He certainly seemed grumpy in an interview I last read a few years ago; I think the topic had come up in connection with Bakshi so perhaps it was a more generalised grumpiness.
I get the idea that you definitely dislike Peter Jackson and you definitely dislike the movies.
Could be...could be!
Well...here's an option: DON'T WATCH THEM! IGNORE THEM! If you go and watch the movies and then expound upon them at length at a website (pro or con), you're still promoting them.
What I'm actually really irritated by is the idea put about by several people that Jackson is "the new Kirosawa" and that he "excells John Huston". As a fan of both this is what makes me want to point out the Emperor's nudity rather than a particular dislike of the film.
I think the film was poor but the hype is what is really getting on my tits at the moment. That and the blatent rip-off of producing a movie with continuity errors that are only corrected in the DVD and then producing a second DVD a few months after a bunch of people ran out to get the first one. That's just taking the piss, frankly.
That's true; I have read a Tolkien inverview where he complained about it and the Silmarilion seems to back up the "no wings" view but LotR does seem inconsistant. Of course we talk about a building having wings without meaning that it can fly, but still...
Overall it's a failure, it totally disintegrates after Lorien (apart from Gollum) although up to that point it is far better than Jackson's version.
But it fails because of the lack of money. In other words, it's an honest failure where Jackson's is a dishonest one - he didn't even try. The Flying Moose page is very funny and perceptive but a similar page could easily be written about the new version, although that would involve having to sit through it again.
It's actually a classic mistake: balrogs don't have wings!
Tolkien used to get quite grumpy on this subject because he said that its shadow spread out like wings and then everyone that illustrated the scene put actual wings in.
never say that he doesn't love the books which he has spent the last four years of his life converting into a cinematic format.
First of all, he hides it well. Secondly he has spent the last four years of his life converting the book into a DVD. The film that he released of Fellowship was simply not finished. Then a DVD comes out that's still not quite the whole thing and finally a super-dooper DVD appears with, I'm told, the actual story and plot included. Talk about milking it.
You should really be down on your hands and knees kissing his bare, hairy feet. Thanking him.
Personally, I curse the day the bastard was born. I've always hoped that when the technology was available someone would do a good LotR adaptation. Instead we get this abortion and the knowledge that probably no one will try to to it right again in my lifetime. What a waste.
Finally, there is no evidence that Jackson had even read the book before the first film came out, it was an adaptation of other adaptations. As I said in another posting, he even copied the mistakes of other people's versions to the point of putting in dialogue and whole scenes which were not in the book but which, by a remarkable coincidence, were in the animated version.
Personally, I think the evidence is that Bakshi would have done a great job if given Jackson's resources. The first hour of Bakshi's version does a better job of Fellowship than the four hours of crap that Jackson came out with.
Due to time constraints, you don't get the impact of his betrayal because as soon as he appears, he is evil. The mystery of the Palantir is revealed as soon as it is shown.
There were very few time constraints on Jackson the problem was that he wasted huge amounts of the time he had. His inability to pace the film was at the root of almost all its flaws, IMO.
I wanted to wander around Rivendell and look at the stuff in the background. Every costume and piece of armor is perfect. The maps and Bilbo's book made me want to read them. I want to wander around Bag End and poke around in all of the drawers.
I agree totally; as a set of semi-static images of Middle Earth it is the best I've seen, partiularly Rivendell which was stunning and for a while took away the bad taste left by Bree and the ford.
I'm saying that this is a movie, that it is in effect a billion dollar commercial for the books.
This is true to some extent but it does give a very distorted idea of the book. It is a very wordy book and the film is very short on talk; I imagine that the book could be a real chore for someone expecting it to be like the film. It took me three tries to get through the book although the final time I cracked it by reading it out loud to my girlfriend (which took quite some time) and really enjoyed the talkie bits and doing the voices, particularly Gollum.
I don't agree with this; the Bakshi adaptation was better than the book in this case.
I feel that no effort was made to find ways of doing this or the Wizards. Just kicking each other around the room was plain dull, although it did raise a few laughs in the cinema at least.
Galadriel "entered their thoughts", "knew their minds" etc. Again, how do you show that in a movie?
With some clever dialogue. Again, no effort was made to find a good solution to this.
EXPECT big screen effects
I did and do but I also expect direction that does more than rely on the effects to carry off the plot. The balrog was done very well indeed (apart from the wings) but the use of it was terrible: first it rescues the Fellowship then it gets lost looking for the stairs.
Exactly when did you lose any love for the story and decided to obsess over meaningless details?
Frodo's growth as a character is a central point of the story which Jackson has ignored in favour of fight scenes and silly theatrics.
Or are you saying that Bilbo's stupid bulging eyes and the laughable fight between the wizards show "love for the story" and characterisation is "meaningless detail"?
I wonder if people will be having the same arguments when we see a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film.
That's a good point but there are subtle differences: firstly LotR was a book first and a radio play second so I'm comparing two methods of adaptation while you are comparing an adaptation to the original. More importantly, HHGttG is fairly sureal while LotR is merely fantastical; I think the latter is a lot easier to film than the former.
He may have read it now but the initial cimema release was a poor copy of Bashi and the BBC; Jackson made the classic error of copying the mistakes of the other adaptions (and even stole two scenes and some dialogue) probably thinking that they were actually in the book when they weren't.
And most of these can be described as "the pacing just wouldn't work in a film"
The man that turned the battle at Weathertop into a gothic version of the Keystone Cops, made the balrog tedious, rushed us through Lorien without even an attempt at continuity, and cut the plot of a mere 430 pages to ribbons to fit into four hours of film knows squat about pacing.
TWW
Re:Faithful to Tolkien's writings?
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Are you one of those who think "if it is different from the book, it's automatically crap!".
No, it was crap because it was crap. Jackson shows no ability to keep the focus on characterisation and off fight scenes. He constantly take the simple option when the plot or issues raise become complex.
I have had this argument many many times on/. so I won't go into great detail again:
Gandalf portrayed as some sort of nut that jumps out on Frodo from behind doors in the dark (oh, dear; Frodo's dropped dead from a heart attack).
Frodo rescued at ford instead of showing his inner strength
Balrog sequence made no sense at all. What was the balrog doing while they played "balance the multi ton rock pile", putting on its Nikes?
The totally awful break dancing between Suruman and Gandalf. Oh, god, that was bad! Followed by the obligitory continuity error (now you see Gandalf's staff, now you don't, now you do again).
Gimli's character just a basic twat who knows nothing about the rings
Lots of continuity errors in the shire's landscape
Watcher does not seal them into Moria on purpose; this is quite a chilling part of the book - the idea that the watcher in the water is NOT the real threat
Lorien a total shambles with continuity errors and WTF is all that telepathy crap about? What happened to the hatred between the elves and the dwarfs?
The best example, though, of Jackson just not "getting it" was the scene between Frodo and Bilbo at Rivendell: in Baksi's film this is a very powerful and moving scene.
Bakshi has taken two
paragraphs and produced one of the most moving scenes in any adaptation of
the book. Where Tolkien just says "he felt a desire to strike him", Bakshi has
shown us Frodo's unconciously clenched fist rising out of both his and
Bilbo's sight. When Bilbo finally says "I understand now; put it away" the
feeling of dispair is very strong. I can't remember if Sir Ian Holm put
the same depth of emotion into the line, or even if he said it at all,
because I was still startled by the silly bulging eyes effect.
Jackson is a hack.
TWW
Re:What I want to know about Peter Jackson
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
·
· Score: 1, Troll
What I want to know about Peter Jackson is "what is it about him that makes his works so utterly astonishing?"
The fact that despite it being very poor he can still be regarded as some sort of cimema god, that's what. He clearly had not even read FotR when the first film was done and his interviews display a total lack of understanding or interest of the source material. Astonishing is the word.
If somebody tried to film Tolkien's books faithfully, THEN you would see crapola with a capital K. It is not possible...
Quite a few people have said this in Jackson's defense but the BBC radio version argues against it; if a good version can be played out on the radio why not a film?
TWW
Faithful to Tolkien's writings?
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Maybe you shold try reading LotR some time; Jackson's version is crapola with a capital K.
For the most part, RedHat has been -adding- new GUI tools to make it easier to perform certain tasks.
But their documentation of the system revolves more and more around KDE/GNOME.
I'm not saying I'll stop using RH but that the development of RH is now totally geared towards their idea of the desktop and if you don't need that then there is little point in upgrading RH as a system. It is precisely because they still include vi, emacs etc and keep all their config files in the same place that I don't see any need to go to RH8 rather than just updating packages from rpmfind.net. I don't need more GUI bells and whistles that I never use, even on my desktops, so why bother with them?
After the 8.0 release I didn't see so many people praising Red Hat as with the 7.3 release.
I've been on RH since 5.0 and I don't expect to ever "upgrade" to 8+. The push for a one-size-fits-all desktop based on KDE/GNOME means that it is getting incresingly hard to administer a system that does not use either of those. It is not helped that so many KDE and GNOME programs do not even bother including a man page.
So, I think all the systems I have RH on will in future be upgraded a package at a time; I currently compile the kernel from source anyway.
New systems will probably either be Gentoo or I might try SuSe; Debian is now so far behind that I wouldn't feel confident trying it on new hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
A dubious assertion; are you claiming that gcc was the only compiler available to Linus?
TWW
Or, stay in the game, play with Apple, get ignored and never change a thing. At least if you leave you're not doing someone else's work for them for free.
TWW
He certainly seemed grumpy in an interview I last read a few years ago; I think the topic had come up in connection with Bakshi so perhaps it was a more generalised grumpiness.
I get the idea that you definitely dislike Peter Jackson and you definitely dislike the movies.
Could be...could be!
Well...here's an option: DON'T WATCH THEM! IGNORE THEM! If you go and watch the movies and then expound upon them at length at a website (pro or con), you're still promoting them.
What I'm actually really irritated by is the idea put about by several people that Jackson is "the new Kirosawa" and that he "excells John Huston". As a fan of both this is what makes me want to point out the Emperor's nudity rather than a particular dislike of the film.
I think the film was poor but the hype is what is really getting on my tits at the moment. That and the blatent rip-off of producing a movie with continuity errors that are only corrected in the DVD and then producing a second DVD a few months after a bunch of people ran out to get the first one. That's just taking the piss, frankly.
TWW
TWW
Overall it's a failure, it totally disintegrates after Lorien (apart from Gollum) although up to that point it is far better than Jackson's version.
But it fails because of the lack of money. In other words, it's an honest failure where Jackson's is a dishonest one - he didn't even try. The Flying Moose page is very funny and perceptive but a similar page could easily be written about the new version, although that would involve having to sit through it again.
TWW
It's actually a classic mistake: balrogs don't have wings!
Tolkien used to get quite grumpy on this subject because he said that its shadow spread out like wings and then everyone that illustrated the scene put actual wings in.
TWW
First of all, he hides it well. Secondly he has spent the last four years of his life converting the book into a DVD. The film that he released of Fellowship was simply not finished. Then a DVD comes out that's still not quite the whole thing and finally a super-dooper DVD appears with, I'm told, the actual story and plot included. Talk about milking it.
You should really be down on your hands and knees kissing his bare, hairy feet. Thanking him.
Personally, I curse the day the bastard was born. I've always hoped that when the technology was available someone would do a good LotR adaptation. Instead we get this abortion and the knowledge that probably no one will try to to it right again in my lifetime. What a waste.
Finally, there is no evidence that Jackson had even read the book before the first film came out, it was an adaptation of other adaptations. As I said in another posting, he even copied the mistakes of other people's versions to the point of putting in dialogue and whole scenes which were not in the book but which, by a remarkable coincidence, were in the animated version.
TWW
Personally, I think the evidence is that Bakshi would have done a great job if given Jackson's resources. The first hour of Bakshi's version does a better job of Fellowship than the four hours of crap that Jackson came out with.
TWW
There were very few time constraints on Jackson the problem was that he wasted huge amounts of the time he had. His inability to pace the film was at the root of almost all its flaws, IMO.
I wanted to wander around Rivendell and look at the stuff in the background. Every costume and piece of armor is perfect. The maps and Bilbo's book made me want to read them. I want to wander around Bag End and poke around in all of the drawers.
I agree totally; as a set of semi-static images of Middle Earth it is the best I've seen, partiularly Rivendell which was stunning and for a while took away the bad taste left by Bree and the ford.
TWW
This is true to some extent but it does give a very distorted idea of the book. It is a very wordy book and the film is very short on talk; I imagine that the book could be a real chore for someone expecting it to be like the film. It took me three tries to get through the book although the final time I cracked it by reading it out loud to my girlfriend (which took quite some time) and really enjoyed the talkie bits and doing the voices, particularly Gollum.
TWW
Perhaps the degree of difference is important?
TWW
Four hours for a medium length book is enough for some subtlety.
TWW
Watching a really good book being adapted by a semi-illiterate moron with no more sense of direction than a cabbage, perhaps.
TWW
I don't agree with this; the Bakshi adaptation was better than the book in this case.
I feel that no effort was made to find ways of doing this or the Wizards. Just kicking each other around the room was plain dull, although it did raise a few laughs in the cinema at least.
Galadriel "entered their thoughts", "knew their minds" etc. Again, how do you show that in a movie?
With some clever dialogue. Again, no effort was made to find a good solution to this.
EXPECT big screen effects
I did and do but I also expect direction that does more than rely on the effects to carry off the plot. The balrog was done very well indeed (apart from the wings) but the use of it was terrible: first it rescues the Fellowship then it gets lost looking for the stairs.
TWW
Frodo's growth as a character is a central point of the story which Jackson has ignored in favour of fight scenes and silly theatrics.
Or are you saying that Bilbo's stupid bulging eyes and the laughable fight between the wizards show "love for the story" and characterisation is "meaningless detail"?
TWW
That's a good point but there are subtle differences: firstly LotR was a book first and a radio play second so I'm comparing two methods of adaptation while you are comparing an adaptation to the original. More importantly, HHGttG is fairly sureal while LotR is merely fantastical; I think the latter is a lot easier to film than the former.
TWW
Yes, that's right: "radio" is to "film" what "submarine" is to "space shuttle". Did that even make sense to you before you typed it?
TWW
Yes. Sorry.
TWW
And most of these can be described as "the pacing just wouldn't work in a film"
The man that turned the battle at Weathertop into a gothic version of the Keystone Cops, made the balrog tedious, rushed us through Lorien without even an attempt at continuity, and cut the plot of a mere 430 pages to ribbons to fit into four hours of film knows squat about pacing.
TWW
No, it was crap because it was crap. Jackson shows no ability to keep the focus on characterisation and off fight scenes. He constantly take the simple option when the plot or issues raise become complex.
I have had this argument many many times on /. so I won't go into great detail again:
The best example, though, of Jackson just not "getting it" was the scene between Frodo and Bilbo at Rivendell: in Baksi's film this is a very powerful and moving scene.
Bakshi has taken two paragraphs and produced one of the most moving scenes in any adaptation of the book. Where Tolkien just says "he felt a desire to strike him", Bakshi has shown us Frodo's unconciously clenched fist rising out of both his and Bilbo's sight. When Bilbo finally says "I understand now; put it away" the feeling of dispair is very strong. I can't remember if Sir Ian Holm put the same depth of emotion into the line, or even if he said it at all, because I was still startled by the silly bulging eyes effect.
Jackson is a hack.
TWW
The fact that despite it being very poor he can still be regarded as some sort of cimema god, that's what. He clearly had not even read FotR when the first film was done and his interviews display a total lack of understanding or interest of the source material. Astonishing is the word.
TWW
Quite a few people have said this in Jackson's defense but the BBC radio version argues against it; if a good version can be played out on the radio why not a film?
TWW
TWW
But their documentation of the system revolves more and more around KDE/GNOME.
I'm not saying I'll stop using RH but that the development of RH is now totally geared towards their idea of the desktop and if you don't need that then there is little point in upgrading RH as a system. It is precisely because they still include vi, emacs etc and keep all their config files in the same place that I don't see any need to go to RH8 rather than just updating packages from rpmfind.net. I don't need more GUI bells and whistles that I never use, even on my desktops, so why bother with them?
TWW
I've been on RH since 5.0 and I don't expect to ever "upgrade" to 8+. The push for a one-size-fits-all desktop based on KDE/GNOME means that it is getting incresingly hard to administer a system that does not use either of those. It is not helped that so many KDE and GNOME programs do not even bother including a man page.
So, I think all the systems I have RH on will in future be upgraded a package at a time; I currently compile the kernel from source anyway.
New systems will probably either be Gentoo or I might try SuSe; Debian is now so far behind that I wouldn't feel confident trying it on new hardware.
TWW