Saturn Award winners: Here is the best of the best [FoTR takes best movie!]

Finally, some justice for PJ, Sir Ian, and FoTR!

Enjoy! ;^)

-Kevin

Ring ping!

Please ping all of our hobbits in case I missed someone.

Thanks.

-Kevin

Take that Harry Potter! (poser) ;^)

-Kevin

PING!

Glad PJ got Best Director! It really was a Directing achievement to pull it off the way he did!

Glad PJ got Best Director!

Me too.

-Kevin

Here is another story at the same site as your link....

All three LORD OF THE RINGS films in one year?
According to a new story, New Line flirted with releasing all three in one year

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dateline: Tuesday, June 11, 2002

By: CHRISTOPHER ALLAN SMITH
By: News Editor
Source: USA Today

It seems New Line Cinema’s bold plan to shoot the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy all at once and release one a year for three years was only the SECOND boldest plan the studio contemplated when it came to Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein’s classic.

According to New Line’s president of domestic marketing Russell Schwartz, the studio thought about releasing LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, THE TWO TOWERS and RETURN OF THE KING in one year (that would probably be 2003 given post production time of all three films).

“It’s actually one movie in three parts, so it didn’t make any sense to sit on them,” he said to USA TODAY. “We briefly discussed it (the one-year release option) but when you factor in the video release, you’re on top of yourself.”

Schwartz went on to gently criticize corporate cousin Warner Bros. for releasing both MATRIX sequels next summer and then fall.

“Where is Warners going to put the MATRIX video? In a three month window?” Schwartz asked.

But now we enter the realm of speculation for a moment. While it might not make sense to release all three RINGS film in one year, we all remember the glory that was the STAR WARS: SPECIAL EDITION release in 1997, when fans could watch all three films, with new scenes, on the big screen just three months apart. So the question is, once all three RINGS films are released (RETURN OF THE KING comes out in 2003) how hard would it be for New Line to add the extra scenes already shot to big screen reissues of the trilogy, say, for 2005? Is there a LORD OF THE RINGS: SPECIAL EDITION in our futures?

We’ll look into it.

LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS will be released this December.

According to a new story, New Line flirted with releasing all three in one year

I don't know if my wallet could have handled that. It's taken quite a hit as it is seeing FoTR 10 times. ;^)

-Kevin

hehehe - I know...

A quick search for photos didn't find any photos... I don't think anybody from LoTR attended... (Think they are still down under...)

The Saturn Website claims to have video files, but The links didn't work for me.

Ring Ping!!

Tolkien Bump-List

Order The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Widescreen)

Thanks ecurbh! ;^)

-Kevin

Don’t get me wrong, I loved LoTR/FoTR and I’m glad to see this movie get the recognition it so richly deserves, but…..

You have to realize that this is the same awards group that voted the following:

Best Younger Actor: Haley Joel Osment, A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
Best Special Effects: Dennis Muren, Scott Farrar, Stan Winston, Michael Lantieri, A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
Best Writing: Steven Spielberg A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
Best Science Fiction Film: A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Bonnie Curtis producers.

I mean lets be honest here, is there even one Freeper that can categorically state that they really LIKED this insipid movie?

Then on the other hand they did vote for the following:

Cinescape’s Face of the Future (Female): Jolene Blalock, ENTERPRISE.
Best Supporting TV Actress: Jolene Blalock, ENTERPRISE.
Best TV Actress: Yancy Butler, WITCHBLADE.

So I guess it all evens out.

is there even one Freeper that can categorically state that they really LIKED this insipid movie?

Yup, I can. Especially the music (best score of the year). Of course I did not see it 10 times like a certain other film...

On the other hand, I have no idea, and frankly don't care, what Enterprise and Witchblade even are.

I know this is a LOTR:FOTR thread, but I'm VERY happy to see Ben Browder and Farscape finally be recognized. WTG, Ben!

Really? I was highly disappointed. Of course, had they ended the movie with the robot sunk under New York, it might have been better. The ending really ruined it. There were some good things.... anyway, I saw it with a bunch of friends and we agreed that the main problem was that it was a Hollywood film, and that's why the ending was so messed up.

Once was more than enough for me. Last year wasn't too good for fantasy/science fiction movies, other than LotR. This year is looking to be much better. (Minority Report, MiB2, TTT.... even the new Harry Potter movie looks like it should be better than the first one)

I liked the ending. The story starts with humans creating a "mecha" to love them, and ends with mechas creating a human to love them. So what is real, and what is artificial?

A.I. - A Visual Analysis

Review by Jeff Bond from FilmScoreMonthly.com (Sorry about the length of this, but it expresses my thoughts about the film better than I could.)

A.I. is a film that, like John Boorman?s Zardoz, tackles some huge metaphysical and anthropological issues and in doing so risks falling on its face. The fact that so many "critics," particularly contributors to a certain highly-visible fan-run website on the Internet, have rushed to insist that the movie does indeed fall on its face is symptomatic of a current movie-going culture which is all but incapable of dealing with a movie that can?t be digested and dismissed in a two word sound bite burped out while the credits are rolling.

The best most mainstream critics can come up with is the statement that A.I. is a fascinating failure, a movie that flirts with genius but cops out in the final stretch. Internet minions aren?t so kind, and this is a taste of some of the well-reasoned reactions to the movie I?ve sampled so far: "Spielberg has lost it!" Spielberg?s wealth and fame has distanced him from his audience as evidenced by the fact that the family shown in the first half of the movie isn?t a lower-middle class "real" family like the one shown in Close Encounters (a valid criticism if you believe that a multibillion dollar corporation would entrust its prototype artificial boy to someone in a trailer park). Spielberg sold out by casting big-name stars in cameos (virtually all of these are voice cameos?one by Chris Rock is unmistakable?but I had no idea Meryl Streep or Ben Kingsley had contributed to the film until I was watching the credits). The movie is too long. The movie is overly literal and over-explains, particularly during its narrator-driven final section. The movie is simple-minded and sentimental. The Flesh Fair sequence isn?t "cool" enough ("This would have been the perfect opportunity for Spielberg to do the ultimate BattleBots scene with fighting robots!" one brilliant Internet surfer declared). The chase sequence in the woods isn?t as good as the chase sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The motorcyclists chasing the robots are badly designed (this is like saying the trucks at a monster truck rally are badly designed). The movie is too cold and distant (i.e., too Kubrick) for a Spielberg movie (it was not E.T. with robots, in other words). The movie is too warm and fairy tale-like for a Kubrick movie.

In other words, the movie isn?t what it isn?t. Sounds a lot like the critical reaction every post-Dr. Strangelove Kubrick movie received, particularly 2001: A Space Odyssey. The "Emperor?s New Clothes" game everyone was playing when Eyes Wide Shut opened now offers double the stakes: we get to trash Spielberg AND Kubrick. If you want to read a review that could easily have been written today about A.I., check out Pauline Kael?s original review of 2001. It?s slammed as overblown, juvenile garbage.

But how can you compare 2001 to A.I., you say? A.I. with its adorable hero, its over-emphatic, literalized Pinocchio imagery, its sentimental musical score can?t possibly be compared to Kubrick?s visionary and ruthlessly chilly sci fi epic. But like 2001, A.I. is far less literal than it appears to be. Like 2001, it tackles and provokes issues so big that when confronted with them audiences seem to have no option but to giggle. And the issues don?t boil down to anything as simple as "does Commander Data really have emotions?" The questions are: What is behavior? What is the process of death? What is the nature of love? Why do we love and why do we need love? What is the power of religion? What is the ultimate legacy of man?

I had a weird, hollow feeling in my gut as I drove home from the screening where I first saw the movie. I?d watched the film in a state of suspension, observing without really being drawn into the story. My attention was held, no doubt of it, but there were elements that seemed jarringly out of place, that DID seem juvenile, insultingly simple-minded. There were things that made no sense, things that seemed to happen for the convenience of the narrative.

The audience held a respectful silence until the film entered its final segment. The woman behind me was crying; the people in front of me were snickering. I didn?t know what to feel. But for all its apparently crass Disney trappings, that final sequence stuck with me. I drove home and all I could think of was my wife who hadn?t gone to see the movie with me. When I got home she made a little joke about her being a robot.

I got a chill up my spine. Just for a second. Not from some sci fi echo of The Stepford Wives, but because I had to ask myself, why do I love this woman? What is it about her that induces this response in me, and how real is it? That was one terrifying second. And I can?t think of another movie that has ever produced such a moment of existential dread in me. For that moment alone I think A.I. deserves awards. I review movies as part of my living, and the most common reaction I?ve had to a film in the past few years is that I just lost several precious hours of my life watching it. I haven?t spent a day since I first saw the movie not thinking about A.I.

I don?t want to take beat by beat every criticism lobbed at A.I. but it seems clear to me that the movie?s final third is what alienates audiences. In the most literal sense, the robot David has been chasing a dream to find the Blue Fairy who will change him into a real boy and reunite him with his mother. After a very long wait David meets some magical visitors (seemingly from another Spielberg movie) who grant him his wish. Lest there be any confusion a narrator (who has also introduced the film?s opening to us) explains what is happening as David makes his final encounter with these future intelligences, with the Blue Fairy, and with his mother. End of story.

We?ve been so conditioned to this sort of pseudo-religious, Disneyfied conclusion ever since Spielberg?s CE3K (and in countless rehashes from Cocoon to Mac & Me) that we never really question what?s being presented to us. But who are these "aliens"? Dialogue suggest what they are without spelling it out, leaving many audience members to mistakenly assume that they?re extraterrestrials. Like William Hurt?s Professor Hobby, they have their own agenda. Like David?s upper class suburban "family" in the first third of the film, they need something from David. He?s a connection to something they?ve irretrievably lost. So dialogue from one of them that appears to be sappily altruistic is really just the feeling out of David?s electronic psyche for a programmed response.

The biggest hurdle for critics of the movie is Spielberg?s ode to Pinocchio, reinforcing the obvious subtext about an artificial boy?s desire to be "real." The Blue Fairy of the story is a real and tangible goal to David, to the point where it could be argued that it becomes his religion, his search for meaning in his life. But few note that the root of this profound motivation for the character is just a cruel joke on the part of his "real" half-brother Martin. It is Martin who suggests that Monica read Pinocchio to David, and with his own perversely acute understanding of David?s child-like weaknesses and innocence, he knows exactly how the parallels within the story will affect the boy robot: it will provide him with the hope that he actually can become a real boy and gain his mother?s love. The Blue Fairy becomes a literal element in the film because David?s machine programming can?t interpret information about it in any other way. To David something either exists or it doesn?t.

The character of Gigolo Joe is a crucial element to the movie that is also unrealistic to some?if David is the first true sophisticated AI, why is Joe so savvy about human nature? Because like David, he is programmed to be. His introductory sequences brilliantly play into common female fantasies?woman want not just a physical lover, but a reflection of their own questions and concerns, someone who?s "complicated," sensitive enough to appreciate them for their personality, their inner needs and dreams. Joe is able to mimic and embrace that complexity, and that gives him an insight into the pathos of David?s plight that none of the other characters have. Just when the film seems to be veering toward a sentimental final trajectory after the cartoonish Dr. Know segment, it is Joe who calls David?s quest into question. What if the Blue Fairy doesn?t exist? With his unsavory knowledge of the politics of male and female relationships, Joe knows that David?s hopes for a happy future with his mother are doomed to failure. "She loves me," David says. "She loves what you do for her," Joe replies. "Just like women love what I do for them." It?s a key speech that defines David once and for all ("You were built like me: specific," Joe says: both droids are designed to provide specific and ultimately limited imitations of human love, just as the iconic Teddy robot is designed to be a childhood protector and confidant), and sets up the end of the film (Joe says humans "?hate us because when it?s all over we?ll be all that?s left.").

For all his worldly sophistication, however, Joe is still essentially emotionless. It is David who is the next step. David?s reunion with his creator, Prof. Hobby, would seem to be part of the film?s Pinocchio thread playing out: the puppet finding his vested Gepetto. But Hobby too is using David for his own ends: both to salve the loss of his own son and as a marketing tool. It?s not for nothing that Hobby?s seemingly warm talk with David takes place under the lights from Dr. Strangelove?s War Room: after destroying his affable doppelganger in the only act of intentional hostility he ever undertakes, David must face down the gentle betrayal of the man who made him. David is not "one of a kind," as Hobby says, but "the first of a kind." Hobby?s creation of a boy who never changes, never grows up, fulfils his own need to preserve his son forever at the moment of death?frozen like the Swinton?s comatose son Martin, who he temporarily replaces.

The film?s first, unfocused shot of David is the key to what the intelligences that discover him at the end are: his descendants. Perhaps capable of compassion, but too far removed from long-extinct humanity to be able to understand their distant creators. Nevertheless, they are advanced enough to discern how David communicates and what the driving symbols are within his mind, and to communicate with him on those levels. He is programmed to be a child; they speak to him as if he were a child. He is obsessed with the meaning behind a Blue Fairy?they provide him with one and speak to him through it.

Is David reunited with his "mother" in the end? Seemingly. Pretty hokey, eh? But Monica is not his mother. She is not his mother from the very beginning, only a person he has "imprinted" on as his mother. And this final Monica who can live for one day only is not even the same false "mommy" he?s been searching for. She?s a three-dimensional tape of the original Monica, a tape that has been run through its cosmic player once and is now unraveling. Somehow she?s been programmed to give David what he wants, to finally deliver the benediction he?s been waiting for: "I love you." And so the end. David goes to the place "where dreams are made." Or so according to the narrator, the future intelligence who has counseled the boy robot in his final hours.

A.I. isn?t about a boy who?s separated from his mother, who dreams a dream about being reunited with her by a Blue Fairy and finally achieves that dream. It?s about the impossibility of achieving that dream. At the end of Sunset Boulevard, silent movie relic Norma Desmond is lured from her house with the promise that cameras are recording her triumphant return to the big screen. For her it?s the culmination of a long, sick dream. But it?s only real inside her diseased head. That?s how A.I. ends, except that what exists inside David?s head isn?t even a dream, but just sophisticated programming. He just received a password in the form of behavior from what looks like his mother. In Sunset Boulevard tough guy narrator Joe Gillis tells us that "the dream had enfolded" Norma?in A.I. another narrator tells us David has gone to the place "where dreams are made." Sunset Boulevard?s narrator is worldly, in on the sick joke?A.I.?s has evolved beyond irony.

In order to relate to A.I.?s ending on any level, as tragedy or triumph, you have to somehow feel for David. So how can we relate to a piece of programming? How can we respond emotionally to an anthropomorphic piece of machinery? That?s a question A.I. asks both its characters and its audience. And we respond, if we do, because David represents our own inherent human limitations. Like him, we can only know and understand so much?what nature, rather than technology, has programmed us to understand. Do any of us truly "understand" the people around us, our friends, relatives or lovers? Do we respond to a "person" or just a system of incredibly complex responses that we define as behavior? Do we have any comprehension of what our place in the universe is? And at the end of A.I., at David?s end, does he confront a god and reconcile himself with the most important human relationship in his life? Or does he simply reach the inevitable outcome of his programming? While numerous critics have accused Spielberg of selling out Kubrick?s ending with A.I.?s far-flung, drawn out conclusion, in actuality Spielberg?s ending differs in only one (not unimportant) detail from the one Kubrick originally planned: the beverage that David prepares for his mother on her last day.

Spielberg?s alteration to this detail DOES soften the ending, but it certainly doesn?t change the ultimate outcome. David?s future caretakers coddle him with all the seeming affection of parents, but they?re more like adults caring for an ancient, dying great grandfather. A.I. is narrated by these future descendants of David, the culmination of the experiment that was the boy robot. The story is in fact a myth about their own origins, told from their point of view?Ben Kingsley voices the chief future intelligence and his narration opens and closes the film. Whatever happens in the story has to be interpreted through this distant lens. Perhaps to the future AIs, the story does have a happy ending?but it is THEIR ending, the one they design and comprehend, not David. To them he has completed his programming and gone "where dreams are made." Now he lies with the dead simulacrum of his mother, spent out and seemingly deactivated. For all its simplicity and seeming sentimentality, this is one of the most chilling apocalyptic images I?ve seen in a movie?a lost and confused, resurrected corpse and the final remnant of humanity?s ingenuity, experiencing their one illusory, last day of life 2,000 years after the death of the human race. Pretty happy, that.

You can?t segregate the contributions of Spielberg and Kubrick in A.I. What Spielberg added was an element of hope and religious longing reduced to its most basic and child-like elements. And that, butted up against the unflinching, Kubrickian reality that underpins the entire story, is what deepens the tragedy. Yes, Spielberg throws us the crumbs of a resolution for David, allows him to achieve his dream. In some way he connects with his mother. But if you understand what he is really connecting to and what David himself is, it cannot be seen as any real fulfillment, only the fleeting shadow of a connection that can?t possibly be made. If David isn?t real, neither is his love. It underscores just how fragile and therefore precious the connections we somehow, against all odds make with other human beings truly are.

The critics of A.I. are now turning their hostility to the obviously great number of people who want to discuss this film, who are in fact compelled to discuss this film. They?re appalled that a movie they deem so unworthy has generated so much human thought. Their message: I refuse to think about this movie and I?m outraged that anyone else would either. The short version of that message is: don?t think. And that?s exactly the opposite of the message of A.I. It?s debatable whether Stanley Kubrick would have approved of every aspect of Spielberg?s production of A.I., but I can?t imagine him being dissatisfied with the ultimate result: A.I. has generated as much debate, as much human cognition, as any Stanley Kubrick film did in its first few weeks of release. And like 2001, it will still be viewed, dissected, argued about and thought about decades from now.

The audience held a respectful silence until the film entered its final segment. The woman behind me was crying; the people in front of me were snickering. I didn?t know what to feel. But for all its apparently crass Disney trappings, that final sequence stuck with me. I drove home and all I could think of was my wife who hadn?t gone to see the movie with me. When I got home she made a little joke about her being a robot.

I got a chill up my spine. Just for a second. Not from some sci fi echo of The Stepford Wives, but because I had to ask myself, why do I love this woman? What is it about her that induces this response in me, and how real is it? That was one terrifying second. And I can?t think of another movie that has ever produced such a moment of existential dread in me. For that moment alone I think A.I. deserves awards. I review movies as part of my living, and the most common reaction I?ve had to a film in the past few years is that I just lost several precious hours of my life watching it. I haven?t spent a day since I first saw the movie not thinking about A.I.

I have a big problem with this guy's review. I have emphasized what I believe is his main points, the rest, I believe is just fill to make his point.

And my question is:
Was it the movie or his wife's "little joke about being a robot" that "sent a chill up his spine?"
Would he feel the same if his wife had said nothing at all?
He did after all state "I didn't know what to feel."

Well I saw the movie, and I agree with the common reaction of most viewers. That being "I just lost several precious hours of my life watching it."

Ian McKellen was masterful in his portrayal of Gandalf. Masterful. He should not be overlooked or awarded over by any of these organizations.

Of course, I believe they are right in giving Best Picture to FotR, and best director to Jackson.

Someone actually got it right!

I do hope that by the time RotK is released, someone out there will recognize the extraordinary job Elijah Wood has done, and not hold his youth against him.

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STOP BY A BUMP THE FUNDRAISER THREAD

LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS will be released this December.

Is it dec. yet?