Posted on 07/20/2004 12:26:58 PM PDT by quidnunc
More Lord of the Rings movies — oh, yesss, preciousss, we wantsss them.
And within the next twenty or thirty years, we'll get them. Children who watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy will take their own children to a complete remake of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's inevitable.
Most great movies will never be remade. We will never see remakes of The Godfather, or Gone with the Wind, or even Star Wars. But Lord of the Rings is different.
Why? Consider these five reasons.
• The pre-existing fame of the LOTR novels prevents the actors in the LOTR trilogy from dominating the roles they played.
No sane actor would dare to recreate the role of Vito Corleone; the role is bound up too tightly with the performance of Marlon Brando. Similarly, what actress can hope to compete with Vivian Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara? But in the current LOTR trilogy, no actor consumes his role so completely. The finest performance in LOTR (Gollum notwithstanding) may have come from Ian McKellan as Gandalf. Yet, much as I enjoyed his performance, I can think of several actors who could have done as good a job portraying Gandalf: Sean Connery, Brian Blessed, Derek Jacobi, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Caine, Patrick Stewart — the list goes on. The major characters in LOTR are so densely textured in the books — and yet so indelibly etched into the minds of Tolkien's fans, after decades of reading and re-reading the novels — that the performances of the leads in the current trilogy seem like interpretations of the characters, rather than definitions. Moreover, Peter Jackson's direction emphasized plot, rather than characterization, thus allowing room for future actors to place their own imprints on the characters in a way that would be impossible in other remakes.
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(Excerpt) Read more at techcentralstation.com ...
Lots of people love getting branded too, doesn't make it a good idea ;)
I'm not insulting anybody, I just hate Tom Bombadil with a passion and consistently skip those pages, and when I do read them I chant in the back of my mind "die Tom Bombadil, die, die in pain". And it is true that when word came out that PJ dropped Tom was when I decided the movies might actually be good (prior to then I was convinced it would be a typical Hollywood hatchet job). If people want to like Tom that's their perogative, but I stand by my declaration that he's the single most annoying character in the series.
The whole history of Middle-earth is incredible, I'd love to see "The Silmarillion" as a film too.
BAH! Your opinion!
You know who I pictured as Tom? The actor that played Mr. Edwards in Little House on the Prairie. He could be gregarious and be Tom Bombadil without looking gay. Unfortunately he is dead, but someone like him could play that kind of take on the character.
Took the words right out of my mouth.
Die, Dobby, die...
Okay fine. But Jackson did not remake Lord of the Rings from Rankin-Bass and Bakshi...
Any tall stoned hippy with flowers in his hair could play Tom.
Silmarillion is a bunch of disconnected stories, it would be like filming the Old Testament. Any of the individual chapters and stories could be adapted to film and be better.
Don't forget Jar Jar [shudder]
As far as I'm concerned, those never happened. They're figments of our collective imagination.
The saving grace of Dobby is that he's usually in pain, so at least he's suffering some for his annoyance.
I just saw the Harry Potter movies for the first time a couple of weeks ago and Dobby reminded me to much of Gollum.
Ahh my eyes, it burns, it burns!
I'd watch 'em.
You really need to read the Harvard Lampoon version of LOTR where Tom is restyled as "Tim Benzedrino".
Yes, that'd be the one obstacle. If anyone wanted to make it more-or-less as it is in print, I doubt any studio might want to take on the risk.
Jar Jar is a movie character he's immune from the list of most annoying characters in literature. And there are just soooooo many annoying characters in movies Jar Jar barely even rates.
I would love to see what Strider and the rest of the remaining exiled Numenorians were up to - fighting evil in the wilds, prior to the finding of the One Ring.
Gandalf alluded to it in the book, and Butterbur made it clear that there was more than one of these Rangers, left in the world.
I heard his next project was a re-make of King Kong. The Hobbit may follow that.
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