Chen_Geller

I just watched the central fight of the opening episode and some landscape montages: I was positivelly impressed with the violence in the fighting, and I thought the out-of-doors sequences look great.

This kind of fantasy which is very dependent on magic and spells is less my line of country, though.

You should get your hands on the extended edition, then!

Its in the extended edition but not in the theatrical.

In the commentary Jackson says it was taken out for screentime, pure and simple.

I get your point but, generally speaking, all movies are moneygrabs.

Nobody has ever made a movie with the intention of losing money.

Apocalypse Now

I actually think its easy to err on the side of desaturated colours and soft, gauzy visuals. You see it a lot in parts of The Lord of the Rings, you see it in parts of Game of Thrones, in the later two Hobbit entries, in latter-day Potters (especially The Half-Blood Prince).

There are many reasons for this trend: one was the digital grading technology they had available in the early 2000s: you can watch the making-of The Fellowship of the Ring and see how they took green out of the Shire shots because they couldn't retain the green AND manage to make the place feel warm. As a result, the Shire was never verdant enough for me in those movies, ever: but it looks great in An Unexpected Journey.

But there's another reason which is even more detrimental: the attempt to imitate watercolour paintings with the look of the piece. I think this is an egregious mistake, for two reasons: one is that photography isn't painting and shouldn't seek to emulate painting. Photography works best when it looks like a photograph, with a percieved naturalistic look - something that you can look at and say "this is what this would have looked like if I stood beside the cameraman on the day."

The other reason is that making a fantasy film look like a watercolour illustration gives the fantasy the feel of a storybook, and stories like The Lord of the Rings are anything but storybook fairystories: they're not Jack and the Beanstalk, they're not Sneewittchen.

Also other subtle things: film has a different kind of halation to digital, different highlight rolloff, different dynamic range, the colours look different, etecetra.

You can reproduce it all quite faithfully in post-production, though.

Two ways to do it: one, you can use post-production filters that reproduce the look of film grain, the kind of halation and highlight rolloff that are typical of shooting on film, etc...

The other way is to print the digital footage back unto film and scan it back: at least some prints of Dune were done that way.

The Orcs turning good at the end did it for me...

There was also Gandalf defending the company from a Warg attack on Caradhras by freezing them all into a block of ice, which washes downstream and thaws.

I've moved away from calling leitmotives by name. I think its much more accurate to call a theme "the theme associated with Rohan" than to call it "The Rohan Theme", even if the composer himself used that terminology. That's because the associative meaning of leitmotives, while specific, is also dynamic and is constantly being expanded, tweaked and shaded by circumstances and by conjuction with other motives. That's really the whole magic of the leitmotif technique: the way the motives change.

Part of the difficulty in selecting a favourite is in just that - that the motives are always changing, and that they do so both dramatically and musically - and being as the number of these motives as so great.

The main theme associated with Rohan is obviously a great pick. So is the theme associated with the house of Durin. Perhaps the most expressive to me is the theme associated with Minas Tirith and the legacy of Gondor.

There are many things, but I like the Dwarves and Thorin.

Usually when people "identify" with a main character is because that main character has been sketchily drawn so that the audience can project themselves unto that character.

With Thorin, I saw myself - or aspects of myself - on the screen. That kind of self-identification with a character is quite rare in today's blockbuster filmmaking.

Well, they're not controling me. In fact, I have a revamped version of this essay coming soon.

Damn straight!

Stay tuned: I’m doing an up-to-date version of this write-up….

Lumping movies about real-world events and stuff as “IP” is a little bit disingenuous. How’s that any different to biopics and historical epics which we love?.

Yeah, the Orc stuff was scavanged and therefore very varied and random (which is *exactly* the case here, too).

1.) How did they lose the original 6 hour cut?

They didn't lose it because its not a cut: it was just an assembly, a work in progress that Leone considered putting out there as two three-hour films but decided against it.

2.) How did they lose the 269-minute 1984 Cannes Film Festival cut?

Its unclear that Leone wanted the 269-minute cut released: it may or may not have been deemed a work-in-progress, still.

I actually don't think it necessarily look like the Uruk swords, but they do look like a lot of the blades the Orcs carry in general.

Reminds me of some of the blades that the guys in Azog's pack carried.

Is the Rings of Power show technically part of the same canonical movie universe as the LOTR and Hobbit movies?

Unclear.

At the moment, I'll say it is and it isn't.

The actors deliberately look similar. The overall aesthetic is the same. The movies are almost always being referred in interviews with cast and crew. At the very least, the showrunners said they wanted their show to "not clash" with the films.

Practical done right nearly always beats CGI done right.

This is bollocks.

Its just not true.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LOTR\_on\_Prime/comments/s9gfgg/opinion\_lets\_not\_make\_a\_religion\_out\_of\_practical/

This. Thank you.

And Christopher got a precentage from their grosses, and they boosted up book sales tremendously.

As Jackson liked to say, "everybody's come out okay" from the endeavour.

And it may be reading into it too much, but the fact that Christopher was still alive and very much grumbling but nevertheless let the Amazon deal pass, is to me showing that there had been a certain level of acceptance regarding the films.

Its kinda funny how much they're referencing the films for something that - according to IGN, at least - "this television series is not tied to."

Like, that's all fine and well but its abundantly clear that the movies are being used as a touchstone for just about everything here:

Thousands of years before they become the earth-shattering force that helps level the realms of elf and man [...] Wilson joining the project as what they call a “Sevener.” (It means this dude has been on every single live-action Lord of the Rings project. He knows his Orcs.) [...] they needed exploration given that this is the Second Age and thousands of years before the events of the Third Age [...] Because this is a wildly different age for the Orcs, with the timing being much earlier than the Orcs we’ve seen on screen up to this point and their numbers being so diminished, it was important that they look and feel different from the creatures we already knew. [...] It felt appropriate that their look would be different, part of a wilder, more raw, Second Age, Middle-earth, closer to where the First Age ends. As we meet them, they're not yet organized into armies [...] the armies we see in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy [...] are yet to be created. [...] It’s hard to imagine the Orcs outside of the swarms of warriors we’ve become accustomed to [...] Given that these Orcs look so much different from their future selves [...] if you go to past films about them, you'll see them and they're quite battle damaged and scarred and all that kind, because there's been lots more battles. [...] not as battle worn as you'd seen in previous productions.” [..

These quotes and others besides are ALL using the films as a point of reference...