Newbie, and LOTR Movie Wank
'Lo. *waves* I've been lurking here awhile, but tonight I found a wank of such incredible and hilarious pomposity that it screamed for me to come out of lurking and share. Just for starters, I sort of consider myself an 'old-school' Tolkien fan, and grumbled for a while about things I didn't like in the movies but then, you know, went on with my life. I have a theory that the wankiest wank among LOTR fans is to be found not among fanfic writers but among oldschool fans who can't stop whining about things they didn't like in the movies. And by whining, I don't mean "complaints about feeling like the movies didn't do some characters justice" (coughfaramircough) but rather The Wank That Ate Cincinnati.



I was thinking of writing more commentary on these links, but actually, I found that this person's self-righteous moaning and whining is a lot more amusing than anything I could think of on my own. First of all, there's the fact that s/he has dedicated an entire page to essays on why they hated the movies, including a commentary with screenshots on why the forging of Anduril in ROTK is the wrong way to forge a sword. (Oh, no, wait: these aren't even screenshots from the movie, they're from the trailer.). Then there's their idea on how to "fix" TTT, which mostly consists of camera angles, "fade out here" and "zoom in here" and contains no dialogue.

How much time do you have to have on your hands to waste it putting together 'statistics' like this? Damn, I wish I had that much free time. "From this it can be clearly seen at a glance that this single battle scene — and only a preliminary skirmish in the Ring War, subordinate in the plot of the epic to many other factors — is rated by J/B/W as on a par with the Ringbearer's ordeal, and more important than most of the other elements put together."

"*Frodo: the lower number (ca. 42 min.) reflects the scenes which are book-based, the higher number (ca. 49 min.) is including the invented Osgiliath/Ringwraith scenes.

*Helm's Deep: the higher number (ca. 45 min.) indicates all scenes corresponding (more or less, mostly less) to the chapter of the same name; the lower number (ca. 23 min) indicates all the scenes of the actual assault on the Hornburg."

On TTT Extended Edition:

Now, not being one of those who was able to reconcile myself upon repeated viewings, (because I couldn't bring myself to suffer through another time, not simply parsimony — I have watched a select number of films voluntarily as many as three times on the big screen) — I was obliged to get and watch a copy when the DVD became available, in order to do it justice and not simply rely on possibly faulty recollection.
There was even a faint hope that I had remembered it as being worse than it was.

Alas, that was swiftly dashed. It was torture. It was as bad as I remembered, and worse. The only consolation was that this way I could break it into small, tolerable doses with the remote, and hearten myself with the promise of Shakespeare after.

On why the costumes are all wrong:

This is compounded by the fact that the citizenry of Rohan are shown as Generic Movie Peasants, wearing the generic shabby browns and grays of the typical movie serf (and some Generic Peasant Warts, too), not the bright, almost gaudy colours appropriate to a culture modeled in part on that of the Vikings, whose unisex love of glorious color and well-combed hair is immortalized in such saga heroes as Olaf the Peacock. The costumes of the named characters are too ornate — the heavy quilted, pleated, fussy outfits are most definitely Renaissance, not Age of Migrations — while those of the "extras" are too simple and nondescript.

(Because y'know Tolkien was REALLY writing about actual historical cultures, not adding ANY fantasy elements whatsoever.)

Why the casting is bad:
Everyone here, with a very few exceptions, is too modern-developed-world, too full-faced and unstressed (q.v. Craig Parker/Haldir), lacking the edge of those who live under harder conditions, even today, which shows in old portraits and modern photographs alike. Too bland, and lacking in the aplomb that is needful, the self-possession and keenness of those whose wits are required on a daily basis for doing more than pushing buttons, who know where the meat and milk come from and aren't at a loss as to how bread comes into existence, frex. Even the mundaner souls of the story would not be as clueless as the majority of viewers (and actors) hailing from within the sheltered technological envelope of middle-America and bourgeois Europe — people who believe that an SUV will save them from a prairie blizzard, or don't know what to do when the power to the freezer goes out because of an ice storm, to save their food.

So, in essence, they seem to be saying you can't cast modern actors in this film. That, or you have to go out into the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, find some yahoo who doesn't know what to do with a computer, and stick them in the film as Aragorn. Or something.

And for someone who sets themselves up as knowing so much about historical eras, their attempts to sound "intelligent" are pretty atrocious: "The ones which rip off the most from LOTR are the ones which fail the worst to emulate it, generally" (Editor? Anyone? Please?)

Sprinkled throughout is the insisting that the person at fault really does have a life. "I do have other things to do, after all." Wow. If I had as much time on my hands as that, I could go ahead and make my own film version of Lord of the Rings, or at least a script that didn't consist mostly of directions for camera angles.

Anyway, I can't describe this whole page in any way that does it justice-- it's funnier than anything I can say about it. It goes on and on and on like this. Just go and look for yourself.