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ruled paper
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31# |
Registered:
10/18/2002
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:01/11/2003 23:54:53)
Reply to : JunblaA
Behold, the keeper of the ring
Does this mean he is evil or that he is soooooo stupid that he can resist the power of the ring. You're nhot implying that Bush is all-powerful, right?
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"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way" -- Juan Jiminez
I speak for the trees
"God does not have a penis" -- Dr. Begres
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rowan
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32# |
Registered:
09/24/2001
Time spent:
2403 hours
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(Date Posted:01/13/2003 07:32:27)
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Dok
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33# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:584
Registered:
06/28/2001
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:01/13/2003 16:44:31)
Slow getting back to the forum:
I saw the movie, and I was sorely disappointed. Glitterbits, nothing wrong with you, I am a tolkein fan and I was thoroughly bored/disappointed.
The editing the editing the editing. flip flop from one group to the next in a the flicker of an eye, the narrative of each character suffered because of it. Gandalf's battle in the beginning threw me, I think it should have come in later as he was revealed to be alive. It interrupted the flow, picking up where the fellowship left off, and started a rampant whirlwind tour of little quick bits from one group then the next, as a result no one was engaging and the characters remained distant for me.
Then the script bungles. Yes it was a drag, but I expected it. But some of them were big ass bungles. Faramir and the ring in Gondor, and the Nazgul spotting the ringbearer pissed me off. Faramir as a character is supposed to surpass his brother and hold onto his integrity concerning the ring as Aragorn did. The ents looked cool, but sucked as characters and got jipped out of their complete vengeance on the orcs. That was a big miss. The ents were not supposed to be fools and them not knowing squat about the trees of Isengard, duh, not good scripting there. I feel like Jackson changed things here and there to make the scripting and effect sequences more managable logistically and financially, as well as, I bet, to make it a bit more accessable to folks who have not done the Tolkein thing and dove into some seriously lengthy fantasy reading. I think the story suffers from it though, not just from a purist standpoint.
I am going to stray away from the consensus and say Gollum annoyed the shit out of me. I am tired of being impressed with computer generated characters and how lifelike they are capable of getting them. I was to the point of wishing I could find the mouse so I could click and drag the fucker into the recycle bin. It doesn't matter, CG always looks CG, it still doesnt visually gel with the live characters in most lighting conditions, and I cannot escape the knowledge that what I am watching is a bunch of actors talking to something to be added in later ,which is a big stretch fo any actor. Not to diminish the talent of the actors here, but there is always interplay between actors in character and make-up that is damn near impossible to reproduce when they are pretending they are looking at a disgusting sickly waste of space while they are talking to the stand-in wearing a blue leotard. There is just an element of interplay that even the most talented actors have a hard time infusing into that kind of scenario. It is like watching people pantomime to shit that aint there, there is always a spark or element of something missing. And again, I am getting real tired of being expected to go "WOW, I CANT FUCKING BELIEVE THEY DID THAT WITH A COMPUTER!!!" While there was no other option realistically to this character, I am just tired of characters who are clicked and dragged into the scenes.
The battle scenes, were cool, but the the Helms Deep battle just loses momentum time after time while he kept cutting to Theoden being determined to go out like a glorious martyred king in a hopeless last stand. The character comes off like a bizzare born again zealot not a man determined only to kill as many of those bastards as he could to at least save Gondor from the full brunt of the remaining orcs. The harsh reality of mass warfare killing sprees, and children going to war is a BIG theme of Lord of the Rings as Tolkein himself was a veteran of the bloody trench warfare in WW1. He infused his story with the horrible reality that he had himself been engaged in in real life. (So for those who really dislike a story that involves bloodshed, Tolkein aint for you.) I think the director could have done better with keeping the intensity and the utter futility of their position, especially with the fact that no humans saved the day, they rallied and charged, they would not have been sufficient, or would have chased the Orcs away at GREAT LOSS, another dismal reality of war. Hence the Tolkein whimsy: the trees killed the orcs, the men only chased them into the trees that the ents brought to the valley in the night. Woulda been a trippy scene and was a loss for the movie that it was not a part of it.
This installment, to me, undescored the sheer impossibility of effectively tackling Tolkein's epic on film without mucking it up (therefore Tolkein's objection, and his son, Christopher's strenuous objection to making a movie from his books, too much story left out). In my opinion, The Two Towers was a big step down from the intensity and excellent job of the first movie.
I am going to go again and take a second look at it though, I like it enough to give it another try and see if was just in a shitty overly critical mood when I saw it last time.
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Every time you lay off an American worker you also lay off an American consumer.
When you export jobs you also export the ability to pay for goods manufactured for the American market.
Let's not vote for Bush again this year.
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katseye
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34# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:159
Registered:
10/04/2002
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:01/13/2003 20:45:29)
Reply to : Dok
I am tired of being impressed with computer generated characters and how lifelike they are capable of getting them.?I?as to the point of wishing I could find the mouse so I could click and drag the fucker into the recycle bin.?
LOL!!!
I can relate to this. I used to work as a graphics programmer for Silcon Graphics back when the 3D business was booming, and those friggin' animations used to drive me nuts. We'd go to the Electronic Theater at Siggraph (our annual 3D geek fest conference) and watch them for two hours (agghhh). I was one of the few that kept wondering why this was an improvement on the real thing or nicely done hand-drawn animations. I got really really really tired of seeing scenes from Jurassic Park. But at least in that case, they couldn't actually film real dinosaurs.
TLOR has two strikes against it before I even enter the theater, unfortunately. First, I almost always find movie renditions of my favorite books disappointing, because it's impossible to do in a few hours what I did in my head during the time I read the book. Second, I have a bad attitude about huge hollywood epics that make all sorts of gratuitous use of 3D effects that are just close enough to reality to tease, but far enough from reality to make me a bit queasy.
But given my bad attitudes, I think TLOR is ok. I manage to go with my friends and keep my complaints to myself, and I actually find it enjoyable. At least it's much better than a lot of the hollywood epic drivel that's out there. I mostly stick to independent films these days.
kat
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rowan
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35# |
Registered:
09/24/2001
Time spent:
2403 hours
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(Date Posted:01/14/2003 00:13:23)
Reply to : Dok
and I cannot escape the knowledge that what I am watching is a bunch of actors talking to something to be added in later ,which is a big stretch fo any actor. Not to diminish the talent of the actors here, but there is always interplay between actors in character and make-up that is damn near impossible to reproduce when they are pretending they are looking at a disgusting sickly waste of space while they are talking to the stand-in wearing a blue leotard.
ahhh...but, in THIS case, they were interacting with the actual actor who voiced gollum. andy whaz-his-name was in a blue costume actually playing out gollum while they filmed the scenes...they switched him over to his CGI alter-ego later. 
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Dok
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36# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:584
Registered:
06/28/2001
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:01/14/2003 01:59:14)
Oh I know that Rowan you hobbit hugging ninny. And it helped in this case, but still....
And for a large part I was bitching about CG characters/creatures in general. So often the whole affect of the actors is off, and very often they are not focusing exactly where the creature/character is.
"OK everyone, I want you to run away from the blue screen screaming while pretending it is really the creature in the artist concept drawing I just showed you.... And ACTION!!"
Then some egghead computer artist gets to try to get the damn thing to flow through all the actors lines of sight etc as well as the monumental task of trying to make sure it doesn't just look like Quake 3 just invaded the friggin movie.
I think the stuff like what Stan Winston does with makeup so exceeds CG that it is a tragedy that you dont see that as much as once before. Then there is really something bizzare ON SET, with the SAME LIGHTING. It totally surpasses overindulgence in the geewhiz "look what the computer geeks did" stuff we get fed now in lieu of what used to be the territory of some extremely talented artists who generated some incredible props and makeup. Now if there was more of the two approches stacked I think that would be awesome. But because of CG a whole very specialized and incredible aspect of movie entertainment field is being yet again replaced by the ethereal wonders some talented stooge sitting in front of a monitor can evoke out of another pile of fucking silicon chips.
LOTR so I gather did a lot of combining the two, with models and sets, but Gollum still comes off as a neat collection of colors and textures applied to a complicated 3-d model on a computer and not a living creature who is actually THERE ON SET. And overindulgence and dependance on CG stuff solely is getting so terribly old to me.
But I am just one of those guys who for shits and giggles did the sculpting for a life sized replica of an Alien (from the movie Aliens) that was someday gonna be used as a halloween prop (we never finished I had to move and it is still in my buddies garage, half finished). So I have to make a point for the artform that has been set aside for a superfluity of computer generated vomit that seems to ooze off the cinema screens today in a frightening abundance. It is more challenging and takes much more practical engineering and artistic knowledge to make a prop that performs on set versus a digital model that even with the obscene amount of money and technology thrown at the industry, cannot produce so much as one fucking character or creature that really looks like a part of it's surroundings.
Here endeth the rant. Amen
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Every time you lay off an American worker you also lay off an American consumer.
When you export jobs you also export the ability to pay for goods manufactured for the American market.
Let's not vote for Bush again this year.
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Cyranothe2nd
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37# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:794
Registered:
07/29/2001
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:01/14/2003 03:14:08)
This totally cracked me up...
THE SECRET DIARY OF LEGOLAS SON OF WEENUS
Day One:
Went to Council of Elrond. Was prettiest person there. Agreed to follow some tiny little man to Mordor to throw ring into volcano. Very important mission - gold ring so tacky.
Day Four:
Boromir so irritating. Why must he wear big shield like dinner plate all the time? Climbed up Caradhras but wimpy humans who cannot walk on snow insisted we climb back down.
Am definitely prettiest member of the Fellowship. Go me!
Day Six:
Far too dark in Mines of Moria to brush hair properly. Am very afraid I am developing a tangle.
Orcs so silly.
Still the prettiest.
Day Ten:
Gandalf fell into shadow. In other news, I think I am developing a spot on my nose. V. serious situation, as Elven spots likely to last for 500 years or more.
Still prettiest, despite blasted spot.
Day Eleven:
In Lothlorien. Suspect Galadriel may be prettier than me.
Also, am quite sure she copied my hairstyle. I was wearing that same look at least 1,000 years ago. Silly bint. She was most annoyed that I used her mirrored fountain to take a nice bubble bath.
I choose to ignore her claim that my hair clogged her drain. Not one strand of my hair has fallen out in 800 years, why would it start now?
Still prettiest by far.
Day 30:
All this paddling about in boats is hell on my complexion.
Aragorn obviously starting to find Frodo strangely attractive. Sam will kill him if he tries anything.
Still the prettiest.
Day 33 :
Boromir tempted by Ring. So tedious. Cannot be tempted myself, as already have everything I want i.e. perfect hair and a butt like granite.
Have been getting very strange letters from someone calling herself "Stacey" who wants to do obscene things to my elfhood. Fortunately have super-duper elf vision so can run away if I see her coming.
Day 35:
Boromir dead. Very messy death, most uncessesary. Did get kissed by Aragorn as he expired. Does a guy have to get shot full of arrows around here to get any action? Boromir definitely not prettier than me. Cannot understand it. Am feeling a pout coming on.
Frodo off to Mordor with Sam. Tiny little men caring about each other, rather cute really.
Am quite sure Gimli fancies me. So unfair. He is waist height, so can see advantages there, but chunky braids and big helmet most offputting. Forsee dark times ahead, very dark times.
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Voltaire
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38# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:1490
Registered:
07/08/2001
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:01/14/2003 23:38:11)
I finally gave in and went and saw the move last night. I'm with Glitterbits. All this magic, dragons, elves and orcs stuff just don't appeal to me. I actually have Tolkien's Trilogy but just can't seem to get into it. I must say that the movie itself was quite a feat. I'm sure it's going to be a new standard by which movies will be judged by in the future. But the story just doesn't grab me, so I ended up spending most of the time admiring this latest example of well done special effects.
To me it all just seems like a bunch of silly nonsense. While the orcs were on the march toward Helm's Keep, I thought it'd be fun to see a bunch of P-51 mustangs swoop in and start strafing the orcs.
I think part of the reason I have problems responding positively to Tolkien's fiction is it's all so anti-modern. I was clued into this when David Brin wrote J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress for Salon. Basically I find allusions to the good ole' days of monarchy and feudalism annoying and don't understand why anyone finds that period of history exciting. I want human beings to advance, not regress.
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Zombies, Unicorns, Devils, Sea Monsters, Satyrs, Dragons, Six Winged Angels, Gods, Demons, Witches, Astrologers, A walking & talking snake, Magical fruit, Talking donkeys, human headed six-winged beasts, Ghosts. All that stuff is in the Bible and yet they tell me it"s not mythology?
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Ladyhawk
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39# |
Registered:
08/11/2001
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:04/09/2003 14:08:51)
you mean i have to wait an ENTIRE YEAR for it to come out on video or dvd??????
I found it using Kazaa Lite and watched most of it this evening. Tres kewl. Sssssshhhh! Don't tell anyone. 
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Some love is just a lie of the heart
The cold remains of what began with a passionate start
And they may not want it to end
But it will it's just a question of when
I've lived long enough to have learned
The closer you get to the fire the more you get burned
It's hard when you're always afraid
You just recover when another belief is betrayed
So break my heart if you must
It's a matter of trust
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rowan
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40# |
Registered:
09/24/2001
Time spent:
2403 hours
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(Date Posted:04/10/2003 07:50:11)
Reply to : Ladyhawk
I found it using Kazaa Lite and watched most of it this evening. Tres kewl. Sssssshhhh! Don't tell anyone.
*foams at the mouth* 
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