Quote
Originally posted by: GoldenPhoenix
Attacking LOTR films and insulting Peter Jackson=loss of credibility
Glad you backed up your point.
Quote
Originally posted by: Mashiro
Peter Jackson loves the Lord of the Rings and lovingly made those films, far better than anyone could have done.
Compared to who? Loving the series doesn't mean you can't destroy it through idiotic decisions.
Quote
Originally posted by: Mashiro
Well thankfully you're not a person in charge of making those decisions as you would have deprived the world of one of the greatest film trilogies ever made.
Compared to what? Star Wars? Indiana Jones? Spider-Man? Are these the pinnacle of trilogies?
There are two trilogies that come to mind that are better than LotR: The Man With No Name trilogy by Leone, and the Godfather trilogy, even though the third film sucked. I don't need to bring up these or other famous trilogies (like the Apu trilogy or the BRD trilogy) because the statement "greatest film trilogies ever made" seems to be an effort to separate the films from regular discussion. They're still movies. Just because they are a capital-T "Trilogy" does not mean that they are elevated to a new plane of film criticism. That's nonsense.
Making blind statements like "best [anything] ever" just puts the discussion out of whack. Use some facts and detailed opinions and make a case for what you believe, don't just ham fistedly tell me it's good and leave it at that.
Quote
Originally posted by: Mashiro
It would be impossible to translate everything the books held for the series onto the big screen and anyone who denies that is just lying to themselves.
This is an erroneous statement. The translation of material to the big screen does not mean that the material must be mutilated to fit our pre-conceived idea of what a movie looks like. Film critic Andre Bazin wrote a whole essay about this that deserves to be read, but I can't find it complete online. It is called "In Defense of Mixed Cinema."
The article focuses at first on the critique that adaptations are not "pure" cinema. Some people in the 50s said that the great films, like Citizen Kane and Bicycle Thieves were better because they were original works and not adapted from literature or theatre, like Olivier's three Shakespeare films. Bazin states that adaptation is a fine thing and completely valid as part of cinema, but it is often done wrong. He is critical of unfaithful adaptations that turn their works into a "movie." Hollywood is very often responsible, in his mind, but he also references some French directors who bastardized Hugo and Dumas, treating the literary accomplishments of those authors like nothing more than a scenario or treatment for a new script. Here's a quote:
Quote
...when an American director turns his attention on some rare occasion to a work by Hemingway, for example For Whom the Bell Tolls, he treats it in the traditional style that suits each and every adventure story.
He is critical of this because he believes film and literature are not as separate as many people pretend, and Hemingway's work deserves more than to be classified into a movie genre. Later Bazin says
Quote
When someone makes a film of Madame Bovary in Hollywood, the difference of aesthetic level between the work of Flaubert and the average American film being so great, the result is a standard American production that has only one thing wrong with it - that it is still called Madame Bovary.
Rewrite that sentence and replace Madame Bovary with LotR, and Flaubert with Tolkien. Of course, Peter Jackson isn't American, but he might as well be: LotR is about as Kiwi as The Chronicles of Narnia, another terrible adaptation that emphasized action over plot, special effects over character, and swooping retarded impossible camera movements over simple natural cinematography.
Bazin believes that it is possible to adapt a book to film without altering the total story or events. He understands that simplification must be necessary sometimes, but those who try to stay true to the material have to work much harder, and will make much better films, than those who see each and every novel as a simple plot outline for the next big action/drama/romance film. For reference, see the Harry Potter films. Even those that removed a lot of plot, like HP3, are still almost identical to their literary partners.
The problem lies in classifying films, as marketing heads and studio bosses understand "genre" rather than quality. The qualities of Tolkien's LotR are history, mythology, symbolism, and personal reality. Try explaining that to the guy who may give you $300 million to make them into films. In today's "big-money" movie market, only "fantasy epics" with "CGI monsters" deserve cash, since people pay to see them. If Jackson had made LotR into an encyclopedic history that didn't jump around narratively and stayed true to the source material's structure (Two Towers is written in two parts that Jackson obliterates, preferring the narrative conventions of action movies) they may have been good films, even if parts were removed. Instead he made Peter Jackson's LotR, which has a giant squid fight, two forty-five minute battle sequences, and a romantic subplot. No thanks, Mr. Jackson. Stick to King Kong.
This doesn't mean the movies aren't worth their salt, for they have (some) great things to offer. They, like the Madame Bovary mentioned by Bazin, merely don't deserve to be called Lord of the Rings. Someone else could come by in 50 years and make much better films out of Tolkien's work, for Jackson has made something that is the opposite of definitive: it's idiosyncratic.