Which movies have you watched? IE': NO CAPES!
- Thread starter Takhisis
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Zkribbler
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I'm halfway through Streets of Laredo. Joey Garza is one of the best bad guys ever. 
And this may be James Garner's best performance. 
And this may be James Garner's best performance. 
.
Actually... I never found her in any way attractive (and I don't know why so many people do), so this isn't too far away for me.
Maybe not her face, but the rest...
(in that film anyway)
BenitoChavez
Elderly Tortoise
Train to Busan - Really good zombie movie.
Zkribbler
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Tin Man 
A science-fantasy alternative-world version of The Wizard of Oz.
A science-fantasy alternative-world version of The Wizard of Oz.
Just finished watching Lord of the Rings trilogy with wife and kids over the past three days. The kids had never seen it as it came out before any of them were born. I remembered how drawn out the ending of "Return of the King" was, but it had even more "ending" scenes than I'd remembered. My wife and I counted nine distinct scenes that could have easily been the end of the movie, in and of themselves. 
Keeping in mind that in this movie she is supposed to be depicting a middle aged, boring, plain and ordinary wife of a middle aged, boring, plain and ordinary man, the scene is supposed to portray her as astonishingly sexy/attractive compared to what you would have expected from the type of character she is playing. And I believe the scene accomplishes this very well.Actually... I never found her in any way attractive (and I don't know why so many people do), so this isn't too far away for me
Synobun
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I re-watched Pitch Perfect two nights ago. It was a'ight. It made me realize I miss these kind of performance movies like Step Up and Drumline. A couple modern ones have come out but they've been pretty mediocre or terrible across the board. It's like choreography has gone out the window.
Well, it is fanfiction.Just finished watching Lord of the Rings trilogy with wife and kids over the past three days. The kids had never seen it as it came out before any of them were born. I remembered how drawn out the ending of "Return of the King" was, but it had even more "ending" scenes than I'd remembered. My wife and I counted nine distinct scenes that could have easily been the end of the movie, in and of themselves.
The ending of the story is even longer then depicted in the film amazingly... so if you want to characterize merciful editing as "fanfiction"... sure, yes I guess?
EgonSpengler
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It's terrible. I remember glancing at the clock right in the middle of one of the giant monster fights, and thinking, "oh my god, this is only half over." If there were an Oscar for "Achievement in making pure spectacle boring", this film would've been a shoo-in. The SFX were good, Vera Farmiga is gorgeous, and if you hate the Red Sox, you might get a kick out of seeing Fenway Park get trashed.
Hm, I barely managed to watch 13 min before erasing the movie...
They seem to not even have been trying to use a half-believable plot (and I mean for the human actors)
It's not ‘merciful’ editing’. By fanfiction I actually mean that. It does not respect the original story's tempo, pacing, scope, or meaning, among others. It doesn't even respect the central story; it's more or less a story with roughly the same characters and major omissions and major additions that distort it.
I've heard people complain that The Lord of the Rings is not like a D&D adventure… and that is exactly the point of it. JRR Tolkien was a religious man in an increasingly secularised, rapidly industrialising society and also a possibly shellshocked war veteran who had survived the terrible years of trench warfare in the Western Front of the Great War.
This is the prologue to my quite dog-eared paperback copy of The Hobbit:
It's been fifteen years at this writing since I first came across THE LORD OF THE RINGS in the stacks at the Carnegie Lirbary in Pittsburgh. I'd been looking for the book for four years, ever since reading W. H. Auden's review in the New York Times. I think of that time now —and the years after, when the trilogy continued to be hard to find and to explain to most friends— with an undeniable nostalgia. It was a barren era for fantasy, among other things, but a good time for cherishing slighted treasures and mysterious passwords. Long before Frodo Lives! began to appear in the New York subways, J.R.R. Tolkien was the magus of my secret knowledge.
I've never thought it an accident that Tolkien's works waited more than ten years to explode into popularity almost overnight. The Sixties were no fouler a decade than the Fifties —they merely reaped the Fifties' foul harvest— but they were the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly. In terms of passwords, the Sixties were the time when the word progress lost its ancient holiness, and escape stopped being comically obscene. The impulse is being called reactionary now, but lovers of Middle-earth want to go there. I would myself, like a shot.
For in the end it is Middle-earth and its dwellers that we love, not Tolkien's considerable gifts in showing it to us. I said once that the world he charts was there long before him, and I still believe it. He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers —thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonisers of dreams.
I've never thought it an accident that Tolkien's works waited more than ten years to explode into popularity almost overnight. The Sixties were no fouler a decade than the Fifties —they merely reaped the Fifties' foul harvest— but they were the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly. In terms of passwords, the Sixties were the time when the word progress lost its ancient holiness, and escape stopped being comically obscene. The impulse is being called reactionary now, but lovers of Middle-earth want to go there. I would myself, like a shot.
For in the end it is Middle-earth and its dwellers that we love, not Tolkien's considerable gifts in showing it to us. I said once that the world he charts was there long before him, and I still believe it. He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers —thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonisers of dreams.
—Peter S. Beagle
Watsonville, California
14 July 1973
Watsonville, California
14 July 1973
Tolkien regrets the loss of the natural world, of the old magic, old superstitions and traditions (the old forest, Fangorn, the fading elves and the wizards taking their ships East, never to return).
Saruman is the corrupted one, an industrialiser, a forced breeder who farms living beings into soldiers, turning creatures of God (Eru) into the mindless killing machines that are the Uruk-hai, like the men sent to die by the thousand in the trenches around the idealistic Tolkien (including all his friends). In fact, most of the time is spent travelling or talking in the books, and the characters actively try to avoid any fights. War is to be avoided and prevented, nature is to be admired and preserved.
In that context, the extended dénouement is not just bearable: it is necessary. It is the conclusion of the story and the start of the new age. Without it all the earlier sacrifices would have been in vain. And, as in all wars, even the winners suffer and they are never the same.
Peter Jackson's stuff? It is just another plothole-strewn pastiche dungeon to storm through like Leeroy Jenkins. Flashy, shallow. Hard on the action scenes and heroic dialogue.
EDIT: here's a link to Cristopher Tolkien's opinion on it: he says Peter Jackson ‘eviscerated’ his father's work.
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