The Hobbit films, previously to be directed by Guillermo del Toro and now to be directed by Peter Jackson again.

let it stand

zing

Cate Blanchett and Ornaldo Bloomps to reprise their roles as EXTREME ELVES.

maybe the two worst-cast characters in the lotr movies.

Or maybe all the elves were terribly cast. Yeah that could be it

wait waht? Neither of those characters is in the Hobbit

They're doing two plots hence the two films, apparently.
Gossip and rumours here
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903624/board/nest/174599595

marton csokas was dope as whoever he played, he should come back

tell me where is gandalf
forimuchdesire to speak with him
tell me where is gandalf
forimuchdesire to speak with him

Who was the super camp one who copped for it at helms deep?
"you breath so loudly master dwarf i could have shot you in the dark" mmmmm ;)

I really have seen it too many times :(

They're doing two plots hence the two films, apparently.

ugh waht

this is stupid

I had a dream last night that Peter Jackson decided to do Lucas-style re-releases of all the LOTR movies that included new footage of new characters, a corsair played by Nic Cage in an eyepatch and an evil witch played by Andie McDowell.

― assorted curses (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, January 3, 2011 6:44 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

he's just gonna cut a battle with king king vs a cave troll halfway through, because the plot needed speeding up.

dunno why i used 'cut' there when i meant the opposite, but fuck peter jackson f'real

Serkis and McKellen are in, hooray!
http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=29860

So is Elijah Wood, er, what?
http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=29849

Concerned Jackson might be coming down with a case of the Lucases.

so looking forward to hating this

I'm up for a single Hobbit film, under two hours, showing young Frodo having some fun uncomplicated adventures and maybe filling those who don't know in on how he met Gandalf, found the Ring etc. Doesn't look like that's what we're getting.

marton csokas was dope as whoever he played, he should come back

tell me where is gandalf
forimuchdesire to speak with him
tell me where is gandalf
forimuchdesire to speak with him

― omar little, Monday, January 3, 2011 4:44 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark

lol

I like how the two film thing was talked about at the start of the thread and then seems to continually surprise people. I look forward to it happening again.

showing young Frodo

Not quite.

Yeah I meant the other one.

Bongo.

Concerned Jackson might be coming down with a case of the Lucases.

the LOTRs were already a massive drop from his previous films (even The Frighteners is better than Two Towers)

C'mon they're aiming for radically different things. I'd probably say that Heavenly Creatures is his best film, but you wouldn't watch it when you're in the mood for some orc slaying. The LOTRs aren't flawless, but I maintain they're pretty damn good on their own (admittedly ludicrous) terms.

giblets in a lawnmower >> billions of CGI orcs falling over

yeah, when i'm in the mood for some orc-slaying, i find that i still have to wait for someone to fucking make one

a decent movie about it, that is...

I'm up for a single Hobbit film, under two hours, showing young Frodo having some fun uncomplicated adventures and maybe filling those who don't know in on how he met Gandalf, found the Ring etc.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

was really hoping that this would be a tonal shift from the LOTR movies, and would reflect the fact that The Hobbit was just a simple fable. i dunno, as a kid, i felt like moving on to the LOTR was a legitimate act of maturity. after this is made, future viewers are probably going to watch them chronologically and i think that, in the long-run, an "uncomplicated" fantasy film that introduces middle earth would be so, so much better than a ret-con'd star wars prequel

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1524134/

great tag line

I love all of Jackson's pre-LotR movies too, and Heavenly Creatures is most likely the best thing he's ever done, but I still think the Lord of the Rings movies were very, very good at what they were supposed to do. Can't imagine any other Hollywood director managing to distill the essence of the books so skillfully, while still avoiding most of the cliched, "the viewers are idiots" type of solutions movies of this size tend to have. Just compare LotR to Avatar, or the new Tron movie, or the Star Wars prequels to see how much stupid things an epic movie like that could have had, and how well Jackson actually managed to make everything work.

Tuomas OTM. there are some stupid/lame things in the LOTR movies but holy shit @ the amount of stuff Jackson got right. it is a miracle that something as cohesive and coherent and came out of the Hollywood blockbuster grinder.

totally! and that's probably the only thing giving me faith in the hobbit.

otoh personally I don't have much faith in this Hobbit movie lol

this was my favorite part of the LOTR films fwiw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWzlgnK87_4

It's been said before itt but the whole two film thing is perplexing. The Hobbit is such a short book, I can't see a justification for stretching it out. It makes me doubtful that it will be very faithful to the original despite Jackson's involvement.

god you guys are such killjoys

these movies will be sweet

i really love the LotR movies -- compare the trilogy to its parallel blockbuster fantasy trilogies (star wars prequels, the matrix) and see how many things weren't fucked up. i do a marathon of the extended editions about once a year (w/ friends and beer); they're really wonderful old-school epics, shaded and lived-in and funny and generous to their actors. when they came out, press focus was understandably on the new tech, and there were a lot of snotty half-assed critical pieces complaining about "all those pixels fighting each other" and how un-stirring it was, but that's exactly backwards: it's only in the impossible aerial shots that the battle scenes are made of pixels. in most of the movie they're people wearing a huge amount of makeup, standing in the mud and rain. they look weighed down by it and it's fantastic.

anyway the books suck but the hobbit is fantastic, which means i have no idea what this movie's gonna be like. sort of wish it weren't being given the Epic Treatment, yeah, but oh well.

Oh I'm definitely looking forward to them. I just think there are indications the story isn't being tackled the way I think it should be, and it's my right to whine about it on the internet, dammit.

xpost

is this the appropriate point to continue twisting the knife re: the Bilbo/Frodo confusion or should I wait

Oh, whenever you like.

As long as it's not a Nazgul knife like poor Bilbo copped on Weathertop.

i used to wish they'd let ian holm play bilbo again. now he really is too old, but before... one of the things i always liked about this book was that it's a bildungsroman about a 50-year-old. and yeah yeah i know Hobbits Mature More Slowly but all that mythos came later -- bilbo has all the trappings of a mild and satisfied middle-class englishman, and i love that it's not too late for him.

yeah I always liked that too. hitchhikers a bit similar in that sense.

anyway the books suck but the hobbit is fantastic

o_O

When I was a kid I totally didn't like him being that age! I didn't want a story about someone older than my dad.

yeah! except hitchhiker's is fairly brutal -- nobody ever really does anything heroic. arthur just hangs out with a bunch of debauched cynics until he winds up back "home", with all his history and species pride stripped from him.

(that's only the first two books or the first series of the radio show -- i guess arthur helps save the world in book 3. but the second radio series is really just as bleak and cruel, and the final book seems to have been written from a place of real resentment.)

anyway, bilbo gets a bit more of a heroic arc than that. ALTHOUGH one of the other things i like about the story is that he doesn't actually do all that much for the Cause, except tell the comically generic deus ex machina hero dude about smaug's weakness. it's clear in the book that the real heroic climax is when he's in the tunnel, invisible, unwatched, and realizes he could turn around for home and never think about any of this again.

(xpost)

it's clear in the book that the real heroic climax is when he's in the tunnel, invisible, unwatched, and realizes he could turn around for home and never think about any of this again

Good call. Might be hard to put on film but I hope they have it there.

In the end, and as I'm sure I've said on this thread, I just want the cinematic dragon to end all dragons.

When I was a kid I totally didn't like him being that age! I didn't want a story about someone older than my dad.

when i was little i honestly probably didn't even notice he was that age; he acts like a scared kid most of the time, and that worked for me. when i was older i realized that the book shows the ways in which decent mild older people who have maybe had a little too much comfort can act like scared kids -- but also how they can force it down, and do brave things, and (bonus!) their mildness and compassion can make them braver, or more effectively brave, or nobler, than the gruff born-brave warrior types. "child of the kindly west, if more of us valued your ways...", and all that.