Hacker Cinema
The Hobbit
1977 · Film · 77 min
Part of The Lord of the Rings (Animated) Collection
Directed by Arthur Rankin Jr., Jules Bass
FamilyFantasyAnimationAdventureTV Movie
The story follows the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, a diminutive creative who resides in a place called Middle-Earth before he is compelled to go on a quest to find a treasure buried deep in the heart of the Lonely Mountain.
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156 comments on Hacker News
In the first paragraph (either of chapter 1 or the prologue), not at all. It's pulling everything from pre-training, so it is likely relying just as much on all the visual mediums like the Peter Jackson films, the animated The Hobbit (1977), and all kinds of random depictions of Tolkien's works.
Bilbo's house is actually described in The Hobbit and the exterior isn't really described at all in Fellowship. The prologue of Fellowship (Concerning Hobbits) mentions hobbits like round doors and windows and the fact some hobbit homes are underground, but the turf-dome design here is not mentioned. It actually mentions hobbit homes typically have bulging walls, so unless you've read the The Hobbit, you might not picture this entirely-underground style.
In The Hobbit, his home is described as a (nice) hole in "The Hill" with a perfectly round front door and round windows, which could imply the design here.
> Do you enjoy any fictional media? TV, movies, plays, interactive murder mystery dinners, tabletop games (d&d, etc)?
Nope, I truly live under a rock when it comes to those.
I've been wanting to watch the big ones (Hobbit, LotR, ...), but – and I say this with no disdain:
I simply cannot get myself to consume hours upon hours of somebody else's fantasy – when I could instead be shaping my own reality.
I have no understanding of your viewpoint. I wish I did, it sounds interesting. I do like a Crafting Interpreters or Mythical Man Month...
But I don't understand how those could not only be held to the same level as The Hobbit, but that you seem incapable of even reading Animal Farm.
Do you enjoy any fictional media? TV, movies, plays, interactive murder mystery dinners, tabletop games (d&d, etc)?
The most horrible example is the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Early commercial VHS tapes of it have the original music. Later tapes, and the DVDs, have all the music replaced with just awful generic music. That bad music just makes it unwatchable.
Music is an enormous factor in movies, I wonder why nobody mentions it. For example, the Lord of the Rings soundtrack is spectacular and adds greatly to the pleasure in watching it. In contrast, the soundtrack to The Hobbit sounds completely generic and boring, and the result is unwatchable.
Another example is Star Wars. The first two movies had amazingly good soundtracks. The later sequels had boring music, and whaddya know, the sequels were boring.
The usual way to do that is to have renewals or other periods; then things that are abandoned fall out of copyright, but things that the author is alive to protect remain in.
It's moderately hard to build a law based on what people think is "fair" mainly because fairness often has more to do with feelings (it would be fair for someone to make a Hobbit movie because the author is long dead; it would be unfair for someone to make a Potter movie because the author is alive, etc) than with an easily quantifiable rule.
I've often thought the solution is to define copyright (of things published, not trade secrets and unpublished works) as being something that can ONLY be defended as long as the work is "available" in the marketplace for "reasonable" amounts. As long as Warner Bros or whoever it is keeps selling the Lord of the Rings (extended edition) on DVD or whatever, they can j'accuse infringers of downloading it.
But ten years after it's no longer in print? No longer in copyright, either.
Rings of Power, an amazing show that manages to truly capture the feeling and atmosphere of the books, gets so much hate online. Yet all these garbage prequels and spinoffs get a pass. The Hobbit as 3 films? Really?
If they managed to make 3 full movies out of The Hobbit, they'll surely be able to make a movie or 2 out of 6 chapters of LotR.
> I was under the impression that The Hobbit was the first book in this saga?
Yes: But the Hobbit is much shorter and is a much easier read. It also was edited after LOTR was published to fix some minor plot holes.
WRT the movies: Peter Jackson added a lot to the "Hobbit" trilogy that wasn't in the book, such as the whole story arc about Gandalf when he wasn't with the dwarves, or the other wizards. The book isn't the epic that the movie makes it out to be.
I think it's important because there are a bunch of would-be claimants for intellectual property violation. Many people speculate that their work was used in training data, but it can be difficult to produce sufficient proof that their copyrighted work is present in the training data. If you could reliably get an LLM to produce 70% of a copyrighted book that would probably be enough to get a few lawyers salivating.
I didn't read the source paper referenced in the ars technica piece, but this statement about it makes me wonder how useful it actually is:
> But a study published last month showed that researchers at Stanford and Yale Universities were able to strategically prompt LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI to generate thousands of words from 13 books, including A Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and The Hobbit.
It seems like well-known books with tons of summary, adaptations into film scripts, and tons of writing about the book in the overall corpus make it way less surprising to see be partially reproducible.
So I guess that's a lot of words to say - yeah until there's something definitive that allows people to prompt LLMs into either unlawfully recreating an entire work verbatim or otherwise indisputably proving that a copyrighted work was used in training data, there's probably nothing game changing in it.
Not true in all cases - for example Blu Ray doesn't support 48 FPS which is probably the reason why we never got high frame rate home video releases of The Hobbit and Avatar rather than the directors thinking that we should see those movies in 24 FPS when at home.
> When I watched the LOTRs movies, I recalled several saying that it diverged from the books.
LOTR film trilogy was amazing - it was made in times when CGI was still more a complementary tool rather than foundation (sic) of the production that we're seeing today. The balance back then was just about right. Hobbit on the other hand felt cheaply done in many spots - CGI was way too obvious. IIRC McKellen really despised that he had to act alone on greenscreen in these films.
For what it’s worth I personally read The Hobbit for the first time as a child a few years after watching the first Harry Potter movie.
So when I read The Hobbit I imagined the trolls to be similar to the giant troll from the first Harry Potter movie. The one that goes after Hermione when she’s crying in the restroom and then Harry and Ron have to save her.
He actually says just that!
Basically, he says that he was approached by some random person and was gifted a copy of The Hobbit. This person turned out to be an illustrator of translated edition (same as at the OP's link) and he made Bilbo look like Leonov (the guy in the video).
As a footnote, Leonov famously voiced Soviet version of Winnie The Pooh in all its glorious 3 episodes:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie-the-Pooh_(1969_film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQmGXzNMw0E
> have very little understanding about what makes good movies
I've seen many thousands of movies, and that does give me knowledge about what makes a movie better.
For example, music makes a huuuuge difference, even if one may not even be aware of the music. For example, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings would be diminished considerably without their very good soundtracks. You can see this with the Hobbit movie - a lousy soundtrack, which severely damaged the movie. 2001 was greatly enhanced with the soundtrack. I read that Kubrick spent hundreds of hours listening to records searching for the perfect music. It paid off handsomely. What would "Blade Runner" be without the Vangelis soundtrack?
It didn't dwell on it, but Tolkien was incredibly meticulous about consistency, distances, travel times, how politics works in his universe, and logistics.
And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material.
... And then you get The Hobbit.
And that every extra gets their own story; the random slave that Jabba kills is mostly forgettable but apparently in the extended universe, she survives, is or becomes a jedi and becomes Luke Skywalker's wife ???
It really feels like they have absorbed fanfiction into the mainline series. The Star Wars sequels had potential after the first film, but since it seems they had no idea what they were doing the second and third were a waste. The very intentionally placed marketable plushies did not help.
The Hobbit could have been fine, but they botched the production, had to pull in Peter Jackson to try and save it, they made it a cynical cash grab with forcing it to become a trilogy with unrelated story and made-up plotlines put in. Rings of Power was completely unnecessary and I have zero intention to watch it.
In hindsight, the Matrix sequels were actually alright. For one thing they pushed the technology (and budgets) of filmmaking forwards, with the big gun suits vs the tentacle robots segment costing more than most films that had been made up until then.
People who write these kinds of articles tend to be unfamiliar with the legendarium past The Hobbit and LOTR (and generally speaking, just the movie adaptations of each).
I wish just for once these directors had simply made the movie of the book and damn the consequences of what Hollywood thinks audiences want. The movies that directors such as Peter Jackson make are brilliantly done - if only the story wasn't hacked. And that's not even addressing the worst of the travesties such as Radagast the Brown being covered in bird shit and the dwarves in The Hobbit being a bunch of circus clowns.
Yeah. Somehow the Hobbit movies have all of the ingredients but just don’t come together.
I simply never bought them.
As a general rule, all movies knock me unconscious. It would probably be 5 years of repeated watching before I caught all the new stuff anyway.
The Hobbit is just OK for me.
A completely faithful film adaptation of Tolkien's books would make for a terrible movie.
Which isn't to say that all the adaptations are good, of course. But the changes that were made in Peter Jackson's LOTR or the Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit were well-intentioned and generally made sense for their respective media.
Probably Tolkien wouldn't like either, but that doesn't automatically make them bad. A good example here would be Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining, which was an excellent film regardless of what Stephen King thinks about it.
Which isn't to say that all adaptations are good, of course. But ragging on artistic license in general just because some works of art fail is a depressing, philistine conclusion to draw.
The thing that I like about the Hobbit 77 film is that it realizes the material is a child's fantasy book. It's a breath of fresh air in a our current era -- where VCs seem to understand that any attempt to profit off of the American taxpayer's defense spending requires some Tolkien reference in the company name.
The existence of the '77 animated adaptation is our last reminder that the Generals green-lighting all this spend are literally mid-witted man-children.
> The 1977 Hobbit film which was produced for NBC [1] was a excellent adaptation
I've not seen the 1977 Hobbit film, but I note that your reference [1] prominently says: "The Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson called the adaptation "execrable"; the author Baird Searles called it an "abomination" and an attempt that had "failed miserably", regretting the quality of the animation and of the soundtrack, and the omission of key plot points."
This only would have worked if it was animated. The 1977 Hobbit film which was produced for NBC [1] was a excellent adaptation, and Yellow Submarine is in the same style. I would argue Yellow Submarine also has many of the same themes, if not more absurdist than fantasy.
Also fun fact I just realized you can stream Yellow Submarine for free on archive.org [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1977_film)
[2] https://archive.org/details/yellow-submarine-1968_film
Ofc the human visual system does not work at discrete frames.
However, there is a threshold on how much information your brain can process and tests indicate this maxes out at the temporal detail you can fit into 60 'discrete' frames per sec. For many people it is actually much less.
That is: in general.
Specifically this threshold is differs based on certain variables; the most important one being available light (number of photons per unit of time).
I.e. the less light, the more motion blur there is because there is more temporal integration happening in your brain's visual system. Estimates say your brain goes down to a temporal information density of less than 10 FPS in very low light circumstances [1].
Your brain does perceive motion blurred frames differently. How do I know? I worked in VFX on many blockbuster movies. We do preview stuff using realtime graphics (aka what game engines do) w/o motion blur at equal frame rates as the final frames (which are with motion blur, ofc).
Even on projects where we used 60 fps there is visible strobing w/o motion blur. And as I said: even when you preview stuff at 120 fps or more there is visible strobing with geometry that covers big distances in your FOV.
Motion from game engines w/o motion blur does not least look like game engines because of this. There is also a night and day difference between post-process motion blur, based on 'smearing' the image based on a motion vector pass and true 3D motion blur.
"The Hobbit" triology was done at 60FPS. But it still had motion blur, for obvious reasons.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698907002118
EDIT: typos/grammar
With all of the creative licensing that was taken with the content, I was really hoping that the Hobbit would have reduced the camp and gave it different tone to match the rest of the "universe". Instead, we got 20 minutes of dwarves throwing plates around and singing songs that does nothing except show examples of how the thinnest book was turned into 3 friggin' movies.
That's just one of the issues I had, but they don't get any nicer from there
You probably want the "Maple Edit" of the Hobbit (also known as "J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit"). It is 247 minutes and is setup as a single film with intermissions.
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85gVFD7Dqwk
Info:
http://www.maple-films.com/jrr-tolkiens-the-hobbit/the-final-version-of-jrr-tolkiens-the-hobbit-is-now-available
There are also fan-made "book edits" of LotR and the Hobbit that purge as much non-book material as possible while keeping th film coherent.
The professional gear can also be too good. I remember when the first Hobbit film came out the picture was so crystal clear it was distracting - like a very high end BBC drama.
I grew up in a family of fantasy nerds and it still took a while for me to get around to LOTR. My main interest was I vaguely remembered a WIRED interview with the creators of Riven (the sequel to Myst) where they said it was an inspiration. I don't remember in what way since the setting is very different, although looking at it now I can see some thematic similarities (a formerly pristine world set on a doomed path by an evil figure with a god complex).
Anyway, I did read the trilogy and the Hobbit and held them in high regard. The movies (mainly the Return of the King) actually did _significantly_ "cheapen" the idea of the LOTR in my eyes at least because the "Return of the King" movie left out plot points that I felt were vital to the message of the books. Primarily that even after the "big bad" was defeated, people were still evil (see the Scouring of the Shire). Much like the real-world war that must have inspired Tolkien given his participation in it, it was a major victory to celebrate but nevertheless not the end of every struggle.
Tangentially I'd also say that even the original Harry Potter brand is cheaper than LOTR because although it's fun and palatable, it doesn't have as much to say about the real world or challenge us in how we live our lives.
A major theme throughout the book trilogy had been that everyone, even Gandalf, has a "shadow" that corrupts their good intentions, except for hobbits which made them ideal ring bearers since the Ring would twist ambition/pride/etc to its own ends. It's basically a morality play for the post-WW2 generation, where the demons are not just external monsters but internal temptations. The movie trilogy's ending was much "neater" and also much less true to life.
But on the other hand, the RPG "The One Ring" does right by the source material by making the shadow a mechanic in the game that mirrors the theme in the books.
So LOTR seems like an excellent example of licensing gone both right (The One Ring) and wrong (admittedly the movies weren't all bad, but most could probably agree the Hobbit movies did cheapen the source material).
Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit are better with the films. Can't say the same for A Song of Ice and Fire.
I honestly didn’t know anything about LotR, only the hobbit because the cartoon came on tv once. I didn’t even know it was part of a bigger story until someone in the movie mentioned Bilbo Baggins and I was like “wait, I know him!”
I was maybe 12 when the first movie came out.
It was the best-known and most influental fantasy fiction on Earth before the cartoons. Anyone with more than a passing interest in fantasy was at least aware of Lord of the Rings. I'm sure the cartoons helped, and I also loved the Hobbit movie, but I think you're making your own experience more universal than it really was.
>Imagine if Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit had been kept so pristine.
It kind of was until fairly recently with the Jackson films. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s we basically just had the books. Yes, there were animated versions of The Hobbit and LOTR in the late 1970s, but they were fairly obscure and before VCRs became common in the 1980s, it was difficult to even see them.
The animated Hobbit cartoon movie is a freaking treasure. It got me into fantasy as a kid and led me to reading the Tolkien books. I have passed it on to my daughter and the opening scene where Thorin & Gandalf talk about the Dragon while reading direct quotes from the book still gives me chills and was probably my first real experience with poetry.
Personally, I find the constant breaking of the flow in a silent movie so the dialog card can be shown very irritating after a while. It's also annoying that the card is shown for too long (for slow readers) and there's a fair amount of dialog you can lip read that is not on the cards.
I seriously doubt dialog cards are part of any director's "vision".
The bad music slapped on the DVDs is also a serious turnoff. Music easily makes or breaks a movie. For example, the music on Lord of the Rings adds greatly to my enjoyment of it. The Hobbit music is utterly forgettable, and makes the poor movie even worse.
For another example, the movie "Hawaii" has a most excellent music soundtrack. Its sequel, "The Hawaiians", has a completely forgettable soundtrack, which contributes to the movie falling flat on its face.
I suspect much of "Star Wars" success came from the music.
I bailed on Fellowship about 50 pages from the end, I think. Gandalf had just fallen a few pages back. Hated it, enjoyed basically zero pages I’d read. And I’ve read and enjoyed plenty of other fantasy, and routinely read long fiction books (mostly “classics”) that’d bore a lot of folks to tears. My favorite book is To the Lighthouse and about a third of it’s about an empty house. I finished every page of Lichteim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature (all three volumes!) and hot damn was a lot of that boring. I like the Telemachus books of The Odyssey.
LOTR, though, was too boring for me, just couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t stomach one more elf song or backstory of a tree. Though I acknowledge that’s probably some very-specific pathology of mine, rather than the book’s fault. I do seem to be wrong, in a sense, in this judgement.
Oddly enough, I later read The Hobbit, and loved that.
I do enjoy the Peter Jackson films (extended, especially for ROTK, which kinda sucks in its theatrical cut)
In the Lord of the Rings, sure, but not much in the hobbit.
But in general I’m not interested in a film of a book I liked anyway.
I too love the books, I've read the trilogy at least 16 times and the Silmarillion at least 3 or 4 at this point (haven't gotten into the others yet but hope to one day). Yes, the tv series can be entirely forgotten. So can the hobbit trilogy - I personally don't mind if the tone is a bit more lighthearted, the book was as well, it was meant to be more of a children's book after all. But certainly much of the extra material could have been removed, and I don't think it needed to be a trilogy, two movies at most. The book has far less material than the LotR trilogy books do and the third movie dragged on forever on pointless battle scenes.
But as for the original Jackson trilogy movies, I think it's entirely possible to appreciate those as someone who loved the books. There are only two major gripes I can think of which are particularly inexcusable and a few smaller things I would've liked to change but which are excusable either for not being particularly consequential, or because of time constraints. Overall though blocking the two major complaints out of my memory, it's quite well done. For a twelve hour film to have only two major gripes compared to the books, I'm not actually sure if there are any other film/book adaptations with a ratio that good.
Sure you can. I never saw the hobbit movies because I heard they had a lot of fighting. It’s a lighthearted book.
I don't think the original Lord of the Rings trilogy would really be filmable as a 1:1 book to film adaptation. As a book fan I think Peter Jackson did a pretty good job with it in general; the behind the scenes footage really shows that they did care about the source material. Fellowship particularly I would still say is great, Two Towers and ROTK have some moments that are either downright ridiculous or against the spirit of the novel but they're still okay as films.
The Hobbit on the other hand really feels generally awful. I watched a fan-cut of it that cuts all 3 movies down to about 4 hours of content and it felt just about watchable.
>The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author. I may be wrong on that but that's my understanding - that largely the Harry Potter movies are true to the script.
I think you can attribute this more to JKR being still alive and in control of her creation than well-meaning production studios / directors.
Honestly I think any LOTR fan should be so grateful for those movies. It could have gone wrong in so many ways. At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made. Remember, the books didn't have a big pop culture presence at the time. Fortunately, Jackson and others involved were really passionate about doing it right, and convinced New Line to take a big risk on it. Maybe they should have changed nothing, but I think that's unreasonable. It's a different medium, where storytelling and pacing are just different, and also we live in reality, and people are looking for returns on their investment.
The Hobbit movies are different story. I don't know if we'll ever know entirely what happened, but from what I can deduce, there were too many studios involved looking for huge returns, and they made big changes too late, including moving expanding from 2 movies to 3, and switching directors.
The Harry Potter movies are pretty faithful, but they remove tons of content. The books get much longer as the series go on, but the movies don't, so 4, 5, 6 are really flying through scenes just to get through the main plot.
It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised.
It was one of the happiest parts of life - to be able to read the books and venture into that world.
It's been spoiled for me by the ridiculous movies like The Hobbit (holy god, Peter Jackson turned Dwarves into ridiculous comedy clowns, covered Radagast with birdshit) , the endless licensed garbage and whilst The Lord of The Rings movie was quite good it hacked the story instead of treating it with reverence. The movie should have changed nothing, regardless of what "modern audiences" expect.
The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author. I may be wrong on that but that's my understanding - that largely the Harry Potter movies are true to the script.
Thank goodness there's a single example in this world of a great work not being commercialised - Calvin and Hobbes.
Is this the most expensive LotR memorabilia? A first edition printing of "The Hobbit" was only worth $210,000 in 2015. Maybe one of the movie copies of the One Ring is more expensive? Or Tolkien's drafts?
MIT mathematics degree.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS - Developed 3D animation software used to animate the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park”. - Software R&D lead for CGI feature “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”. - Senior Software Developer on “The Hobbit” films.
INFO Location: Honolulu, HI Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Possibly Technologies: 3D Graphics & Production, VFX, Software Development, Common Lisp Résumé/CV: Upon request LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaveh-kardan/
Oh please, lots of great cultural creations had a profit motive. You think "Blade Runner" was made without any desire for profit? Or "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Or Peter Jackson's LotR movies? Those were enormously profitable.
And Rings of Power was not that bad. It's not as great as the LotR movies, sure, but it's better than the Hobbit movies. (But not as good as some of the Hobbit fan edits.) And it's a LOT better than the new Netflix show "The Ark". What a turd, and a huge disappointment coming from some of the people behind Stargate.
I think the other thing about Tom Bombadil apart from the character himself being a but cheesy is that you've actually had to read quite a long way into a book supposedly about heroism and a final reckoning between good and evil to get to the point where they've just left home and are now being rescued from a tree by a singing spirit!
(I think it's probably less disconcerting to people whose introduction to Tolkein was the tweeness of the Hobbit rather than Peter Jackson's films and high fantasy in general)
Extensive experience in computer graphics development and production.
MIT mathematics degree.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS - Developed 3D animation software used to animate the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park”. - Software R&D lead for CGI feature “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”. - Senior Software Developer on “The Hobbit” films.
INFO Location: Honolulu, HI Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Possibly Technologies: 3D Graphics & Production, VFX, Software Development, Common Lisp Résumé/CV: Upon request LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaveh-kardan/
We could have more of Middle Earth since there's plenty of material. The problem is TV/Film written and directed by committee that has to dance around the stories that Tolkien actually wrote in the world as he built it since his estate has never sold the rights to the Silmarillion and the History of Middle Earth.
That's really why the Rings of Power sucked. The company wanted 10 hours of content and paid nearly half a billion dollars for it. But budget can't create story and characters where there are none and the writers have to work around the appendices of a book.
It's the same fundamental problem as the Hobbit trilogy. That could have been a fantastic 100 minute film.
And better than The Hobbit. That should have been one 3 hour movie or maybe two 2 hour movies. But it was greed and slop when they made it three.
I studied film and worked as a DOP. There are some aesthetic aspects to frame rates many people don't consider.
With lower frame rates (24/25) you can expose individual frames longer, which leads to more motion blur with movement relative to the camera. Motion blur can be an deliberate choice, or a necessity: with higher frame rate the exposure time per frame drops, which means you need more light per frame, which means you either need more budget to light things or you need to push the sensor/film more which typically degrades color and noise performance. Nowadays this is not a big issue, but it can still be relevant if you e.g. do night scenes with available light or similar. Of course having double the images also affects the budget in different ways when it comes to storage, post production, offloading times, battery consumption, how well you have to perform your practical effects and so on.
If budget is not an issue, high frame rates change how a film or a scene feels as well. Things feel more real. Shorter exposure times/smaller shutter angles are traditionally used to make things feel more stressful. So habing a higher frame rate can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing, and it all depends on the story you are telling. For example a war zone action shocker with shaky immersive hand camera might profit from the high frame rates as it feels more real (and thus more shocking), while a fantasy story like the hobbit might feel a bit too real and thus uncanny using the same thing.
Art is very often about creating an aesthetical distance to the reality. That is why most masterful paintings don't look like photographs, why black and white photographs can aestheticise their motif, why directors never show people going to the shitter in certain genres etc.
IMO high frame rates in film are heavily influenced by the narrative aesthetics pioneered by video games. Many modern films have a video-gamey feel to them as well, in the way they show motion, physics and the camera angles/motions that are chosen.
So frame rate in film is an aesthetical choice, and like everything choices can be made wrong, especially since films are made 4 times, once on paper, once on set, once in the editing room and once in the head of the viewer. Maybe what seemed like a good choice on day one on the set turns out to be a bad one on the last day. Maybe on set everything seemed like the right choice, but in the editing room the focus of the story shifts and you regret not shooting it differently.
I wonder when we will see variable frame rate films where film makers can use the frame rate as an aesthetical choice on a per scene basis..
The Hobbit movies looked wonky with due to whatever number frames it was running per second.
>here are really only five possible movie plot lines. Boy meets girl. And then... There are at most five ongoing narratives in U.S. political history. Outsiders take power, to redress grievances. And then … There may not be even five master narratives in world religions. People suffer. But then …
7 plots, there are 7 media stories.
Jaws, overcoming the boogyman/shark.
Cinderella, good personality poor becomes rich and deserves it.
LOTR, you need to bring widget somewhere wierd to save the world.
Hobbit, you adventure to strange lands and come back.
Annie Hall, comedic character has to overcome adversity to get happy ending
Sweeny Todd, flawed main character who fails, then ultimately learns to overcome their flaw and become good and happy.
Groundhog day, time travel forces bad main character to become better.
All these are aligned in the news as discovered by the author. Realistically just following 'hate inc' by matt taibi. Which really the article/author and matt just comes from Hunter Thompson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_journalism
You can imagine, over and over in the election system the characters of democracy play out exactly this way. Once you realize this, it forces you to personally answer the obvious question. Are they doing it intentionally or is this all fake like these fictional movies?
To me what seems really weird about all this are all the attempts to "franchise" LOTR that fundamentally misunderstand the property by taking what seems to be a core idea of the setting, when it really isn't.
The idea behind LOTR is that Tolkien tried to create a modern "mythos". The guy drew on and expanded a lot from existing mythology and folklore (especially Norse myths) when creating the setting of LOTR/the Hobbit. Trying to keep the story of LOTR focused on the One Ring and all the other attached rings seems... wrong?
In the grand scheme of things, Sauron is a fairly minor villain of the setting, he's merely a high ranking general of Morgoth/Melkor (name depends on the published version of Return of the King where he gets namedropped once, Morgoth being the one used later and the intended one). The rings are just the instrument Sauron used to try and gain power. Other stories don't have to keep focusing on the rings, in fact, they're probably more interesting when they don't. The other book written by Tolkien, The Hobbit (the book, not the movies) understood this; the One Ring provokes mystery but ultimately is just a tool for the actual narrative which is Bilbo and the dwarves restoring the dwarven kingdom. Sauron doesn't even play a role in it!
If someone wanted to expand on something in the "mythos" of LOTR, then it'd be much better to just... tell a new story and tie it through sharing locations and maybe a few background characters instead of fawning over The One Ring constantly. That story has been told. Tell a different story, there's plenty of possible "room" to fit it in, even if you don't own the rights to the Silmarillion.
But who am I kidding, that idea would never make it past a Marketing Executive who wants to milk the original story for what it's worth by overfocusing on stuff that doesn't need to be focused on.
Jackson's "enhancements" to The Hobbit were failures because he wasn't a good storyteller. He turned it into a Disneyland ride. You can see that in other Jackson movies, like "King Kong".
Jackson needs a Paul McCartney to tell him "no, take this scene out, and that one, and that one."
Because compared to most attempts at adapting books, LotR did a good job. The changes were made to make the trilogy easier to watch since the books can be a little difficult at times, or to make the characters more dynamic. They weren't perfect, but no adaptation is. As for the Hobbit, I agree with you. That entire trilogy was a mistake.
Personally, while I loved the LotR movies, I also feel like they were the worst thing to happen to the books. Ever since the movies came out every studio has wanted a piece of it for nostalgias sake. I remember when the first two Narnia movies came out I was sad that not as many people liked it since I love Lewis every bit as much as Tolkien, and I wanted my enjoyment of the books to spread. Prince Caspian had inaccuracy problems, but the core story was there. After the abomination that was 2010s Dawn Treader, and seeing how corporatized Middle Earth has become, that seems like a mercy in hindsight.
Haven't seen Rings of Power yet, but I'm probably going to be fine with it - Tolkien fan-fiction still scratches the itch. I found what they did to the Hobbit far more upsetting, and had a friend who absolutely hated the original movie trilogy back in the day: In contrast to Rings of Power, where the writers just make shit up, there was detailed source material available, making any deviation far more jarring.
Sauron the flaming eyeball? Denethor smacking his lips and dribbling food down his chin so that even the last person in the audience understands that he's a "bad guy". Faramir getting tempted by the ring? It's quite interesting how some people treat it as some sort of gold standard of faithful adaption...
I empathize with the writer, and as someone who read LOTR a couple decades ago now (yikes) I agree that this show (and to some extent even "The Hobbit") didn't _feel like Tolkein_.
I think he nails part of why, but in general the problem is these shows (due to the economics behind them) have to make people "relate to it" like a modern Disney/Marvel/Pixar movie, whereas the story is set in a time which is _not_ relatable.
When you know this, every part where a character does something that is "too much in line with modern sensibilities" can feel inauthentic, and suddenly "break the experience of watching it".
At the same time, _shrug_. It does seem inevitable.
> bad writing
There are examples of bad writing in here. But you're right; it's not all bad. And effects, acting, etc are generally pretty good. Though not great. (Except Disa; she's great.)
> I can't see this as anything else than sexism
The complaints about Galadriel aren't sexism. At least, the legitimate complaints aren't. If anything, the show undersells her. She should be one of the three most powerful elves in Middle-Earth right now. She ruled Lindon and rules Eregion, and yet her nephew the high-king dismisses her like she's a nobody. And she acts rather irrationally much of the time.
I think the main complaint about the troll fight isn't that she's the one to kill it (because of course she is), but that the other elves are so completely useless.
> LOTR films were not as Tolkien wrote. I recently re-watched them and they're not perfect either, to heap praise on the films but scorn the TV series is looking back with rose tinted glasses at best.
The LotR films are really pretty good. By no means perfect, you're right about that, but they treat the source material with a lot more respect than The Hobbit or the Rings of Power did, and the result is a much better story. It was made with love, and you can tell. I can forgive Osgiliath (even if I still miss the Scouring of the Shire).
>it was in some ways better than at least "the two towers"
Im gonna have to disagree. Overall it was decent, but the pacing was horrible. As well, adapting a childrens book to be gritty leads to a lot of tonal problems that I had problems with. The Two Towers, at least in my opinion, is the best movie in the Jackson series. Especially when you factor in the emotions of Theoden King when he lost his son, and the fact that it was all his fault he died. He was the one who listened to Wormtongue, and banished him. Pair that with the highs and lows of the Battle of Helms Deep, and you got an emotional masterpiece! I didn't get any of that from any of the Hobbit movies.
due to a decreased sense of imagination and wonderment
I don't know about that. I didn't read the Harry Potter series until my 30's and I absolutely loved it. Full of imagination and wonderment, I was utterly captivated. I've also re-read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings multiple times throughout my life and it seems to get better every time.
I'm pretty cynical about big budget movies and TV shows in general though. I prefer shows where all the emphasis is placed on the writing and acting, such as Better Call Saul.
The Hobbit trilogy wasn't mediocre - it was just astonishingly bad and worse, they added a huge amount of material that had nothing to do with the book.
The Hobbit is a single book that is shorter than any of the three LoTR books. There was no reason to make three movies out of it other than greed.
Galadriel is thousands of years younger in this show... The show does a good service to both the lore and the old movies, you can see they put a lot of care into it so dont worry. The orcs actually look like corrupted elves, which they didnt in peter jackson. Peter showed that he was done with lotr in the hobbit..
> the characters there do not seem that much at odds with the book or the first three movies
well, The Hobbit itself as a book is at odds with LoTR, being a children fairy tale rather than an epic.
Just compare the scene where they get away from trolls in The Hobbit with the the trolls attacking Gondor in the movie. The change of tone is insane.
OTOH, it's pretty silly to be angry about it :)
> That could have been a 2 hour movie or at most two episodes.
https://hobbitfanedits.fandom.com/wiki/Hobbit_Fanedits_Wiki :)
The Maple Films edit version of The Hobbit was a very good movie.
For me, The Princess Bride and the animated Disney Sword in the Stone (and a bit later, The Hobbit) shaped my early understanding of Europe and gave me a life-long love of Europe and European history. I even migrated here from the US in my 30s and, although I have yet to find any dragons, I love the old castles, historical centers, and other reminders of history all around - just enough to keep me connected with the fantasy books and films I loved as a kid.
I for one was more relieved than disappointed. I never bothered with the Hobbit films, and don’t plan to see the forthcoming Amazon production.
I bought the book a few years before the movies and couln't stand it the first time. Then someone advised me to read The Hobbit first. Good advice: not only I enjoyed The Hobbit immensely, but I was able to read The Lord later... but not comfortably.
I found some parts boring and repetitive and read them diagonally. Anyway, I did finish the book and was moved by some parts, characters and themes.
FWIW, it was a translation, so changes in the language along 1000 years could be a similar factor. I also agree with simonh in the influence factor: I chose the book because I was told that it was a centerpiece of geek culture.
But I suspect that it's more a question of which books were read by kids at a certain time. Will it be a popular book in this category in a thousand years?
Even if I am not a native English speaker, when I have read "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit", many decades ago, when I was young, one of the main reasons why I have enjoyed them very much has been the distinctive language in which they have been written.
I cannot say what exactly made me believe this, but while reading them I thought that these books contain some of the most beautiful English language that I have ever read (and I have read many thousands of books). I have not changed my opinion later.
The movies have been fine, but reading the books has been a much more powerful experience for me.
It makes more sense when you see the box office numbers which is around $3 billion world wide for all three movies. Ideally, The Hobbit is a single streaming feature movie, but Hollywood rightfully saw an opportunity for another “LOTR”.
I don’t remember where I read it, but the Tolkien clan was not a fan of either movie trilogy.
That's what I think, they are not accurate to the books, or book in The Hobbit's case, but they are good films and I love watching them.
Huge LOTR/Tolkien fan ever since I was a kid, loved the Ralph Bakashi animated LOTR film from the 70's(great rotoscoping and creepy mood), absolutely loved the Peter Jackson trilogy, liked the hobbit animated films Rankin and Bass(good music!, weird animation?), even found enjoyment in the newer Hobbit trilogy(3 movies for 1 small book? Smaug was great though!).
After seeing this amazon trailer though I am beyond disappointed in what they are creating and with the budget they have it is really sad. I could be mistaken but I feel like this will be looked at as a gigantic flop for amazon. The story looks like its not even based on anything Tolkien written, which is beyond me given there are so many interesting tales Tolkien wrote that have not seen the screen(Beren and Luthien, the fall of Numenor, the silmarils and Elvish wars of the 1st age).
And like the parent above mentioned it is alarming that the actors are all unheard of and there are no connections to the successful franchises that Peter Jackson created, where is this roughly half a billion going? The CGI looks lackluster so its not there.
This is going to be a disaster, Like GoT Season 8 level diaster. Mark my words. My reasoning:
1. The budget for the original LOTR trilogy was $281 million [1]. Obviously there's inflation but we're also talking film vs TV. Films tend to be much more expensive to produce to the point where only theatrical releases tend to make films economical;
2. The showrunners are JD Vance and Patrick McKay. If you check their IMDB profiles they have almost no credits. How on Earth did they get this job? To put this in context: films are run by directors. Producers work for the director. TV shows are run by showrunners, which are really producers. Directors work for the producers. There's good reason for this. The showrunners need to maintain consistency across the entire season while individual episode directors will manage the schedule for their own episode.
Producers are writers and you'd expect that any producer has a long list of writing credits and a premium TV showrunner will have lots of producer and writer credits.
3. No name recognition in the actors that I can see. There's nothing wrong with eelvating talented no name actors but you need to pepper in some name recognition. It builds hype and recognized actors tend to be recognized for a reason. GoT had Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage. There were also seasoned actors who just weren't well known (eg Lena Headley);
4. A lot of shows go downhill when they run out of original material. It happened to GoT in apsectacular fashion. It happened to the Handmaid's Tale (the book only covered Season 1). It takes a strong writing team to generate good original material. Being in Middle Earth is both a blessing and a curse. There is source material like the Silmarillion but that can also hamstring you in a way that greenfield writing isn't.
5. Statements made suggest the showrunners and Amazon just don't get the tone of Middle Earth, like they were trying to make GoT in Middle Earth. Not everything has to be GoT. Jackson understood LOTR. It's why his vision was so good.
6. Spinoffs are hard. The most successful spinoffs are organic. Frasier (from Cheers) and Better Caul Saul (from Breaking Bad) spring to mind. Both came from a successfully developed character that was proven to audiences and thus also had inbuilt interest. HBO is busy throwing mud at the wall to see if any GoT spinoff will stick. Even now I'm not sure HBO has any idea of how badly D&D shit the bed with GoT season 8. It undermined the interest in earlier seasons and nobody talks about GoT now. In seasons 3-5 they were actually showing episodes in theaters (even IMAX theaters). Think about that. Nobody cares about these spinoffs and D&D are a big part of why. But they're also not organic.
If you want to see what happens without strong leadership and understanding the source material, look at the Hobbit (yes Jackson was involved but he came in very late).
Amazon has committed $1 billion to this and I believe they are obligated to produce at least 5 seasons. I predict we'll see 2 or even 3 different showrunners in that time and the whole thing will likely be incoherent. Look at American Gods Season 1 to 2 or the downfall of The Walking Dead for just how much this can doom a project.
[1]: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/elijah-wood-lord-of-the-rings-amazon-1-billion-1202127879/
Storytelling, that's how. Which doesn't exist.
What you'll notice is that in better storytelling, there will be an explanation of why the hobbit can beat the giant spider. Outsmarting it, being invisible with a ring, whatever. Good storytelling means you make the impossible seem possible.
Now, all we have is token women who we all know are there because they are women, beating up men in ridiculously impossible ways, with no explanation of how. It's just that the writers want you to know that women are strong grrrrr. Because feminism. Well, it makes for terrible cinema.
I still love the original animated hobbit. The pacing was a mess, but there was something about the creativity in the animated films of the 70’s that we’ve lost I think. Wouldn’t translate to a modern audience, but I love that, i dunno I’ve been calling it “leather bound fantasy” feeling.
> And not to involve Jackson seems off
Personally, the more I reflect on the Jackson series, the less I'm a fan. He borrowed heavily from the pacing, framing, and selectiveness of Bakshi's animated film, which didn't finish the trilogy.
But worse, though inevitable when you have billions of $$ in your eyeballs, Jackson over-printed a lot of kids' imaginations with his depictions. I can't remember what I thought things looked like before I saw his films--and I probably read LOTR for the first time in 1993...
And I'm not just "new stuff bad". But seriously, the source material looked way different in my head--and felt different, too. Especially the Hobbit.
"Consult Jackson". Jackson had his say. He has no authority over new depictions; he didn't write a word of it.
My opinion on this matter has less to do with stretching and more to do with creating. It feels like the further we get from what the author actually wrote- in terms of dialogue, characterization, etc.- the worse the final output is. LOTR isn't just good because hobbits, it's good because Tolkien's writing is good. The Jackson trilogy was close-ish to Tolkien's writing, the Hobbit films further, and this even more so. I'm of the opinion that this was a major issue with the last few seasons of Game of Thrones as well.
I think it’s an opportunity to explain how elves and dwarves ended up with different skin colors and whatnot. It’s a good opportunity for world building.
In the Hobbit movies there were some black elves and they didn’t describe anything about them. Just that there were some Black Forest elves mixed in with all the other elves.
I guess it slightly distracted where every minor detail had some back story and history, but I don’t think detracted from the story. I don’t think leaving out these details was in the top 100 flaws of the Hobbit movie.
As someone really into Tolkien, I’d rather see them expand or adapt the lore than just swap out details. It’s not that it’s the end of the world, but it’s dangerous to change details from someone else’s work because I never know what was the actual important piece. I suppose I could change Michaelangelo’s David’s sex but it would be hard to recreate it with the same qualia as Muchaelangelo as I’m not him. It’s not the sex of the sculpture that’s important, it’s my implementation. I’m sure Michaelangelo would have e carved an amazing woman, or African, or Asian, or any background. But few are Michaelangelo.
An example of this that I think went kind of well is the Kevin Kostner Robin Hood movie where they cast Morgan Freeman and gave him a back story of being a Moor from the crusades who returned to England. I think this worked out better than if they had just randomly changed a Robin Hood character ‘a race.
I didn't necessarily agree with all of Jackon's decisions, but, in the end, I enjoyed watching the movies (and still do). The Hobbit films are a different beast, for sure.
Exactly my opinion as well. What worries me is that we saw what ten years of market shift did between LotR and The Hobbit. Now it's been another ten years of it. Instead of showing bad people tearing down trees to fuel industry, we're going to have some good character give a five minute long speech about it. There is going to be a romance plot between an orc and a non-orc. There is going to be a female orc and she is going to be a strong independent woman. There is going to be a ruler who is as bad Denethor but they're going to make a strong point about him also being a racist.
Christopher Tolkien I think was fairly correct in his analysis of the LoTR films, and I think it became clear with the Hobbit what the ultimate conclusion of that style of treatment of the source material would be.
What he got wrong is that they're perfectly fun and good films in their own right - it'd be more accurate to say they're heavily inspired by the LoTR books rather than being direct adaptions. In some cases they cut things which just would never have even worked on screen, and in general I don't think a deeply ponderous and weighty mood would have really been received that well. That said, some of the changes they made (e.g. to Denethor) were just gratuitous.
Not that I am interested in defending Amazon's series, which I think will be a disaster, but I don't think the comparison with the Hobbit movies holds.
True, the material they have rights to is from the appendixes of The Lord of the Rings. The difference, though, is that in this case they are going to create a completely new story. So, they can fill as many episodes they want.
With the Hobbit, instead, they had the story already and they had to stretch it to create a trilogy.
Christopher Tolkein was hopelessly grumpy (or protective, depending on your perspective) about anyone doing anything with his father's works.
Personally, as a fan of Tolkein's works, I thought LoTR was fine. I didn't necessarily agree with all of Jackon's decisions, but, in the end, I enjoyed watching the movies (and still do). The Hobbit films are a different beast, for sure.
> Making more money?
Honestly, what would it hurt? They can continue to publish the more raw works, you're not losing anything. I didn't finish the Hobbit films and I'm still alive.
Did he not?
After suffering through the Hobbit movies, I would completely disagree.
Adding salt to the injury, these movies destroyed the story in the book that Tolkien apparently wrote specially for his children. Talk about taking care of a legacy.
I guess it was difficult to resist the temptation, with so much money involved. But I don't see any other justification for those 3 movies apart from penny squeezing
>They're anticipating that people will discover the book because they're presently longtime fans or future fans via the Amazon series. Bet it explains the timing of the book too.
Wonder what people think after never reading The Hobbit until after watching the 6+ hours of movies then circle back to the book?
If you look at the word count and movie runtime of LOTR, then compare it to the word count of The Hobbit, you'll find that a similar treatment of The Hobbit would result in probably around 90 minutes of film.
There are complications with that assessment, but 90 minutes would fit quite well with the fact that it's supposed to be a children's story. The Rankin Bass animated version left out a few key plot points (particularly the arkenstone subplot) that could be recovered with a 90 minute runtime. I could also see the possibility of having a 2 hour extended edition
True fact I learned only this week, from another HN story: Topcraft, the Japanese firm that did the animation for the Rankin/Bass Hobbit and ROTK, ultimately broke up and a bunch of its team went on to help form Studio Ghibli; several of the animators on The Hobbit went on to work on classic Miyazaki films.
Despite the Peter Jackson movies, The Hobbit was actually written as a childrens' story rather than a grand epic.
I'd wager a lot that the cartoonish nature of his pictures was an accurate reflection of how he saw that story.
If you haven't seen the 1977 animated Hobbit film (often called Rankin-Bass after it's creators), you're doing yourself a disservice.
For live action I believe this is the case. For example the 48fps version of The Hobbit was very uncanny, and the makeup and SFX were too obvious.
But for purely animated films I don't think this is the case; there's no makeup or SFX to hide. The bigger issue would be budget I think, and tradition.
> But Dune is barely out for a few months - it's a blockbuster, for sure, with enormous production budget, lots of public interest, etc. But so was Jurassic World, the Star Wars sequels or the Hobbit trilogy. Whether Dune will become an all-time classic like Laurence of Arabia remains to be seen.
Those movies have worse visuals than Dune imo.
Once you realize that the Hobbit movies are either “orange” or “blue” all.the.time. they become unwatchable. I hope some future rerelease fixes them.
Would they stop making new Marvel movies? Largely yes as presumably someone would have already made todays Marvel movies 30 years ago. They tried rehashing the Spider Man origin story several times and people got bored because they had already seen it. I am not saying nobody would do movie adoptions, just that they would be made closer to the original content.
Consider every Shakespeare movie is in the public domain and sure every few years someone remakes Hamlet, but it isn’t a new major movie every year like clockwork. And nobody would be trying to stretch the Hobbit across three Movies to maximize profit.
I mean I am a hardcore fan of the books for my whole live, and I certainty have some small issues with the movies, but damn. Saying that Peter Jackson is not a good director is quite the statement.
It seems to me that because you love the books so much you are applying and insanely high standard. Given where Fantasy has been before and since in movies what was achieved was almost unbelievable how amazing it is.
> In the movie, though, Faramir succumbs to the ring initially and leads the hobbits around for 15 minutes.
I think this is not even a bad change. It made Faramir and thus Boromir and the family dynamic a bigger part of the story. It gives it way more impact later when Faramir rides out.
> He did the same thing to even worse effect in The Hobbit.
In the Hobbit he had to jump in last minute and the studio forced it to 3 movies. There was no saving that thing. The only reason he directed it at all is because they might have pulled the movie from New Zealand.
> And yet with all that padding, he left out The Scouring of the Shire, one of the most important parts of the book.
There is just no practical way to include this even in the extended editions. The movie gets made endless jokes about how it has like 7 endings. It just not how movies work.
Remember even the cinematic editions had to cut so many things, it totally insane to think they could have added what amount to a whole other part at the end that can arguably be its own movie.
It is longer in the movies but there are also lots of things in the books that are not in the movie. It makes sense to increase the battle scenes for a movie.
And the romantic plots were in the book as well.
Are you sure you are not mixing up Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit?
The CGI in some places is really not very good at all, in other places its pretty good. The practical effects hold up amazingly well. All the parts of the movie that are non CGI just look amazing, and in some places the used CGI in a small way and that stuffs looks good as well.
The difference between LotR and the Hobbit couldn't be bigger. Hobbit is a gigantic trashy CGI shitfest. But what can be said is that the Hobbit was so terrible for so many other reasons that the CGI part didn't really matter.
I read recently, that the Hobbit films have been re-colour graded to align them with the main Lord of the Rings films in the latest UHD 4k box set.
The Hobbit films on the other hand fell rather flat.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy seems like quite an achievement these days; I don't recall seeing the same amount of passion and dedication in any of the more recent film adaptations. But I think I might also be biased due to my age when it came out. I'm in my forties now, and I rarely bother with film and television now, preferring books instead.
I felt it had the opposite problem of the Hobbit trilogy. Too much cramped into 2 movies and left out too much context and supporting details that would make the world more interesting and understandable to viewers. I think it would have been better as a 10 episode series or movie trilogy instead of 2 movies.
The only way I ever want to watch that one again is a fan edit I heard about that cuts off the excess cruft.
Lord of the Rings was a dedicated labor of love and is IMO still the (set of) films ever made. The Hobbit was a cynical attempt to try and cash in on LotR's success and mindshare, but it was doomed to fail from the start for not having the same team and amount of creative control behind it.
In hindsight, I wish Peter Jackson was allowed to make The Hobbit first, then the LotR trilogy as we know it. The Hobbit could have been a film that never needed the huge budget it got in the end.
> I'm just hoping it doesn't get Hobbit-ed by making shit up to pad the time and introduce characters not in the original material.
Well, its being made into two movies instead of The Hobbit’s three, and the source material is about twice as long as The Hobbit, so I think the risk of that is a lot lower.
3-4 hours film per 100K words is probably reasonable [0], the cureent Dune is still very squeezed where The Hobbit trilogy was...very much not.
[0] E.g., the first season of Game of Thrones, roughly covering the plot of the book A Game of Thrones, and which hewed pretty close to the source but still cut a fair amount, was 9.5 hours for ~300K words of source material.
At no time in history has there been so much "art" as a result of about measuring the audience and seeking please it, or at least extract money from it. We're now already at the point where fans think in term of "franchises" and applaud "smart moves" made by "brands", i.e. even large swaths of consumers are now marketing drones, too.
Of course that doesn't mean it was ever "pure" at any point in time, just that it got worse. I've seen so much regression and dumbing down in just the last 20 years, that I don't care if that guy is a hypocrite, I think he happens to be correct anyway. I see what I see, and I can only imagine how it would seem if I had overview of 50 years of that shit.
> When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.
> The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who actively promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectuals, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
-- Hannah Arendt
^ Good luck making movies (with a budget, and an audience) that are not entertaining, because they have something serious to say that doesn't happen to be funny. They do exist, and in absolute numbers I bet there's more of them made each year than ever before, just because of accessibility of the technology. But it would be dishonest to focus on those and ignore the fact that, say, three The Hobbit movies exist, or how people break out in tears over Star Wars movies -- and all that insane, infantile, extremely commercialized utter crap.
Again, Barry Diller may have been just as guilty of that stuff. I don't know and I don't care, because he doesn't matter. The world matters, the human species matters. How cool a specific individual is or isn't doesn't matter, they and anyone who remembered anyone who remembered them will be gone in a few centuries.
> The arrogance is in being able to convince yourself it was different in the old days without risk of being contradicted.
That would be nostalgia. And I'm not even convinced the assessment is wrong. And calling someone "arrogant" isn't contradicting them anyway, it's avoiding the argument if anything.
If you are unfamiliar with Lindsey Ellis, she is a popular media/cultural critic. Probably most famous for her breakdown of the Hobbit movies as well as Disney animations. Her reviews are often more positive then what you would expect from a more traditional film critic, but do point out troublesome aspects of media as well as the culture around it.
I’m not a media critic my self and will do a terrible job summarizing her point in a paragraph, a point which took her weeks to formulate, film and edit to a 40 minute video essay.
My gist is that people reacted just as badly to Mel Brooks back in his days to his movies as the supposed ‘twitter mob’ does today. Mel Brooks even set him self some boundaries about which lines he shouldn’t cross, what not to make fun of etc. Mel Brooks even criticized other film makers for stepping over their boundaries in a subject matter that was too sensitive. That is, if you couldn’t make a Mel Brooks movie today, then you couldn’t make a Mel Brooks movie back then either.
I still love that movie with the hobbit guy about the BBC acorn. That was great.
I think to a large extent people overestimated how much this feeling, specifically in the Hobbit films, came from the high frame rate vs. how much came from other artistic, creative, and budget choices they made.
I saw them in both normal frame rate and HFR as they were coming out and it looked kinda low-budget, weirdly lit/color corrected, and generally just clunkier than the LotR films did in the moment.
Second that; Hobbit in particular seemed like a mid-budget British made-for-TV show. I get that it's all psychological, that I'm used to deliberate Hollywood motion-blur look... but I still couldn't bear it.
But clearly we learned something or there was something special about Hobbit, because that hasn't necessarily been my experience with all 4k / high-frame shows or movies...
I was never able to read all the way through the books myself; they were much too dry for my taste. I did quite enjoy The Hobbit though, and I think the LotR movies are fantastic. It's an excellent cinematic universe, IMO. There is so much there to build a story upon.
My experience is different: I've seen all three Hobbit movies in HFR with 48fps and it was gorgeous whereas interpolation is not even close to what I've seen in the theaters. Cinema is not in FPS count but in camera movements and frame composition. Cheap TV shows and movies look cheap regardless of FPS count.
Genuine question: Why do people still use film anymore? I know some big movie studios do sometimes use it (The Hobbit comes to mind), but I don’t understand why anyone would use film when we have DSLRs that can have resolutions over 30 megapixels.
EDIT: added “why” at beginning
I started reading The Hobbit to my son (5 years old). We read half a chapter every night, or even less before he falls sleep. He loves it, and asks me to read to him when I almost forgot to do so. He asks A LOT of questions about new words and differences with the movies (he is a big fan of them). Our pace is quite slow, but it is a great time together.
It's great to see so many reading parents here. I read The Hobbit and LoTR to my daughter starting when she was around 9. It must've been almost a year per book because we finished last year when she was 13. I had to explain some of the subtler passages and backstories, but she got much of it. We watched the movies together this year and she picked up most of the differences (though even I didn't pick up on the deep changes in Eowyn's character, as linked in another comment here).
I had read the books as a teenager in the 80's, 20 years before the movies existed, the same paperback books from my father that we re-read together. I was happy to re-read them, because I had missed much of the poetry (as noted in other comments here) and forgotten some of the story. I had seen the movies in between, but I'm referring to the deeper stories and in-book legendaria that the movies didn't cover. Despite the changes and omissions (and Hollywood effects), I still think the movies did a good job, as good as could be expected.
BTW, we started reading Little House on the Prairie when my daughter was 4, and also read all of Narnia and a few others before Tolkein. Reading with your kids is a great way to re-discover the books of your childhood (or discover, because I'd never read LHotP).
The Hobbit movies were certainly awful. At least there is a pretty good animated version that has some of the heart of the book.
> Are fiction books really that updated (in terms of the words, not formatting)?
Sometimes, but not often enough, in the way that's under discussion, that it's a fair comparison to what's already done in the film world, I think. There are a few famous examples (The Hobbit having a scene significantly modified to better fit the LOTR, for example) but major modifications to different releases, for reasons other than censorship (which strikes film and books alike), aren't as common as in film, I'd say.
I have another anecdote about pain. A few years ago, cycling at night on the then-under-construction path by the Cambridge Guided Busway, I bounced off an invisible kerb and noticed the “pain” from the fall before I hit the ground, when I was still at a ~45 degree angle; yet when I then picked myself up and cycled on to the cinema I felt no pain — even though, when I checked myself at the end of the film (one of the Hobbit films), I found I’d been bleeding enough to make quite a mess.
Ellis' hobbit videos are absolutely wonderful. I love the unexpected direction she takes the videos when she [spoiler] visits New Zealand and talks to people involved in the films.
Correct.
When they first came out, they had some excellent promise. They were the first digital 4k movie camera. So if you wanted a digital end to end 4k workflow, for about 4 years, RED was the only show in town. However, if you wanted to use normal lenses and dump direct to a normal plate format, the alexa was what you really wanted.
A rundown:
Firstly, you couldn't buy or hire one, you had to know someone.
Secondly you had to get a bunch of adaptors for _everything_, which drove up the cost significantly
Thirdly no global shutter meant that it wobbled horribly when you panned left and right.
Fourthly its colour was off, and noisy as hell(visual noise) (some later generations are practically colourblind. cough hobbit cough)
If they had actually produced and shipped the RED one, when they said they would, then my opinion would have been different. If they'd shipped the epic on price and spec, again, they could have transformed the film industry. But they didn't. By the time 4k digital workflows were practical for most people, RED had lost its shine.
Why do I personally dislike them?
Because, whilst there are some lovely people that work there, the level of cultism and secrecy is frustratingly annoying.
I'm trying to do VFX on a shot, I've been given a couple of TB of .r3d files, it takes 30 second a frame to put into a useable format. Even then I have to fiddle with it, because the colour profiles are all messed up, or some other stupid issue.
I talk to the RED team, they try and sell me a $5k card that only works in a mac (I was working at a linux shop at the time)
Fortunately Nuke 5/6 had native .r3d handling, which meant that we could drop out to the farm and blast through all the footage at once, with decent conversion options.
Why did people used them?
Size
They are much smaller than a film camera. Its practical to mount them on a moving rig, hand operate, etc, etc, etc, without loss of quality
Mobility
Because there is no film, you can bump them, wobble them, sit them next to explosions and not worry that the film is warping.
4K
way more resolution to play with. This means that you could push the ISO more and just half the resolution and get usable footage. which you had to do, making it basically an Alexa competitor
The key difference between the RED One and the Alexa, is that the Alexa couldn't record to an onboard device, the RED could. Also the resolution of the Alexa's sensor was lower, but the sensor size was correct. It also had a much greater usable dynamic range than the RED one.
The concept was nice, the company, and the fanboys can get to fuck.
If you actually want to understand why Tom Bombadil is in the story, read Christopher Tolkien series on the creation of the Lord of the Rings.
It was originally envisioned as a sequel to the Hobbit with a slightly more grown up audience. When JRR wrote it, he hadn't even settled on Sauron as the bad guy. He vaguely thought the bad guy would be Treebeard! He got Frodo and co. all the way to Rivendell before he connected his other story (the Silmarillion) to the LOR story.
Bombadil was left in, in my mind, because he had to explain how four hapless hobbits could throw the black riders off the trail and still escape from the forest. And he didn't really have any editorial constraints until the movies came along.
Sure, you can invent some just-so-story to explain him but the truth is that the tale evolved in the decades it took to write and so it has vestigial parts.
Tangent: where/how can I obtain the animated 1977 version of The Hobbit? I had it on vinyl, and remember watching the film. YouTube's got a random selection of scenes but not (AFAICT) the whole thing.
My wife and I try to do this every few years. This year we started by marathoning the Hobbit trilogy. While I like the Hobbit movies, it was the first time I had watched them back to back with the LOTR movies and I was blown away by how much more simple (in a good way) and less frenetic the LOTR movies were than the Hobbit. I actually noticed a physical reaction to the last Hobbit movie. We watched it in one sitting right before bed and I felt so mentally overdriven I couldn’t fall asleep for several hours after getting in bed.
The thing that seems to be missing here (and maybe it's also missing from the movie... I can't remember) is the bread, butter and honey at Beorning's house. Possibly people will find this strange, but before reading the LotR, I'd never eaten this. It's amazing! So simple, yet so complex in flavour. If you are thinking, like I was, bread + butter... yawn... bread + honey... been there, done that, mixing them isn't going to make a difference..... I really recommend trying it :-)
Edit: Ha ha! That was the Hobbit! That's why it's not in there :-P
The question of continuity is an interesting one. There was a similar issue for the recent Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, where some of Tolkien's languages are very fragmentary but there was a desire to have more invented speech.
David Salo is a Tolkien scholar who was brought onto the film team to help expand some of Tolkien's conlangs for use in the film. While his work isn't strictly "canonical," he did do a lot of serious work to make his additions fit into what fragments we have. His blog is a good read: https://midgardsmal.com/
Then stop making Hobbit movies there.
You're staking out some pretty strange territory, if you think it's wrong to refer to the movies based on The Hobbit as "the Hobbit movies".
The Lord of the Rings movies are not the Hobbit movies at all, not being related to The Hobbit.
Because Lord of the Rings is no less one of the Hobbit movies.
The return of the King is one of the best movies of the last 20+ years. Whine about the Hobbit all you want, but LOTR is the greatest trilogy ever made and Peter Jackson is a legend.
Don't get me started... Ah, too late!
The Fellowship of the Ring is an excellent film, pretty consistently following the story while removing confusing elements like Tom Bombadil (some scenes, like the Moria stone troll fight, could have been a bit shorter, but overall it was really amazing).
The Two Towers started showing the early signs os Jackson's "interventionist" approach (which later culminated in the Hobbit films) with adding numerous elements like Aragorn's side trek and Gimli's and Legolas' banter -- but again, it overall added to the story without removing too much of it.
However, with The Return of the King he completely blew it, changing some important elements like Ents' motivations and, above all, the role of the Dead Men of Dunharrow. In the books, they're a formidable but reluctant force which has a strong but limited impact on the story -- they aid Aragorn's attack on the ships, scaring most of the Umbar's forces into drowning and allowing him to increase his army with the captives on the ships, but then he releases them and they never reach Pelennor.
In the film, they are turned to a deus ex machina which sweeps the battlefield and the streets of Minas Tirith, killing all the enemies and not touching the "good guys" (the book shows that the Dead Men scare everyone equally; the "good guys" survive because they are captive and chained to the ships, which probably needed a lot of cleaning afterwards). That scene reminded me of those commercials where a green goo destroys all the toilet bacteria in one powerful sweep -- in my opinion, that change totally destroyed the premise of the book and turned it from "The Return of the King" to "The Return of some Guy with Toilet Cleaner".
/rant
Interesting.
> If you can listen to it and hear reverb (unless you're going for that effect) you're doing it wrong.
I was thinking precisely that; I figured it'd need to be subtle and just-above-subliminal to have the most effect.
Completely agree about the 24fps-vs-60fps thing. I think this is a combination of both the fact that the lower framerate is less visual stimulation, and that I'm used to both the decreased visual stress and the overall more jittery aesthetic of 24fps.
Regarding >24fps, I think how it's used is critical.
I remember noticing https://imgur.com/gallery/2j98Y4e/comment/994755017/1 (yes, a random imgur gif - discovering that imgur doesn't have an FPS limit was nice though). I think this particular example pushes the aesthetics ever so slightly, but still looks pretty good.
I don't know where I found it but I remember watching a 48fps example clip of The Hobbit some time back. That looked really nice; I completely agree 48fps is a great target that still retains the almost-imperceptible jitter associated with 24fps playback.
To me the "nope"/sad end of the spectrum is motion smoothing. I happened to notice a TV running some or other animated movie with motion smoothing on while in an electronics store a few months ago... eughhh. It made an already artificial-enough video (I think it was Monsters Inc University) look eye-numbingly fake (particularly because the algorithm couldn't make its mind up about how much to smooth the video as it played, so some of it was jittery and some of it was butter-smooth). I honestly hope the idea doesn't catch on; it'll ruin kids and doom us to having to put up with utterly unrealistic games.
But I can see that's the direction we're headed in: 144Hz LCD panels are already a thing, and VR has a ton of backing behind it, so it makes a lot of sense that VR will go >200Hz over (if not within) the next 5 or so years.
The utterly annoying thing is that raising the framerates this high almost completely removes the render latency margins devs can currently play with. Rock-steady 60fps (with few drops below ~40fps) is hard enough but manageable on reasonable settings in most games nowadays (I think?), but when everyone seriously starts pining for 144fps+ at 4K, it's going to get a lot harder to keep the framerate consistent - now that we've hit ~4GHz, Moore's law won't allow breathing room for architectural overhead as has been the case for the past ~decade, and with current system designs (looking holistically at CPU, memory, GPU, system bus, game engine) we're already pushing everything pretty hard to get what we have.
So that problem will need to be solved before 144fps+ becomes a reality. A friend who has a 144Hz LCD says that going back to 60Hz just for desktop usage is really hard because the mouse is more responsive and everything just "feels" faster and more fluid. I'm not quite sure whether the games he plays keep up with 144fps though :P
On a separate note, I've never been able to make the current crop of 3D games "work" for my brain - everyone's pushing for more realism, more fluidity, etc etc, and it just drives things further and further into the uncanny valley for me, because realtime-rendered graphics still look terribly fake. Give me something glitchy and unrealistic in some way any day.
The "disruption" of the music industry by the Internet, Napster, etc.. ultimately led to users being given greater control over the music they listen to. You can now legally purchase DRM-free single tracks from the various online stores.
Maybe a similar thing needs to happen with movies? I think the fansub community, the Tolkien edit of The Hobbit, and MST3K and Riftrax are examples of what "greater control" could look like.
Suppose there were a standard video format that accepted a separate stream of commands to skip or re-order scenes, insert audio or subtitles or splice in video from external sources and remove or alter vocal/sound effects/music from the original content.
Now, users could create alternative versions of their favorite movies and share them with each other. Suppose a movie with an alternative sound track requires songs that you already own? No problem, it just uses them. Suppose it requires songs that you don't already own? Maybe it pops up a window "would you like to buy these tracks from Amazon/iTunes/whatever for 99 cents each?" and then when you buy them it adds them to your music library. If you don't want to buy all the tracks, maybe there's just no music in that part of the movie.
I could see this as a really great way for movies to increase music sales, and for people to get excited about and re-watch old movies and have a way to participate in the creative process. It also can be done in a way that's respectful of copyright law, by giving users a convenient way to purchase all of the copyrighted content they need to watch the movie in its edited form. I suspect a lot of traditional Hollywood types will hate the idea of people watching movies in any way other than how the director originally intended, but I think they should just get over it.
Wanaka is really beautiful; for people who haven't been there you can get a reasonable idea of what it is like by watching almost any of the outdoor scenes from Lord of the Rings / Hobbit movies. I first went to Wanaka in '94 long before the rest of the world discovered it. Warbirds over Wanaka is great too if you're into WWII aircraft (and others besides). The skiing is great there too (Cardrona, Treble Cone). And Hilary's first major ascent was Mount Aspiring which is about 1.5 hours drive by 4x4 from Wanaka.
Markering, social engineering. Hot or not, learn from it!
Everyone in the marketing business should learn how it's done from such premieres (other examples are Bond, Hobbit, Harry Potter).
I think those strategies would not work with a completely new title. Here you have a series that spans over 2-3 generations and through marketing you can create this illusion that this is an incredible cultural phenomenon, and that everyone is waiting, and that it's a part of the saga, and that without watching it you cannot call yourself a member of the polite society, or a middle class.
Look closely at what kind of arguments are used in the marketing messages. "This episode fits to the style of the other films". Now do reverse engineering on that statement - they took focus groups, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, ask people questions: "what are you most afraid of with the new episode", they say: "that it will spoil the style and mood of the previous movies". Now take 2-3 most repetitive statements and construct the smart message that will cover these problems. This is how it's done.
Another element is that the screenplay is written in such a way, that this episode has to be both - relating to the previous episodes and satisfy the fans, but also has to have a self containing story, that will be understood by those unfamiliar to the series. From the marketing point of view the Star Wars fans are not really the target group, they will go to see it no matter what. The real challenge is to broaden the fan base, attract those uninterested. Make the girlfriends go together with the boyfriends, and parents together with the children. Big bucks rule.
I particularly like the way they insert the information into the news reels. Of course the TV stations are being paid for it and the message is well tailored, but goes seamlessly well with other pieces of news. Very few movies are honored like that.
On a technical level - I think Episode I in 1999 was the last one shot on 35mm film. But actors spent most of the time in the blue box, so the editing deserves applause. Episodes II and III were shot on video making the composition with the CGI much much easier. But this time they went back to shooting on film, natural scenery and models. Interesting development. It's also interesting how they are able to release it on all different formats, 2d, 3d, IMAX etc. all at once (like games on different consoles).
I'm slightly critical from the point of view cinematographic art, but I'm admiring it as a global social engineering masterpiece and a business enterprise.
Premise is wrong. The Hobbit movies were far from awful.
Yet support takes many forms, not only monetary, and not only from the audience (propaganda comes to mind...).
But I'm willing to moderate my statement to "no AAA blockbusters will be made" or "no really high budget movies will be made", or something like that. It will have an impact on the budget of movies. Some may argue that is a good thing, but I enjoy my Matrix, LoTR, Hobbit, Cloud Atlas, Marvels, etc. and don't really want that to go away.
the hobbit was filmed on new Zealand... by Hollywood. who gave NZ a new thematic airport (it's like entering the shire) and in exchange for the airport and the movie production taxes got the head of kim dotcom on a tray.
I think they mean LOTR and not the newer Hobbit movies.
Yeah ... I'm not sure whether it's a good trait or not! When I was young, I could entirely live in my mind if I was bored (or being bullied) and if I hadn't got a job that required me to "play the extrovert", I'd probably be writing fiction. At a minimum I'd be the introverted engineer that looked at his own shoes when I talked to you.
I still have a fondness for books that I might not otherwise have. Some movies seem to be plucked right out of my mental images (The Hobbit and LoTR movies) but others are really disappointing (Ender's Game was way better as visualized in my head).
Very nice effort! 4.5 hours is still a bit long for a single film. Ever since The Hobbit movies were announced I thought the story could fit into a couple 2-hour movies much better than the three existing 3-hour movies. The Hobbit felt like a five-page school paper where you could only come up with two pages of actual content and you're scrambling to fluff it out, like adding useless anecdotes and increasing the font size of all punctuation.
“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” Indeed you were, Mr. Bilbo, indeed you were.
I find the premise of the article odd. Characterization of Hobbit in the movies as something that was made "trying to honor every one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s footnotes, appendices, and letters" and fit into LOTR film trilogy. Since Jackson did not have a licence to anything other than Hobbit, LOTR books and its footnotes, that's what they used. Where they went with it made it impossible for me to watch more than the first film...
I don't get what are the values of this "morally bankrupt" middle class according to Moorcock, if Tolkien's work is confirmation of those. Destruction of nature for profit, corruption of power, strong being capable of using evil either blindly or wantonly. That is shown as bad, whereas simple, polite and modest (albeit with great amounts of food, ale and tobacco) life is good. I'd want a any "class" to adhere to those.
As for being Anti-Tolkien, I'd have to see some one produce as much content, build a world so intricate and even write a fable of it. Works of Tolkien have so many aspects beyond the stories of Hobbit and LOTR, that saying something is anti- to that feels too simplistic. I have read only a few of Eldrich books, but what I remember from those was not so encompassing or ambitious.
If you choose this one aspect from Tolkien's works and decide to attack that, you certainly can, but what you actually accomplish? I'd rather read good fantasy from any writer, be it simple or complex. I'm currently re-reading Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, which might be classified as a children book, but it's still very enjoyable and intelligent for an adult me.
I bet there is some threshold at which the movie does worse in the long term with limited release. They can still do a full release in the future and part of the profit is purely from buzz and social momentum, followed up by video sales etc... So they can probably just wait until it's worthehile for a full release. The newest Hobbit movie was ready for summer release but pushed to avoid competition with other hits. If they can wait 6 months, I'm sure Sony can wait here with minimal losses.
It's liability, which you might call the corporate version of fear.
Even though the chance that North Koreans would stage a terrorist attack in an American movie theater is slim to none, if something did happen, there would be no end to the lawsuits. As the article mentions, even in the case of the Aurora shooting there was plenty of blame being thrown around in the courtroom. The shooter dressed like the Joker, is the Batman movie to blame? Is the theater to blame? Even in a case like that, where there's clearly one violently insane person to blame, lawsuits happened.
In this case, where there was a clear threat issued, if something happened the theaters would be instantly culpable. It wouldn't even have to be North Koreans, maybe just some sick DPRK sympathizer going nuts and shooting someone.
And like they say, on top of that there might be reduced attendance for other movies as well. If someone's going berzerk in the theater that's playing The Interview, do you really want to be next door watching the Hobbit? Do you even want to go to the mall?
I don't think anyone is seriously worried about an attack. They're worried about the potential legal fallout / lowered profits that could occur in a variety of ways. Controversy isn't great for business, especially during the holidays.
That being said, I think it's spineless. The US Government doesn't respond to threats and blackmail, but corporate America is more than happy to sacrifice anything in order to preserve the bottom line.
I had no intention of going to see The Interview at a theater, but if I can find an independent place playing it on opening night (assuming they'll even try to have it open that night), I'll be tempted to go and support them for standing up to idiocy.
"low barriers to entry" is as best as I can tell an arbitrary phrase that means whatever you want it to mean.
For example, a movie industry with the "lowest barrier to entry" would be a legal system where I can take The Hobbit from New Line Cinema, copy it, and sell it to consumers at industrial scale. As far as I can tell, not even the Pirate Party advocates for such a system.
Whenever somebody says "low barriers to entry" inevitably what they mean is "low enough that Big Bad Company is in trouble, but not zero". And while I support the sentiment, and to a significant extent, the policy, I fail to see how arbitrarily adjusting the barriers to entry to a different value because I don't like who is benefiting from it right now is anything other than picking winners and losers, which is a very un-free-market thing to do.
well, not going to argue whether Lord of the Rings or the Dragon Tatoo Girl is a one or three separate books each.
Though "Hobbit" becoming 3-movie series would undoubtfully generate more money this way, so it seems Republicans is right on the money here :)
And here is a link to the second part:
An Ork fortress for over 320 million euros: A virtual claims report for the Film “The Hobbit”. Part II – property damage:
https://www.allianz.com/en/press/news/studies/news_2013-08-22.html
I've seen LOTR, and I read the book (at an appropriate age too haha). I "know" The Hobbit is no less pompous and derpificated a conversion. Just looking at still images of it is enough for me. The good guys are good looking, the bad guys are ugly, music tells you what to feel every step along of the way, all of that crap; I know it, and I don't see anyone denying it. So I'm simply trusting my intuition on this, you know?
How much shovelware do I have to take before I am allowed to skip one? I don't even think Tolkien was the greatest author ever (there's just so much random stuff in LOTR for example), but for me there is bounds and leaps more humanity in one of any of those books than in all LOTR movies combined; so unless I missed the dude remarking that LOTR was horrible, and that he is making The Hobbit differently to make up for it, I know that for me this thing is going to be neither subtle, nor beautiful. I just didn't want to point all of this out in detail because it makes me seem like such a snob, I'll take the "troll" thanks. If this stuff is fine art for you, I'll be rolling in the dirt having fun.
So you made your comment without having even seen the movie? That seems to give you even less of a position from which to call something "brainless crap" surely? If I've mis-spoken because I haven't fully appreciated your decision making process, it's because you didn't make enough of an effort to articulate it in the first place.
But whatever. I think I'll take a lesson from The Hobbit myself right now, which is don't feed the trolls, for nothing good will come of it.
What's the more brainless, the person who watches a movie and contemplates it, or one who dismisses it without a thought?
Without a thought, and without paying attention to any indicators.. or merely without watching the full-length movie? Huge difference. But I appreciate the irony of telling me how my decision-making process goes without having the faintest idea of it, not to mention my ability to appreciate beauty or "subtlety". Subtlety.. I might watch The Hobbit one day just to think back to this post and laugh.
The Hobbit is a story for kids; and by the point grown men make million-dollar budget movies out of it, there isn't much of the original life left, anyway.
The original contract is super short; the movie contract is extremely bloated... maybe it really does take a lawyer to call that bloating "an impressive piece of work". Impressive would have been to make a children's movie out of a children's book, instead of doing whatever with it and staining the careers of otherwise fine actors, just because it can't fight back and money is nice to have.
If this offends anyone; good. The existance of all these movies, their treatment of legit stories for children to turn them into brainless crap ala Star Wars, offends me as well.
Nerd moment.
This reminds me of the part in The Hobbit (the book, not the movie) where Gandalf takes the dwarves to meet Beorn, the skin-changer. Before entering his house, Gandalf warns the dwarves that Beorn is tempermental, and that in order to get him to help them, they should stagger their entrances.
Gandalf initially only enters with Bilbo, but as he tells Beorn about the adventures they have had so far, he repeatedly references an increasingly large number of dwarves. e.g. "You have mentioned a dozen, yet there are only ten dwarves here!", to which Gandalf replies by having two more dwarves enter.
In the end, master businessman Gandalf gets Beorn to house all 16 in their party, by means of exactly this "nibbles"-like negotiation strategy.
I really do think Gandalf has a lot to offer the business community as an astute and personable negotiator.
Cool idea, but I don't think it's possible.
I just Googled "hobbit torrent" -- there were 5 DMCA notices at the bottom of the page -- so far, so good.
The problem is a single DMCA complaint contains thousands of URLs for many movies (ex: http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=709810). To reconstruct the page with these results would require Google revealing which of the thousands of urls was actually withheld.
I got the joke. I found it funny. I also found it thought provoking to examine how spoiled I am as a first world person. But that also got me thinking that to some level even basics are first world.
Movies: If your starving in some 3rd world country I doubt you care about when the next Hobbit comes out
Games: you'd have to be able to afford a game console before you care about games.
Cars: I lived in a 1st world city for 7 years where most people don't own a car which point out how much they are not really needed
Coincidently, do you know name of the font used on maps in LOTR/Hobbit movies?
For example: http://ii.wbshop.com/fcgi-bin/iipsrv.fcgi?FIF=/images/warnerbros//source/warnerbros/hobezpposbem.tif&wid=3000&cvt=jpeg
The gulf between homage and derivative work is quite wide. Consider a few examples of famous derivative works: Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, Alice in Wonderland, Apocalypse Now, Muppet Christmas Carol. Right now there are no less than 3 different ongoing adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (the movie series, the BBC series, and CBS's Elementary series).
These are works that would be patently illegal if the source material were not in the public domain. This isn't just about "remix culture", it's about being able to adapt and interpret what's out there, fully and without restriction. Clearly there is value to allowing such artistic freedom once a work has grown sufficiently old. However, today that age has grown quite impractically long. A movie such as War of the Worlds (a 110+ year old book) can be made without seeking a licensing agreement, but movies such as The Hobbit (a 75 year old book), King Kong (79 years), The Chronicles of Narnia (62 years), Casino Royale (59 years), or The Dark Knight Rises (73 years) still require licensing.
And the sad part is that even in the next 20 years when, say, the Superman IP will be pushing 100 years old and Mickey Mouse even older it seems likely that such things will still require licensing.
The fact that the current IP laws have not utterly destroyed creativity or the productivity of creative industries is not a ringing endorsement. The fact is that they are stifling and they have been responsible for creating an industry which is too heavily controlled by a small group.
No, you're wrong. It has nothing to do with artifacts. Higher frame rates just do not have that "otherworldly" look that everyone associates with high quality cinema. It's a completely psychological effect, but it's nonetheless entirely real and it absolute cheapens the look and is very distracting.
Moreover, anyone who knows anything about film would have seen these problems a mile away upon hearing that The Hobbit is shooting at 48fps. I honestly can't believe these directors were (initially) behind this, but then again they were apparently backers of 3D as well which also has a reputation for cheapening the look, although that is more debatable. I think moviegoers will outright hate 48fps though, rather than just gradually shy away from it as in the case of 3D tech.
It's an established perception issue. Not only people expect blur from the movies, but they also associate the lack of blur with lower quality production.
To explain - the same problem exists with never LCD TVs. Many of them has a logic for resampling 24fps source and interpolating it into higher frame rates. In theory, this is supposed to remove the blur and make dynamic pictures more detailed. In practice, it actually does that, but it also makes movies look like soap operas. A quick google search brings up ton of complaints of this nature, and the root of the problem is that soap operas are shot for TV broadcasting and at higher frame rates. Hence, the visual aesthetics one typically associates with them. In other words, you bump up FPS, you get the soap opera impression... which hardly the vibe Hobbit should have :)
I use maxcdn for the-hobbit-movie.com (W3 Total Cache) and recommend it too.
I don't see what that has to do with anything. Public domain works can still be commercially exploited. The only difference is that LOTR wouldn't have sat in preproduction hell for years because of squabbles over the rights. Peter Jackson could have gone ahead and made his very fine movies — instead, copyright almost got him forced out of The Hobbit.
Often at database-like sites, where I can get a list of something in a selectable category that matches a particular term. For example,
IMDB can give me a list of all TV series / films / etc. with "Hobbit" in the title: http://www.imdb.com/find?s=tt&q=hobbit
Musicbrainz lets me search by track name, album name, artist name, etc.: http://musicbrainz.org/search/textsearch.html?type=track&query=I+Am+the+Walrus