In case you missed it, there are now eleven more reasons for New Line to make The Hobbit. Only Titanic and Ben Hur won as many Oscars in a single year as The Return of the King just did. Now if only Decipher would keep publishing the dozen or so LOTR RPG products that are already written, despite getting rid of the remaining RPG department staff, roleplayers could give Decipher some money.
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And I thought each installment of Mr. Jackson’s Lord of the Rings was my worst nightmare, but now you truly shake Horror in my face. I can only hope that Mr. Jackson and his gang of frustrated librettists abandon Mr. Tolkien’s poor works for something of a magnificence worthy of their talents: maybe the novels of David Eddings or, better yet, Dragonlance.
I think the Academy rewarded Jackson more for what he did with the trilogy as a whole ( filming 3 movies all at once, etc) rather than the last film as an actual best picture itself. Mystic Eriver was a far better work both in acting and cinema, though it was nice to see fantasy finally get a nod.
Not much of a mainstream movie fan, so Mystic River is nowhere on my radar (and will probably never be). Just glad that Sean Penn, although he should have gotten an Oscar for his performance in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH. Just glad that the film (or films) that I love and adore (without me having to become a fundamentalist, hardlined, Tolkien Purist … I prefer moderate fan) made a clean sweep at the Academy Awards. Peter Jackson deserve what he did, which he promised never to repeat it, shooting 3 movies at once with 14 consecutive months of production shooting. To the mainstream fans, skeptics and purists (that means you, Christopher Tolkien, the stuffy eldest son of JRR), IN YOUR FACE! BOO-YA!!! B)
Jeff: I have to agree, the sweep was a result of the Academy rewarding the entire trilogy, not just the final installment. After all, *everyone* kept referring to it as Lord of the Rings, rather than Return of the King. tarkil: I’m sorry you didn’t like the movies. I’ve had the experience of feeling a film betrayed the original story as well.
AFAIC, it was the best ADAPTED screenplay without making the film(s) way too long for the typical moviegoers, especially when multiplex theaters don’t use intermission periods anymore. (And I don’t have the kind of bladder control as a twenty-year-old). It may not be the best TRANSLATION of Tolkien’s books but the film does well in carrying us into his fictional world and feel behind his literary words. If I die tomorrow, although I will miss acquiring the DVD to the final film, I am content and happy having seen LOTR come to life on the big screen. No regret.
Dai Oni, I’m afraid I can’t agree with a single thing you just said. In my opinion, the award should have been for the screenplay which least trusted its source material and then we could perhaps understand Mr. Jackson’s odd/silly/infuriating inventions, embellishments and conflations. To be sure, I’m a fan of J.R.R Tolkien but I am also a fan of film, and these movies fail to impress when held against either measure. Garbage trebly stacked is still garbage and, to award such, is to award effort and not excellence. In ten years, Mr. Jackson’s trilogy will come to rest alongside the rusting hulk of The Titanic amid the vast deep of dressed-up and noisy melodramas.
As for Decipher’s Lord of the Rings role-playing game, I feel they, like Mr. Jackson, squandered their opportunity. Dungeons and Dragons offers an almost unlimited palette of unfettered challenge and adventure and, I believe, that is one of its principle allures. By its very nature, Tolkien’s Middle Earth offers a much more constrained palette with a very limited foe-set and an inescapable meta-plot. To appeal to more than just Tolkien fans this shortfall had to be addressed, and I don’t believe it was. In my opinion, they just recoded D20 and, as a result, offered nothing more than a subset of its possibilities while ignoring the unique subtleties and possibilities of Mr. Tolkien’s creation.
Exactly what is the universal criteria for Best Adapted Screenplay? Your opinion is just subjective and IMNSHO, holds to an impossible standards. Had MASTER AND COMMANDER adapted as exactly you asked, it would have been an equally boring movie for an equally boring novel. As for melodrama, ROTK could have ended that way, if you include the Scouring of the Shire, and that would have been anti-climatic for moviegoers (yes, there are dynamic differences between readers and moviegoers). No, I think we just our due and Hollywood finally recognize it. In ten years, maybe the next cynical generation will feel the same way as you do now, and fantasy film genre once again fallen back into obscurity, but not me. I will treasure the films more than any I have seen in my 34 years. So I really don’t care what others think when I’m 44. Oh, one more thing. Even the late Tolkien himself stated that the book “as is” cannot be adapted for motion picture. It would have been too huge and the plots too scattered for moviegoing audience to follow. It is unfortunate he didn’t live long enough to write an adapted screenplay.
tarkil your remarks sound trollish – but I’ll go along with the assumption that you’re serious.
LotR were as finely crafted films as you could ask for considering the source material. While cute in the book, many of the elements were landmines of potentially ridiculous scenes if not done just right. And Mr. Jackson did an amazing job of bringing Tolkein’s world to life.
A film is a gestault of the scenes it is comprised of. When you change something, it radically affects other things in unexpected ways. So when editing the book to make it adaptable to film it’s necessary to change things. And those changes force other changes. And when you’re shooting scenes, and looking at storyboards, and finally in the editing room working with the best shots you got it’s a whole different set of problems. It’s not like you can say “well that didn’t come out like we thought, let’s reshoot a quarter of the film.” So its FUCKING AMAZING he pulled off what he did.
And when you can do better why don’t you write your own adaptation and sell it to a studio and make a better film.
Good job