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Hedrigall posted:I'll fight you all to keep Bofur Who?
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Jul 25, 2014 09:07
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THE BAR posted:Who? James Nesbitt. Hey, if they actually gave him something to do, I'd be totally on board for keeping him.
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Jul 25, 2014 09:09
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Reducing the number of dwarves fixes literally none of the films major problems.
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Jul 25, 2014 09:44
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sassassin posted:Reducing the number of dwarves fixes literally none of the films major problems. Exactly. I've been all for more dwarves from the get go but they aren't doing anything with them, or at least not anything interesting, we've had huge chunks of screentime devoted to those drat action scenes that drag on for ages and don't accomplish anything, and even more screen time is devoted to everyone who isn't a dwarf, like seriously the loving Mayor of Laketown had a longer and more elaborate introduction than any single one of the dwarves got, but we stick around with the dwarves for the full nine hours it takes to complete this trilogy while the mayor is important for all of ten minutes, if that, so what kinda sense does that make where a bit character with only middling importance to the overall story is given more lines and screentime than at least half of our main cast? Numbers are not the issues, distractions are.
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Jul 25, 2014 10:34
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I admit I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who couldn't finish the first film and sort of only halfheartedly watched the second because my little sister wanted to see it but my real feeling is just that Peter Jackson doesn't care about the dwarves. They are there because they are there in The Hobbit but Jackson has genuinely little interest in them or their story and he'd much rather be filming the big dramatic action sequences or the Tolkien Lore elements. He treats them like they're mostly a comedic sideshow to the main events and the only ones he seems interested in are the ones he ties to the main event. He wants to be doing elves and goblins and seems to have only cursory interest in anything else. If you had someone who seriously and wholeheartedly wanted the dwarves, Bilbo and their quest to be the centerpiece of the story, a lot of the problems wouldn't have happened.
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Jul 25, 2014 10:47
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ImpAtom posted:He treats them like they're mostly a comedic sideshow to the main events and the only ones he seems interested in are the ones he ties to the main event. He wants to be doing elves and goblins and seems to have only cursory interest in anything else. How is this different from Tolkien? The dwarves are boring, shallow poo poo in the book, too. PJ actually has a decent effort at expanding Thorin (in terms of quantity of content, quality is another discussion) and you have at least a fair idea what half of the others deal is.
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Jul 25, 2014 11:00
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ImpAtom posted:[Dwarves] are there because they are there in The Hobbit but Jackson has genuinely little interest in them or their story and he'd much rather be filming the big dramatic action sequences or the Tolkien Lore elements. He treats them like they're mostly a comedic sideshow to the main events and the only ones he seems interested in are the ones he ties to the main event. He wants to be doing elves and goblins and seems to have only cursory interest in anything else. This is all so true it hurts. I loved The Hobbit as a kid, and when the movies invoke those memories they're great. But as you said, all the injected lore and LOOKIT THE CG action just ruin the pacing and plot. Still watched the first two and will see the third, but I'm just not excited like I was when the film was announced. Contrast this with LotR, where I couldn't get through the books (as a kid) but each movie surprised and thrilled me in a different way. The artistic liberties taken were to make the story as a whole more palatable. (but skipping Bombadil's section was a sin!)
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Jul 25, 2014 11:06
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Hedrigall posted:I'll fight you all to keep Bofur
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Jul 25, 2014 11:49
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I don't think it's the CGI that's the main problem with the look of the movie; I think it's more to do with the switch to 3D, which ended up doing a few things. - The choice of HFR. Obviously, some people didn't mind. Others like me thought it it hurt the look of the movie a lot. The world felt less textured, and things felt less mythical and fantasy-ish. I just wanted the movie to look like a "regular" movie. - Loss of practical effects like perspective. Shooting 3D forced more digital composition. - The choice of 3d affected the movie's color scheme. It wasn't just an issue with teal/orange (as sick as people are hearing complaints about it). And it wasn't just the post-production with the digital grading. If you actually look at the Behind the Scenes stuff, you'll see that it affected the choice of how costumes and props look on the set. More things were already colored unnaturally orange before the cameras started rolling; it was a deliberate choice so things can "pop" out better on camera. Sad that a movie that commits to 3d looks worse than many movies that half-rear end the 3d. That's not to say CGI wasn't an issue. I really did wish the main evil orc dude was some actor in costume and makeup like Lurtz from TLOTR. Having a key antagonist animated made the threat he's supposed to impose "feel" more abstract when it shouldn't have been. Granted, he did look better than the live-action orc that they filmed but ended up discarding. Maybe how they were constantly unhappy with how the orc looked was another sympton of the film's short pre-production.
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Jul 25, 2014 12:44
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I know that when I saw Lurtz in FotR, my reaction was " Holy poo poo so that's what it would be like to meet an Orc in real life".Like, I wanted to run. Whenever I see one of the CGI characters in TH, I think "Welp, guess their computer animators are getting some nice resume material or something."
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Jul 25, 2014 12:59
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I think putting down that you worked on Azog would hurt your resume more than anything else. "You worked on that hideous thing?"
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Jul 25, 2014 13:04
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True that. Still, what made the LotR trilogy magical to me was the fact that now, finally, at last, we were getting to see this incredible detailed world that Tolkien created, as it would have appeared in real life--without having to fall back on crutches like making it animated. I thought the biggest achievement about Jackson's work was that he took what many people had forever said was an "unfilmable" story and he loving filmed it. He figured out how to make it work. And it was glorious. No half-measures, no cop-outs. Everything from Gandalf banging his head in Bag End to the orcs tunneling under Helm's Deep felt like we were being schooled by a master. And now we're just back to the same old CGI cartoon solutions that gave us that loving green alien teddy bear in Lost In Space. Improved, sure, but just a grown-up specimen of the same species. The Hobbit is much more of a kiddie-cartoon of a story to begin with, which is why I'm not really that mad about it, not like I still am about Star Wars. Im not hankering for a dark gritty realistic version of the Oz books or whatever. I'm just disappointed that PJ didn't turn out to be the game-changer I'd thought he was. Data Graham fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Jul 25, 2014 |
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Jul 25, 2014 13:16
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Data Graham posted:I'm just disappointed that PJ didn't turn out to be the game-changer I'd thought he was. Cause the first time doesn't count, all his films need to be of equally high quality and be just as ground breaking when it comes to effects work cause hey, he already did one project with $200 million in practical effects, he can do it again! Yeah, no, looking back now it's pretty obvious that there was no way he was gonna capture that LotR magic again. Mostly cause he spent the better part of a decade avoiding The Hobbit, trying to get somebody, anybody else to do it, and when the time finally came and there wasn't anybody there he stepped up and did the job. Cause that's what these movies are for him, a job, work, a project for a movie studio to work on so they can get some food on the table and roofs over their heads... and maybe fuel the tourism industry of a whole nation and fill up every major theatre in several dozen countries at once. PJ said from the start that he didn't want to do The Hobbit, and with a whole lot of money riding on getting these movies done he was basically forced into it and given a really harsh deadline for such a massive project. (that he himself ended up making bigger but whatever) I guess the point I'm making is that the LotR had odds in their favour of turning out good due to having a huge amount of pre-production work done on them, tons of creative freedom by a team that were rightfully passionate about what they were working on, and technology that helped enhance the vision they were trying to produce. Compare that to The Hobbit, with tons of pre-production work thrown out or reworked as they're filming, led by a team of people mostly in it to get their next paycheck, hampered by their own technology as they need to work in 3D and HFR which throws a lot of practical effects out the window increasing the need for CGI. People say these movies remind them of the prequels, but to me they remind me more of the Transformers movies, done for money action movies with flimsy stories but lots of cool one liners with a director who admitted he isn't as interested in the source material as he is playing around with all the fancy toys he can get with a $100 million budget. ... wow i'm sorry that sounds really bitter uh honestly I'm looking forward to the next one really they don't suck as much as Transformers they just suck in a lot of the same ways you know?
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Jul 25, 2014 14:08
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If you rewatch his lotr movies you can already see the cgi obsession. He just didn't have the resources or quality available for it when they started Fellowship. The balrog's fire was a major innovation at the time. His entire resume paints him as an fetishist for the cgi centrepiece, and the idea that The Hobbitses over reliance on it is a result of laziness or not enough planning time is absurd.
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Jul 25, 2014 14:33
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sassassin posted:His entire resume paints him as an fetishist for the cgi centrepiece I don't think this is fair -- his splatter flicks showed a genuine love of practical effects. But yeah, the CGI trend was obvious, just looking at the progression from FOTR to ROTK.
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Jul 25, 2014 14:59
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I'm really not a big fan of the hindsight complaints regarding TLOTR. If you didn't like TLOTR, then yeah... sure. But CGI was already a full force in big budget films back in '01-'03, they just seemed felt more creative and less mind-numbing back then. I thought the CGI, save for a few bad CGI human shots, were great. I thought the escalation from first to second to third movie was well measured, even with the use of CGI. It felt like the build-up to total war was earned, and I was invested in the battle with the huge Oliphaunts, trolls, orcs, and ghosts because it's quite clear what's at stake. This was before every single TLOTR or Harry Potter wannabe movie needed "a big battle". And that Rohan cavalry charge... 
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Jul 25, 2014 15:09
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Echo Chamber posted:I'm really not a big fan of the hindsight complaints regarding TLOTR. If you didn't like TLOTR, then yeah... sure. But CGI was already a full force in big budget films back in '01-'03, they just seemed felt more creative and less mind-numbing back then. I thought the CGI, save for a few bad CGI human shots, were great. I thought the escalation from first to second to third movie was well measured, even with the use of CGI. It felt like the build-up to total war was earned, and I was invested in the battle with the huge Oliphaunts, trolls, orcs, and ghosts because it's quite clear what's at stake. This was before every single TLOTR or Harry Potter wannabe movie needed "a big battle". What complaints? The Hobbit movies aren't bad because PJ used a lot of CGI. He's always used as much as he can. Dude loves effects.
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Jul 25, 2014 15:19
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I got impression that the some people (not just people here, but elsewhere also) are retroactively applying their complaints about The Hobbit movies to The Lord of the Rings movies with things they originally didn't have a problem with.
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Jul 25, 2014 15:21
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A lot of the complaints are things people gave a pass to in his earlier work, yeah. An overall good film makes a viewer more forgiving. This is normal. Personally I find Gollum (in lotr) far worse than Azog for how over-indulgent the performance and direction is. You can tell that PJ is cutting it together with one hand, probably dressed in the green gimp suit. Gollum in the hobbit is a far stronger piece of work.
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Jul 25, 2014 15:28
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Having just watched LotR a few months ago, I didn't have any problem with CGI in it because it's not prevalent. It feels like in the Hobbit, they're just using CGI to be lazy. In LotR, there are a couple areas that graphically look kinda bad nowadays (Pippen/Merry on Treebeard, Sam and Frodo escaping Mount Doom) but those are mostly because most green screen work from that era does look bad 10 years later. The Hobbit suffers from Star Wars prequel syndrome due to complete prevalence and reliance on CGI and it feels like no one was willing to reign in Peter Jackson. He's just a guy that people need to say no to. "Lets change Beorn into a bloodthirsty monster bear." No. "Lets have a crazy barrel action scene." No. "Lets bring in Legolas and a lady elf love triangle." gently caress no. "Lets make all the major antagonists CGI." No, what the gently caress are you thinking? "Lets make Gandalf cry." What the gently caress are you doing Peter?
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Jul 25, 2014 15:31
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It is funny that peoples major complaints about the movie, is that it is too much like the book. "Funny antics between dwarves?" Not in my serious movie! "Barrel Ride?" What kind of silly nonsense is that? They should just have put all the actors in real barrels and see who survived! "CGI?" It is just a fad, like sound and color.
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Jul 25, 2014 16:37
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In the books they just hopped in the barrels and floated off. In the movie... well, we all know what happened.
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Jul 25, 2014 16:44
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The barrel scene was one of the better parts of the movie if you take out a couple questionable CGI scenes.
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Jul 25, 2014 16:48
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Oasx posted:It is funny that peoples major complaints about the movie, is that it is too much like the book. What the gently caress are you talking about? The entire talking point is that the movies have barely anything in common with the books, and just flat-out add and cut entire chunks wholesale.
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Jul 25, 2014 16:49
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therealjon_ posted:The barrel scene was one of the better parts of the movie if you take out a couple questionable CGI scenes. Yeah it went on a little too long (basically everything after that gate where one of the dwarves gets shot should've been cut) but it was not terrible.
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Jul 25, 2014 17:02
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I feel like the trilogy could have been made into two really tight movies. Instead we get 3 indulgently long movies.
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Jul 25, 2014 17:29
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sassassin posted:How is this different from Tolkien? The dwarves are boring, shallow poo poo in the book, too. So?
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Jul 25, 2014 19:46
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I hope that there is no adaptation of the Simarillion, because I do not know if I can stand another Jackson Middle Earth movie. My father will want to see this when I see him for his birthday, I'm just nervous that this one will be a two hour long CG battle.
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Jul 25, 2014 20:11
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wins.
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The dwarves aren't important to the story no matter how many nerds who haven't read the book in years (if ever) bitch and moan about it. The story was popular in the first place because of the Elves and Goblins and poo poo that PJ is criticised for focusing on. Treating them "like they're mostly a comedic sideshow to the main events" is in no way doing us a disservice. It's dead on (despite omitting the brilliant fatshaming). Diverting focus from Bilbo is maybe a valid point but honestly how much mileage can you get out of a one-trick pony like Martin Freeman?
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Jul 25, 2014 20:39
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PassTheRemote posted:I hope that there is no adaptation of the Simarillion, because I do not know if I can stand another Jackson Middle Earth movie. Apparently, they're throwing in everything from the appendices because this is the last chance they'll have at making a Tolkien film, so they want to adapt as much as possible.
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Jul 25, 2014 21:21
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sassassin posted:The dwarves aren't important to the story no matter how many nerds who haven't read the book in years (if ever) bitch and moan about it. The story was popular in the first place because of the Elves and Goblins and poo poo that PJ is criticised for focusing on. People also seem to forget that a big part of the charm of The Hobbit the book is that there is just this gaggle of basically faceless interchangeable dwarves, which the audience of the time knew as the coal-mining, sing-marching forest imps in pointy caps from dog-eared fairy-tale storybooks that made another contemporaneous pop-culture appearance gathering around Snow White. And this time they're all traipsing off on an adventure to kill a loving dragon. The story was never about the individual dwarves any more than Snow White was about the tragic backstory of Happy or how Doc and Grumpy are old battle-hardened brothers-in-arms or how Dopey needs to be completely reimagined in a world that is less receptive to mockery of the mentally deficient. What made The Hobbit fun and funny was that Bilbo got swept up in their unknowable little quest and had to learn to be one of their inscrutable little clan, even as they spend the entire book getting subdivided up in faceless themed piles, i.e. with "Ori, Nori, and Dori all in a heap together" and repeatedly delving comedy from the gag of showing up one by one at people's doors until they're overwhelmed by their sheer numbers that had crept upon them like the heat in the frog pot. But then they get to the end and it turns out these goofy little faceless dwarves can actually hold a mountain against a siege by several combined armies, and when Bilbo tries to take advantage of their foibles to turn the standoff to a general mutual advantage, he finds out just how personally they take it. And you end up with the identical pair of Kili and Fili separated by death, something that had seemed unthinkable up to that point. This was supposed to be just a bunch of singing Smurfs marching in a line through the forest, not people who could actually, you know, die. That's the slow-burn twist that the book pulls. It tricks you into caring about characters you're almost pointedly not supposed to care about. And the longer and more detailed the movies get, the more character they imbue into all these weirdass individual dwarves, they further they get from the source material. (Rankin-Bass actually captured it pretty well by making the themed duos and trios of dwarves basically carbon copies of one another with different colored hats, which is really the vibe that Tolkien gave them.) Saying that The Hobbit would have been better with only three or four dwarves would basically just be turning it into another FotR, with a party of carefully selected individuals with their own deep rich backstories to explore while on their road trip. It's missing the point of what makes the stories different and seems to be saying that the right answer is to make them more alike.
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Jul 25, 2014 22:03
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PassTheRemote posted:I hope that there is no adaptation of the Simarillion, because I do not know if I can stand another Jackson Middle Earth movie. I'm calling 2 hour CG battle, and maybe 5-10 minutes of Sackville-Bagginses at the end. And 20 mins of namechecking LotR in Rivendell.
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Jul 25, 2014 22:13
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Echo Chamber posted:I got impression that the some people (not just people here, but elsewhere also) are retroactively applying their complaints about The Hobbit movies to The Lord of the Rings movies with things they originally didn't have a problem with. No, we were at least complaining about some of the CGI in Lord of the Rings well before we got glimpses of the first Hobbit movie.
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Jul 25, 2014 23:11
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Octy posted:No, we were at least complaining about some of the CGI in Lord of the Rings well before we got glimpses of the first Hobbit movie. I feel like a lot of my CGI complaints are opposite between LotR and the Hobbit. With Lord of the Rings, there's some bad CGI due to what seems like technical limitations of the time. Whereas with the hobbit, it's just too much CGI.
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Jul 26, 2014 02:09
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sassassin posted:The dwarves aren't important to the story no matter how many nerds who haven't read the book in years (if ever) bitch and moan about it. The story was popular in the first place because of the Elves and Goblins and poo poo that PJ is criticised for focusing on. The story is about Bilbo's journey with the dwarves and the change in his relationship with them as he grows. Edit: Also, I don't get how dwarves shouldn't be cut from the film because they're not important to the story. Wouldn't that be an argument in favor? I like having them all in the movie, and I'm just wondering what you mean. Toady fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jul 26, 2014 |
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Jul 26, 2014 02:11
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Nipplebox posted:The story is about Bilbo's journey with the dwarves and the change in his relationship with them as he grows. Except for that one chapter that doesn't feature any of them.
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Jul 26, 2014 02:45
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computer parts posted:Except for that one chapter that doesn't feature any of them. Bilbo's growth into a hero contrasts with the static personalities of the dwarves. Bombur is fat and burdensome; Bilbo loses weight and becomes the leader of the company. Thorin is proud and greedy; Bilbo bargains for peace by giving away his treasure. The dwarves' takeover of Bag-End is like Smaug's invasion of Erebor, and by fighting for the home of the dwarves, Bilbo is fighting for his home. Edit: The least important dwarves are the ones who have no meaningful relationship to Bilbo, but I admit I'd hate to see dwarves cut from the film. If only there were more moments for each one, like Gloin's "making a long-term deposit" quip or Bofur's talk with Bilbo. Toady fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Jul 26, 2014 |
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Jul 26, 2014 02:53
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Mordiceius posted:I feel like a lot of my CGI complaints are opposite between LotR and the Hobbit. With Lord of the Rings, there's some bad CGI due to what seems like technical limitations of the time. Whereas with the hobbit, it's just too much CGI. Yeah, but I think there were times when they could have done something different, like the green soap foam that was the ghost army in RotK. I don't think that was so much a technical limitation as an artistic choice.
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Jul 26, 2014 06:22
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Octy posted:Yeah, but I think there were times when they could have done something different, like the green soap foam that was the ghost army in RotK. I don't think that was so much a technical limitation as an artistic choice. Oh absolutely. There were a myriad of stupid decisions in LotR, but I just feel like with that series people kept PJ on more of a leash. I think with the Hobbit, they're afraid to tell him no. (See Lucas and the prequels)
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Jul 26, 2014 07:26
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Mordiceius posted:Oh absolutely. There were a myriad of stupid decisions in LotR, but I just feel like with that series people kept PJ on more of a leash. I think with the Hobbit, they're afraid to tell him no. (See Lucas and the prequels) But the difference here is that PJ is surrounded by a lot of the same people who helped him make LotR, people who should know when to put their foot down and say he's got stupid ideas cause they've been working with him for years, whereas Lucas had an almost entirely new team who didn't know how much push they had with him and so didn't really know how to say no. From watching the behind the scenes stuff, my impression was less "they's afraid to tell him no" and more "there's too much poo poo that needs to get done to argue over what's good or not". (the example that sticks out in my head is that one time PJ asks for some torture devices in Goblin Town and Weta did something insane like less than a couple of days turnover, which leaves very little room for quesitoning whether or not it's a good idea and even less room for coming up with something better)
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Jul 26, 2014 07:46
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