PPPS: Not that necessarily FlamesAddiction is arguing in favour of ignorance. But he might be, if I cared to take the trouble to find the original post. But hey, I'm lazy too! Ironic, isn't it?
I'm not. I just thought it was a funny/slighly elitist thing to suggest that most people should know without having to look it up, what it means. I never suggested that no one should learn it or use it.
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PPPPS: Oh yah, and The Hobbit was thoroughly mediocre. So far each Jackson movie treatment of Tolkien has been a lesser vessel, so by the time this "trilogy" is over, I expect Bilbo to defeat Smaug with water-filled bladders and a slapstick routine.
So I take it that the film didn't offer any jouissance? Besides that, how was the overall performance of the the thespians? I think part of the reason the film bothers me is the heroic couplet dialogue of hobbits. It's almost like the spondee to dactyl ratio is off a little.
I heard some critics say that the ring is in fact objective correlative to the feelings and tension in Europe at the time The Hobbit was written. Do you think it was allegorious in that sense? I also find it funny that in a film about elves and goblins, people are arguing about the low degree of verisimilitude regarding the deus ex machina.
(Just typical hockey forum film critique lingo... not meant to come off as invective)
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Last edited by FlamesAddiction; 01-03-2013 at 08:16 AM.
Why Critics Will Come to Regret Their Relentless Savaging of the New Film
Despite tentatively positive reviews from The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, National Public Radio, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, and several smaller urban newspapers, if you've heard much about the first entry in Peter Jackson's much-hyped Hobbit trilogy, it's probably that, well, it isn't very good. Right now the nearly three-hour demi-epic, controversially shot at double the frame-rate of most Hollywood features, is sporting a dispiriting 42% on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie-review aggregator that certifies movies as "fresh" or, as in the case of Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, rotten.
Would a film critic reviewing a Jane Austen adaptation be forgiven for exhibiting little knowledge of (and little willingness to embrace) the film's source material? How about Tolstoy? The reviews of The Hobbit don't just indulge, they indeed rely upon both the critics' and readers' ignorance of Tolkien's tale and what it was actually intended to be by the time of the novelist's death and (more to the point) Jackson's mid-nineties discovery of it as a possible cinematic blockbuster.
So when The Atlantic opines that Jackson's The Hobbit should have been "slender and simple" like the book, indeed "innocent and intimate," and that any reference to the "necromancer"-cum-Sauron in The Hobbit is merely "Jackson cross-promoting his earlier films," don't listen to it for a moment--and don't be fooled by the legerdemain of that magazine's film critic, who drops esoteric references to the books as though he understands them well and has considered their scope and intersections in writing his review. Likewise, when CNN says that there's "so much less at stake" in The Hobbit, and that the movie should acknowledge this by avoiding any "dark forebodings of impending death and destruction," this too is a betrayal of Tolkien's literary legacy. This is not, as CNN would have it, a mere "caper." Nor is it, at The Washington Post and others absurdly posit, reminiscent--either visually, tonally, or otherwise--to "The Teletubbies." This is dark, mature subject matter involving a cast of characters still unaware enough about what's going on around them that they can still take time to laugh and (admittedly, on occasion) make bad jokes.
Moreover, critics seem to be whitewashing the flaws of the original movie trilogy. The Washington Post complains of a lack of "engaging character development" in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, as if that had ever been a hallmark of Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. The original trilogy was itself a plodding, portentous affair with a good deal of unbearably melodramatic dialogue and head-shaking archetyping. We permitted it, as moviegoers, because The Lord of the Rings was and is an allegory, because it was and is beautiful to experience, because it has ever been intended as a lengthy and immersive experience, and because it tells a story of massive scope and scale: all things which, as it happens, are true of Tolkien's (and Jackson's) The Hobbit.
As the years go on, critics will return to the first entry in The Hobbit trilogy with a more favorable tone than they have approached it with thus far, and will be embarrassed for having rated it barely above George Lucas' thoroughly execrable Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (38% on Rotten Tomatoes). Here's hoping that reversal comes sooner rather than later.
Heh, well that's why I'm asking. He did leave, and I think he did talk about consulting wizards, but it was never flushed out the way it was in the movie. Because I'm fairly certain it hadn't been thought up yet.
I think...
I'm probably just going to have to read the book again myself, heh.
To that point, I don't think we ever meet the brown wizard in The Hobbit OR Lord of the Rings. I don't think he is even more than mentioned. The real story behind the wizards gets flushed out in the Similarion for the most part. Which is like a history of MIddle-Earth.
I think Tolkien had been working on the history of Middle Earth in considerable detail long before the Hobbit was published, so it probably was "thought up" but not published. The brown wizard was briefly in the Lord of the Rings but not the Hobbit if my memory is correct.
I wasn't bitching. I honestly have never heard that term before. Not in high school and certainly not in one of the 0 lit courses I took in University unless Ohm's Law was considered Deus Ex Machina.
But even searching for it here at CP, it has been used quite a bit. I must have glazed over it.
I guess this is my version of peoples continued misuse of bias. I am so bias.
That's crazy. It's like one of the 20 literary devices they grind into you in High School. Weird.
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Originally Posted by Locke
Thats why Flames fans make ideal Star Trek fans. We've really been taught to embrace the self-loathing and extreme criticism.
I am surprised the movie is getting trashed the way it is. I thoroughly liked it. It won't ever live up to LotR, but it's pretty good. 4 out of 5 in my opinion.
I will be honest, I do kinda feel like some of those reviews though, like the additional stuff is unnecessary, even if it is further explianed through the later mythos of Tolkiens work.
Saw it today in 2d, loved it. Though a little Eagle background was needed, I would think Bilbo's first question after getting dropped off would have been "where the blank did those giant eagles come from?"
How the hell does it get to a 45% rating? I mean I get that it wasn't perfect or anything, but 45%? Tough crowd.
Many of the reviews I read were pretty critical of the 48 fps frame rate, not so much the content of the movie itself.
Also, Rotten Tomatoes doesn't assign a score like Metacritic does. The 45% rating means that 45% of critics gave it a positive review (vs. 55% who gave it a negative review), not that the film received an average rating of 45/100.
I haven't watched it with the 48fps. I didn't want to take the chance of not liking it so I watched it in normal theatre. It is something new, and doesn't necessarily deserve a negative rating.
I think the 48fps thing is mostly a red herring when brought up in negative reviews. my feeling is that critics that didn't enjoy it had the same basic issue I did, namely that it was the light fabric of a childrens' fairytale that was uncomfortably stretched over the heavy, epic framework of the previous trilogy. it's the constant straining to make the two very different tones fit seamlessly that bugs many people, but it's subtle enough that they can't quite put their finger on it, so they just blame things on the frame rate instead.
Want to see this Friday night. Are the non IMAX screens at Chinook playing the 48fps 3d? On the cineplex website it only shows sunridge as playing it in HFR 3D in AVX. AVX at Chinook is Les Mis. However, 48fpsmovies.com shows Chinook and Chinook IMAX as both showing it in 48fps.
I think that fans of previous Jackson movies are giving this one a lot of leeway, simply because it's from the same director, realm, stories. But if you actually sit back objectively, this movie was not as good as any of the LOTRs. Admittedly, I'm not a fan of any of them really...
But, it probably should be better than 48%, it really wasn't THAT bad. But it certainly wasn't spectacular, that's for damn sure.
I still don't get the 48 fps, an unnecessary risk by the director.
not meant to come off as invective)
