I watched Wizards last night for the first time in decades. The mixed style of animation, with the rotoscoping and textured backgrounds and the prog-jazz soundtrack...it's something you don't get anymore. Gotta admit I've done a 180 on Ralph Bakshi's work and become a fan.
I honestly like Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings better than Jackson’s. It feels more weird and otherworldly.
Try to catch American Pop sometime if you haven’t already. It’s kind of a mess, but it’s an interesting mess.
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If this day gets you riled up, you obviously aren't numb to the disappointment yet to be a real fan.
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I'm embarrassed to say that I just watched Jaws (1975) for the first time all the way through. Filmmakers today trying to build effective tension with score and without jump scares should study this movie. It's really aged well too, the effects are kinda campy at some points but overall it still hold up really well. Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw are amazing. Absolutely fantastic film.
Also I'm never going in the ocean again.
First time I saw it I was too young to know what was going on.
I finally watched it in my 20s, I literally jumped when they first showed the shark. And when he said "You're gonna need a bigger boat" I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
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It’s long-winded, and not in a good way. I read the books faster than I watched the movies, and I only started reading them after FOTR came out. He even managed to leave out tonnes of material and randomly made the hobbits different sizes, despite the power of CGI.
What do you mean? This was after a lot of CGI heavy movies from that time. And making Hobbits look small isn’t even something that needs to be done in CGI, but Jackson certainly didn’t shy away from using it.
edit: okay, I get maybe I shouldn’t use cgi interchangeably with special effects, but anyway, the point is still his attention to some of the details was sporadic.
What do you mean? This was after a lot of CGI heavy movies from that time. And making Hobbits look small isn’t even something that needs to be done in CGI, but Jackson certainly didn’t shy away from using it.
edit: okay, I get maybe I shouldn’t use cgi interchangeably with special effects, but anyway, the point is still his attention to some of the details was sporadic.
There are tons of mistakes in the LOTR trilogy, both from special and visual effects. Doesn't detract at all from the films IMO because there is so much awesome about them.
If you want much more advanced CGI watch The Hobbit trilogy.
There are tons of mistakes in the LOTR trilogy, both from special and visual effects. Doesn't detract at all from the films IMO because there is so much awesome about them.
If you want much more advanced CGI watch The Hobbit trilogy.
Do NOT watch the Hobbit Trilogy.
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There are tons of mistakes in the LOTR trilogy, both from special and visual effects. Doesn't detract at all from the films IMO because there is so much awesome about them.
If you want much more advanced CGI watch The Hobbit trilogy.
I don’t want more advanced CGI, I want consistency that doesn’t make you want to heckle the film like you’re a part of MST3K.
As a huge LOTR fan who was actually really annoyed with some of the things they did in the Jackson movies (many of which reek of studio-suit interference), I still think it's obviously better than the Bakshi version and the Bakshi version was the one that I was into when I was a kid. The Jackson LOTR movies may have the greatest use of music in film of all time, and the way they used the landscape cinematography to create a world on the screen, on their own, make it a triumph of filmmaking.
All the rest of it - the acting, script, pacing, effects - had to do was not totally screw it up to a point where you couldn't enjoy the music and scenery. And they don't screw it up. There are some stumbles here and there, but the writing is mostly fine and the performances mostly good. Could it have been easily improved? Absolutely. Could it be re-done better today even with a similar budget? I think the chances of that happening are basically nil.
... Also, the extended cuts are generally better. The pacing of the first film is just massively improved by the extra time spent in the first half especially, and the questionable stuff in the second film is diluted. I'm less convinced that the ROTK extended version is really much better but it it isn't worse.
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That frickin stupid river scene soiled my entire impression of the franchise.
I think if they had actually planned properly, they could have leaned into that tone and made the whole trilogy that way, and it would have worked much better overall. The shifting between silliness and taking itself super seriously was one big problem with those movies (among many).
The Hobbit as a book is a very different type of story from LOTR. It's completely different to read, and much less serious. If the movie had been done in a way that you had, for example, "Old Bilbo" as the narrator, clearly exaggerating things and making them ridiculous and hyperbolic solely to amuse his audience, it doesn't matter if it's silly and outrageous. They could have even used it as a framing device. This scene comes to mind (1:20)
... Just do that. There's so much more flexibility that way.
That being said, the whole production of the Hobbit films was such a mess that this type of planning and forethought and organization was never in the cards so it's kind of moot.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
The Hobbit trilogy is tucked away in a dark corner of our memories just like SpiderMan 3, GoT season 8, Dexter's final season, the Halle Berry James Bond movie.
It's like when Seti banishes Moses in the Ten Commandments.
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Let the name of Moses the hobbit movies be stricken from every book and tablet, stricken from all pylons blurays and obelisks streaming services, stricken from every monument of Egypt Hollywood. Let the name of Moses the hobbit movies be unheard and unspoken, erased from the memory of men for all time.
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Yeah. There’s a reason the Hobbit bounced around before Jackson finally threw up his hands and did it himself. You can tell he phoned it in comparatively and was essentially forced to stretch it into a trilogy because reasons.
Yeah. There’s a reason the Hobbit bounced around before Jackson finally threw up his hands and did it himself. You can tell he phoned it in comparatively and was essentially forced to stretch it into a trilogy because reasons.
He didn't phone it in, it was just a mega rushed project that the studio kept interfering with.
He was literally shooting during the day, and then going back to his trailer and writing all night to get the project done/and expanded as they flipped it to a trilogy really late in the process.
The Hobbit movies because what they became because of horrible work at the studio and interference/poor planning.
Such a wasted opportunity - and I even say that as someone who LIKES that Trilogy, but can openly see that it's pretty bad.
If Jackson would have fit The Hobbit into one movie, it would have been perfect. There is a single-act cartoon from the 70s that was very succinct. It’s one thing to throw out material, but to add unnecessary material is just nonsense.
I'm not as down as most on the extra content in the Hobbit. Personally I loved all of the Gandalf / White Council stuff. Take out the romance plot, get back to practical effects with less CGI (especially for monsters), and throw out the entirety of the final battle and redo it with a better sense of pacing and storytelling (and as an actual battle, rather than taking the heroes off the battlefield and isolating them), and I think it would have been a decent trilogy.
I can go slow ahead, come on down and chum some of this ####.
