King Kong

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by Egan

Yeah, but his special effects are great! A certain Mr. Lucas could learn some tricks.

Learn bah he just steals from CGI companies like Zoic.

But who cares about Lucas, "Joss Whedon is my master now."

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Type941

I think only the Two Towers was done more or less well, the rest is filled with too much cliche lines and symbolism...

I guess I'm odd, in that I absolutely detested The Two Towers - compared to The Fellowship of the Ring it was nowhere near as visually stunning. Some of the 2nd unit photography was decidedly second-rate, and some of the dialogue was appalling. It wasn't too bad on a second viewing, but when I first saw it after seeing FOTR I was quite disappointed. I also felt the third movie missed a lot of the point of Tolkien's work by ignoring the whole 'blighted Shire' bit. But all-in-all, I felt Jackson got closer to the feel of the books than anyone else could possibly have done.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

I found the Lord of the Rings films to be derivative and self-indulgant (the painful film score played no small part in this assessment). It is, however, more than likely that my similar opinion of J. R. R. Tolkien's have influenced this perspective, thus skewing objectivity to an extent.

Oh, I agree that Tolkien's work is greatly overrated. Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast is a much better piece of epic fantasy - its only failure being that it was left unfinished. Tolkien's work is derivative and not very imaginative. Of course I'm not at all sure he wanted to beoriginal or imaginative, since part of the point was to cobble together an English mythology from bits and pieces of European folklore, and (by all accounts) he was more interested in developing the languages of Middle Earth than in producing great literature, but the work suffers nonetheless.

My point is that Peter Jackson takes pulp fiction and overrated fiction - society's guilty pleasures - and brings them to the screen with more panache and flair than other directors could. It's not like he can ruin a classic by adapting the work of 2nd rate artists. Jackson is not doing the equivalent of re-recording Mozart using a synthesizer - he's basically just taking the equivalent of a Celine Dion song and giving it a bit of style.

[Type941]

Originally Posted by Beery

all-in-all, I felt Jackson got closer to the feel of the books than anyone else could possibly have done.

Who else have tried to get close? I think Jackson is he only one! :rotfl:

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Type941

Who else have tried to get close? I think Jackson is he only one! :rotfl:

There was an unfinished (and atrocious) animated version done in the '70s, and a reasonably good BBC radio version (with Ian Holm) done in (I think) the early '80s.

[Egan]

Originally Posted by TLAM Strike

Learn bah he just steals from CGI companies like Zoic.

But who cares about Lucas, "Joss Whedon is my master now."

Joss Whedon? Umm....No need to get silly now...

:P

And I'll take the Lord of the Rings books over any amount of other fantasy or Sci-fi any day of the week.

Mind you, I generally can't stand either fantasy or Sci-fi so I'm probably not the person to speak about this sort of thing.

Aside from Gibson and Clarke that is.

[Type941]

Originally Posted by Beery

There was an unfinished (and atrocious) animated version done in the '70s, and a reasonably good BBC radio version (with Ian Holm) done in (I think) the early '80s.

Not exactly benchmarks than.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Type941

Not exactly benchmarks than.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. I never suggested there was a benchmark.

[Type941]

Originally Posted by Beery

I'm not sure what you're getting at. I never suggested there was a benchmark.

someone said that Jackson did the best job of anyone in recreating the movie, and thus deserves big cridit, while my point is it's hard to say how good of a job he did since we can only compare to some very mediocre/low budget attempts - thus hinting that the whole thing is overrated a little. :|\

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Type941

someone said that Jackson did the best job of anyone in recreating the movie, and thus deserves big cridit...|\

No one here said that he did the best job that anyone had ever done of recreating the movie. If they did, please quote it, because I don't see any such thing.

But anyway, if we're talking movies now, he has certainly done better than the first movie - it was better simply because this version actually got finished. The fact that no one has done a credible job up to now is not an argument against Jackson's ability, and anyway it's beside the point. I don't think anyone argued that Jackson was the greatest director ever, or that his version of LOTR was an incomparable masterpiece. Personally, I didn't think the last two films deserved the overblown recognition they got at the Oscars.

All I said was I felt that he did the best possible job of achieving the feel of the books. I don't think anyone could seriously dispute that, unless they got inside my mind and checked out what I really felt about it. I'm pretty sure that what I feel about Jackson's LOTR is pretty much actually what I feel about it.

[Type941]

Originally Posted by Beery

all-in-all, I felt Jackson got closer to the feel of the books than anyone else could possibly have done.

I was referring to this.. Apparently your own qoute!

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Type941

I was referring to this.. Apparently your own qoute!

And I stand by it 100%. But judging by the argument you're making against it I just don't think it says what you think it says. Your argument seems to suggest that I'm talking about the movie being OBJECTIVELY better than any other MOVIE. The quote of mine says nothing of the kind. It talks only of my SUBJECTIVE opinion of how well the movie renders the BOOKS. It is folly to argue against what I wrote there, because it's my own opinion (it says nothing at all about objective fact), and I'm the only one who can possibly dispute it.

What you seem to be doing is either completely misunderstanding what I've written, or you're trying to create a rather clumsy straw man. I think it's probably the former. I don't mean to be rude, but is English your first language? I'm definitely getting the sense that you're getting something wrong here.

I guess you could argue that my opinion is wrong, but then you'd have to argue about how Jackson got the feel of the books wrong. So far you've made no effort to argue along those lines.

[jason10mm]

Jackson cut his teeth making huge splatter fest horror flicks. I have a sneaking suspicion that King Kong is gonna trample a lot of New Yorkers to mush Can't wait for the spider scene myself!

[Type941]

Originally Posted by jason10mm

Jackson cut his teeth making huge splatter fest horror flicks.

Yes yes, I've seen those! :rotfl:

Beery, i think you just said he's done better than anyone on LOTR, hence he's a very good director. I didn't think his movie was that good, hence my view is you can't judge him based on his one work, a remake of a book, than can only be judged against some mediocre attempts before him. Or in other words - how much is modern technology, and how much is Jackson.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Type941

Yes yes, I've seen those! :rotfl:

Beery, i think you just said he's done better than anyone on LOTR, hence he's a very good director.

Again, I think you're putting words in my mouth. I certainly never said any of those things, and I am BY NO MEANS convinced that Peter Jackson is a very good director. He has his strengths, and he has very pronounced weaknesses - weaknesses that I've mentioned. In many ways he's very similar to George Lucas - he can make a movie look very good, and he can do very good pacing, but where a script is concerned he's a liability. But what's important in the end is that Jackson did make a credible version of LOTR where others failed. LOTR didn't need a genius to bring it to the screen, but it did require competence. The same is true of King Kong.