My defense of the LotR movies is not fanboyish. For someone so quick to label someone a hack, you’re not very good at using the right words to describe things. And I shouldn’t have to qualify it to an actual thinking individual, but my description of LotR as “unreadable” has nothing to do with the “difficulty” of the text and everything to do with Tolkien being a dogshit terrible writer.
So a Hollywood studio gave $300+ million to a director who’s then-track record consisted of low-budget, low-quality films with no involvement at all, eh? That’s not very plausible. And those movies reek of low-brow Hollywood decision making.
The studio had very little control over what happened in the films, as Jackson was on the other side of the planet and they couldn’t really do much about it when he’d already shot things. I have no idea what you mean by “low-brow Hollywood decision making” in this situation, as Jackson was one of the most non-Hollywood directors in the business at the time. He had open contempt for the Hollywood studio types at the time. I don’t know if he still does, although that may just be my residual irritation at how godawful The Lovely Bones was.
About as foolish as this scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Vyhve9gtg The freshman film student hack quality starts a little before the 2:30 mark. Enjoy the artistic vision from the great director who sheperded this project alone on his shoulders from start to finish. And please don’t pull out the canard that this scene is an anomaly. . .the three movies are chock-full of such dreck.
Awww, were you sad there weren’t any fireball spells cast?
Wow, only four times, eh? Why not spread the love around to those other fantasy films that were competing at the time? Or the decade before, or the decade after?
If anyone had made any good ones, I would have been glad to. But they didn’t.
Cutting the Scouring was one of the best decisions Jackson made. Talk about anti-climactic. The point without the Scouring (other than being a much better ending) is to wrap up each character’s story. Epics do that, although audiences aren’t used to it. What part of the ending should have been cut? Yes, the bouncing gay hobbits slow-mo scene is too long, but I fail to see what in the 30 minute denouement could be removed without doing harm to the “here’s what happened to everyone” purpose of the end. As it stands we never find out what happens to Gimli and Legolas, although “they built a boat and were totes besties forever” is probably not the ending most people are looking for there.
If any movie should have won best picture/director it should have been Fellowship. As others have mentioned, the cuts from it made sense, and the changes were ultimately pretty slight. If nothing else, that version of Boromir had so much more depth and personality than the one ini the book.
100% agreed, but the Academy was never going to give Best Picture to the first film. It was only after all three films made a billion dollars that the Academy grudgingly handed over some accolades that were clearly meant to be considered awarded for the trilogy as a whole. Now that is low-brow Hollywood decision making.