Month: December 2001

PlastiCode

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Welcome to the new PlasticBoy. I’m now managing the site with some custom PHP code instead of Blogger. The major change for you: comments! I haven’t tested this with many browser/OS combos so post your bugs here (or mail me if you can’t get posting to work).

Fellowship was even better than

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Fellowship was even better than I expected, and I was expecting a lot.
Sure, I have my gripes, but they seem like nitpicking in retrospect. Here are a
few notes:

  • Everybody calls Sauron by name. In the book, few people are unwilling to
    say “Sauron” for fear of attracting his attention. Why would you change
    that?
  • If directors are going to do arrows-in-flight shots, they should really look
    at some videos of
    arrows in flight first. It looks much cooler than anything I’ve seen in a
    movie.
  • Why do fantasy movie archers always have to hold their bows sideways? It’s
    just silly.
  • Showing Sauron in full armor wasn’t so bad and it seems like a nice
    compromise with just having Gandalf or Elrond tell the Isildur story with no
    visual.
  • The fight scenes were great but it’s too bad they succumbed to the trend
    towards jumpy, close-up camera work so it’s hard to tell what’s going on. I
    guess maybe that’s necessary when you’re working CG into fight scenes.
  • I like how they beefed up Arwen as a character, she is practically
    non-existent in the book.
  • I enjoyed everything from the Balrog on even more because it seemed more
    faithful to the book. I think that bodes well for the rest of the series.

And the Village Voice review

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And the Village Voice review desrves its own link just for this quote: “How much fun it would have been to see a real desecration of Tolkien that periodized the trilogy’s cosmic adventures by having them played out inside the brain of some acid-ripped hippie—the Fellowship leaving the snug communes of northern Vermont on a perilous mission to cast the ‘ring of power’ into the boiler of some fetid East Village basement.”