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Tolkien world experienced two huge events this month.
Amazon announced last week the diverse cast for its new Lord of the Rings series. Shortly thereafter, Christopher Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien’s editor and the guardian of his father’s legacy, died. (Hopefully, there was no connection between the events.) (more…)
Checking the lights in Sydney
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It’s a big weekend for Taylor Swift. She winds up her record-breaking 1989 World Tour on Saturday, December 12, in Melbourne and reaches the ripe old age of 26 on Sunday, December 13. So now is a good time to sit back and think about what it all means.
What exactly is the significance of Taylor in pop music, modern aesthetics, and Western culture in general? (more…)
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In his remake of King Kong, Peter Jackson dragged out the big ape’s death so long it felt like a lifetime. At the time, it merely seemed like a lapse of taste. In hindsight, it seems like the beginning of a whole new career characterized by megalomania, greed, one-upmanship, self-indulgence, and bad taste. It was just the first symptom of the dragon sickness that has now consumed him.
The Battle of Five Armies begins with Smaug giving Laketown the Dresden treatment, (more…)
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I was hoping that the first installment of The Hobbit trilogy would be merely a Phantom Menace moment, and that Peter Jackson would produce leaner, tighter sequels that would pull this ill-conceived trilogy out of the crapper. But no. I am saddened to report that The Desolation of Smaug is freighted with the same problems as the first movie, and more.
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I am sorry to report that I was disappointed by The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first installment of Peter Jackson’s film trilogy based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
Jackson’s first mistake was trying to make a trilogy at all. The Hobbit is shorter than any of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings. Thus its story could have been told completely and satisfyingly in a single movie of around two hours.
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Translations: Danish, Portuguese
One of my favorite parts of The Lord of the Rings is book 6, chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire,” the penultimate chapter of The Return of the King. (more…)
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Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director whose films I have been watching since I learned he was directing The Hobbit, which is being produced by Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a LOTR fanatic, I wanted to get a sense of how Del Toro might handle The Hobbit. This is the first of three reviews I hope to write on his work so far.
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It was one minute past midnight, one last time. I knew The Return of The King would be a great movie, and it is. The only question in my mind was, “How great?”
Return is not as good as The Two Towers, my favorite Rings movie, but it is a magnificent, moving film, that will not disappoint, and taken together the Rings movies are certainly the greatest movie trilogy ever made, and rank among the greatest achievements in film history.
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It was one minute past midnight again, exactly 364 days after the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of The Lord of the Rings movies, and I was back for the opening of The Two Towers. I loved the first movie so much that I was fully expecting to be disappointed. There’s nowhere to go from here but down, I thought. So I was moved to tears of absolute delight that The Two Towers is even better than The Fellowship of the Ring.
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At one minute past midnight on Wednesday, December 19th, 2001, I was one of hundreds of people assembled in several sold-out theaters to see the Atlanta opening of Lord of the Rings. I was astonished that hundreds of people had gathered to watch a three-hour movie starting after midnight. (more…)