Re: Gandalf falling scene, pro/con

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Steve Fine) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> JRRT was hardly a master at writing. All scholars agree that many
> "rules" of storytelling were broken by Tolkien and that the books have
> major flaws. 

ALL scholars?  You mean the ones you heard on the DVD supplements for
The Two Towers EE.  Hardly an objective group.  Tolkien's breaking of 
'rules' in most cases made his stories greater, and at least one of the
people you heard on the DVDs, Tom Shippey, did not mean that the unusual
things Tolkien did were unsuccessful.  He was marveling at how effective
Tolkien's strange methods were.  Shippey's current book is 'J.R.R. Tolkien, 
Author of the Century', by the way.

Possibly the very best chapter in The Lord of the Rings is The Council of
Elrond.  One of Jackson's minions on the DVDs said she would have taken
a 'blue pencil' to that chapter if she was publishing the books.  That's
the most evil and self-serving thing I've ever heard from the PJ crew.
They can rationalize changing the story for the movie all they like, but
when they start bad-mouthing the best things about the books, as books,
they show they are not fit to be adapting them for the screen. 

> ... Many of the changes to the source material have been great
> movie making decisions (i.e., the elimination of Tom Bombadil, the
> addition of complexity to Faramir) 

Both highly debatable, but valid to discuss.

> and improvements of certain weaknesses within Tolkien.

No way, José.

> ...
> We should all thank our lucky stars that a Tolkien lover was the
> center of this production. 

Not a Tolkien lover, going by the evidence of what he has done.  Maybe
a Tolkien liker.

> This could have been much worse.

At least we can agree on that.  The movies are pretty good in themselves,
though they fail to do as well by Tolkien as they could have and should have.
But they could have been much worse.  They could have done things like
leave out Tom Bombadil, trivialize the Council of Elrond, give Saruman
power over the weather, take away the impact of the Palantir, leave out
Radagast, leave out 'The Scouring of the Shire', leave out Frodo's vision
of Middle-earth on Amon Hen, add a non-existent Warg attack, make it
appear that Aragorn dies, until he returns alive, make the Ents foolish 
instead of wise, make Gimli an object of ridicule, make Faramir unsure of
himself, ...  Oh, I forgot, the movies do all those things.

-cr

(What are you going to do now, start yet another new thread?)