What movies made in the last five years are worth watching?

Neither of those are particularly true for D&D3, actually.

 

Ah, so it's fun to watch because it's a train wreck, then.

Well, train wrecks are fine too, from time to time.

 

Thing is, it's not even a train wreck.

It's kinda bad, you know it's not going to be brilliant. The acting is okay at best, the combat scenes are funny and the plot doesn't make sense.

Yet somehow it holds itself together.

 

I saw the Hobbit as well, and I was disappointed. I'm NOT a Tolkien fanatic, though I really like the novel, as well as the Ring trilogy.

I do agree with some of your criticisms. My major problems with it are two-fold. First, I found a lot of the outdoor scenes (other than the forest scenes where you expect them to be dark) to be kind of lifeless, almost like they were filmed either on really overcast days or maybe even on a soundstage. It just didn't come alive for me because of that. The scenes in Goblin Town were kind of cool, especially with Gollum. But that really didn't make up for the rest of it, at least for me. I loved the cinematography of the trilogy, which is why I was so incredibly underwhelmed and surprised by that in The Hobbit. I love good cinematography, and this was just bad.

Second, I totally agree with you about the pacing. As soon as I had heard that it was going to be 3 films, and not 2, I strongly suspected that there would be problems. The Ring trilogy is this vast, complex story with lots of characters and important details, that could not be contained by 3 movies, yet it was trimmed down to fit that, and even those movies (especially the last one) at times seem overly long. The Hobbit is meant to be the total opposite of that, a sleek, fun, adventure film with clever escapes and running from danger to danger.

Here's the problem -- if you want to satisfy a typical movie viewer (or me), you streamline it. You don't include a lot of what just seemed to me to be filler. You include LESS of what is in the book, anything that does not work in a movie should be omitted. But they went one step further and not only kept just about everything, but added even more, and that was a terrible decision from a movie fan's point of view.

On the other hand, if he wanted to satisfy Tokien fans, and say to hell with run of the mill moviegoers, then you slavishly follow the text of the book and DO NOT add more to it.

I think some of the decisions made in the making of the film were faulty, no matter what your point of view -- Tolkien fanatic or just someone looking to see a fun movie.

BTW, I thought Radagast could have been completely omitted from the film. Heck, I thought a lot more than that should have been completely omitted. It's like he had no editing to tell him when to stop and what to leave out. What should have been a rousing adventure story comes out just a bit too dry because of that.

 

As both of you said, Radagast was made into something plainly stupid. That could have been done much better.

I have said before how much I hate seeing a ninety pound women punching through brick walls to kill a six hundred pound bear on the other side. Movies are stupid. And once you remind me that it is most certainly a movie since nothing in it can be believed, you shot yourself in the foot. The bunnies dragging the sled at mach speed did almost as good a job of reminding me that they want this to be another children's film as the dwarves did with the dishes...

But the part that killed it for me was the Dwarves tossing plates and magically never breaking one. That scene removed the idea this was something that could be believed. It set the stage for disappointment only.

Deviating from the book is not always bad, but it always pisses people off. You just do not fuck with a good thing.

 

The film was trying too hard to please too many people and because of that ended up pleasing too few. The scenes with Radagast and the dwarves with the dishes, and so on, were fine IF AND ONLY IF you are making a movie for children. I have no problem with them making a children's film -- I might have not gone to see it, and Tolkien fans might have balked, but the audience is certainly there.

Tolkien fans forget that The Hobbit was MEANT to be a children's book. You end up taking the whole mythos too seriously, and you forget things like that. When it comes right down to it, The Hobbit, is NOT another book of the Bible, it's not a piece of history, it's a children's adventure story, and a pretty good one at that. It's not a sacred text, like the Silmarillion. A lot of the darker scenes were not added into the book until much later, after The Lord of the Rings was written. You could very well make a pretty decent children's film out of that book, if you set your mind to that.

The problem is that later on, the book, with the added scenes, became more of a prequel to The Lord of the Rings. And that's an entirely different animal. I think to an tiny extent, the book suffers from the same problems in that Tolkien changed his mind about what he wanted it to be, because in parts it IS simply an adventure story. But in the movie, that tiny problem is magnified by Jackson's choices. If you want it to be a prequel, you have to appeal to a more sophisticated audience, which means taking everything more seriously. Doing that, the scenes that Omni points out really don't belong in it at all.

I think because of all of that, it comes out feeling like kind of a mess.

 

The only thing that really jarred me in The Hobbit was the fight on the falling wood bridges in the goblin pass, it broke suspension of disbelief. Tolkien's works have always had elements of both seriousness and silliness, with the possible exception of the silmarillion. There are silly scenes in lord of the rings as well. The contrast serves to make the dark parts appear darker. I agree Radagast was probably a bit overdone, but this was the one Valar who was obsessed with animals and plants, and he's described as speaking the many tongues of birds, and his name means the tender of beasts. He also saved the day at least once in Lord of the Rings by sending out Gwaihir(giant eagle) to Orthanc, thus saving Gandalf from his imprisonment at the hand of Saruman, and I would think at least indirectly saved Frodo and Sam from Mt. Doom.

 

I just didn't think that Radagast should be so goofy -- that's basically the best word I can think of to describe him in the film. I get who he is supposed to be, but there are ways of treating someone like that, even with some humor, without getting so... childishly silly. There's all different kinds of humor. Yes, there was humor in the Lord of the Rings, but nothing quite so over the top (in a childish way) as Radagast.

 

The only way to do Radagast justice and not make him goofy, would have been more disturbing. He's an obsessed recluse who eventually loses all contact with the world of men, and there would probably have to be a touch of darkness to him as well, as I have a feeling the reason he loses contact with the world of men is that he takes a stand against it in his protection of nature.

 

Well put. I too have thought that Radagast may be partly to blame for the natural creatures being so violent in some areas of the lore of the Tolkien world. He likely had quite a bit of influence in the Ents, and when things went bad for them, he cannot be held unaccountable.

But enough of that. I just hope the next in the trilogy is not as far off from the book as this one was. They can make it as childish as they want. I enjoyed the books more, with the excessively repeated hatred of the silmarillion. (Intentionally uncapitalized for being a filabuster of a novel.)

 

As I said, I'm not a Tolkien Fanatic, so I'd have no problem changing Radagast in ways that I'm sure that Aegho or other Tolkien scholars might object to, if and only if it made for a better movie. I'm sorry, but if making a better movie means upsetting a few purists, it actually would not bother me at all. I really believe that you can change things while still maintaining the spirit of a book, simply because, as I said, things that may work on paper do not always work as well on film.

It IS possible to write something which is NOT faithful to the letter of a story while still maintaining the spirit of it. It takes understanding that spirit, and having a decent, respectful writer and a decent director. You do what serves the movie, and not what serves the anal-retentive minority. It's why "West Side Story" is arguably as good or better a "Romeo and Juliet" than Shakespeare's. It certainly is more relatable to modern audiences than the original. I'm sure when it came out, there were Shakespeare fanatics crying foul as well. But it's still considered a classic, and the original still exists if you prefer it. I'm not saying that The Hobbit has to be as different from the book as "West Side Story" is from "Romeo and Juliet", What I'm saying is that it serves very little to stand for extreme faithfulness in preference to making a good movie.

Obviously I'm biased though, because I'm not someone who considers Tolkien's works to be among the best things written in the English Language. That doesn't mean I don't like or respect what he's done. He's a very good story teller who can get kind of wordy at times, and I don't particularly care for his poetry. Some of what he does is very old-fashioned, purely British traditional tropes, like the relationship between Frodo and Sam. It's something which is very class-based. I don't mean that in a bad way, just that it's culturally foreign. It's clear by the relationship that Frodo is the master of the house, and Sam is his loyal gardener turned manservant. It doesn't make it bad. It's just kind of ideosyncratic by modern American standards. Imagine an American version, where a guy goes on a quest, and he brings along his culturally American gardener. Now that would be interesting lol.

 

Ok, I'm gonna stop you right there. I disagree with you about Tolkien being a very good storyteller. Certainly he told very good Stories, but much like Dickens or Lovecraft he told those good stories rather badly.

 

It's a manner of speaking lol. But I should have phrased that differently because while I wouldn't put it like that, I don't actually disagree. People who tell good stories are generally called good story tellers, as opposed to being a 'good writer'. The best (like Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut) do both well. Asimov and Clarke can tell great stories, but they aren't the greatest at writing them.

 

Tolkien is a good world-builder, an acceptable storyteller, and a subpar writer.

 

Sorry for not using a superlative .

 

I just watched a movie this past evening that I've wanted to see for a long time -- "Searching for Sugarman". It's about this unbelievable but true story of an American singer-songwriter named Rodriguez that until very recently, almost no one outside of South Africa had ever heard of.

Back in the late '60s, early '70s, there was this singer-songwriter named Sixto Rodriguez. He lived in Detroit, and recorded 2 albums that never really sold, and he eventually just left the music business and probably no one would have ever heard of him again, except for one thing. Some South African tourists came back from the U.S. with a couple of his albums, that they all loved, and everyone that they played it for loved. But no one could purchase it anywhere. So they started to make bootleg copies of these albums and eventually Rodriguez became this huge phenomenon in South Africa. The way it's described in the movie, he became bigger than Elvis or The Rolling Stones. People talked about him like he was another Bob Dylan.

Everyone in South Africa, because of a variety of rumors thought that this guy was dead. And the movie becomes a kind of detective story where these people are trying to figure out what the hell happened to Rodriguez.

Anyway, I highly recommend this documentary movie. It's well made, and the music is great and the story is just, as I said, unbelievable. There was a Sixty Minutes story all about Rodriguez last year or earlier this year (I can't recall) that was fascinating as well. But the movie really came on my radar back when it first was released because of a review by Roger Ebert. Plus a friend of mine hasn't been able to stop talking about it lol since he saw it recently.

Anyway, I'll maybe post some music from Rodriguez in the music thread, to give you a taste.

 

Just found this: