_NP?_�"the_formerly_colonised_coming_back_to_haunt_us"

[Dave Monroe]

>From Louis Menand, "Goblin Market," The New York
Review of Books (January 17, 2001) ...

   "The main visual part of my long-term memory of the
book is that handmade map: I can still mentally trace
the progress of Frodo and his valet, Sam, over the
three volumes, from Hobbiton to Mount Doom. I imagined
the landscape more or less on the model of my own
backyard. The rest of my memory is a residual sense of
the lore of Middle Earth, the stories upon stories
that the characters and the narrator tell, an
elaborate, unfinished saga of another world—erased, by
now, of almost all detail. I do not remember The Lord
of the Rings as a loud or violent book. I remember it
as an eleven-year-old's Proust.
   "I was therefore completely unprepared for the new
film adaptation of the first volume, The Fellowship of
the Ring, which was written and directed by the New
Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson. I took along to a
preview a fourteen-year-old whose judgment I respect,
and who had recently read the book. As we walked out
of the theater three hours later, I said to him, 'They
really made a lot of stuff up for the movie.' He
patiently explained to me that everything in the movie
is an almost literal recreation of the book. And when
I went back to read the book again, I saw that he was
right.... I asked my fourteen-year-old companion ...
whether the images on the screen matched the
impressions he had formed when he was reading the
book. 'Pretty much,' he said.

[...]

"One senses in almost every frame of the movie a lot
of digital fine-tuning of the image. The meadows are
too manicured, the streams too sparkling, the skies
too dazzling or too lurid. Your eye never relaxes
because the image is both lifelike and too lifelike.
You find yourself unconsciously looking for the seams
in a seamless picture.

[...]

"Everything is somehow real and unbelievable at the
same time.
   "This was how my fourteen-year-old companion had
visualized the book. What I had read as a kind of
historical novel, he had read as a fantasy adventure.
His visual imagination was shaped by a completely
different stock of stylistic referents, from Xena,
Warrior Princess to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,
and most of all from the virtual reality of
computerized games. Hundreds of orcs swarming up huge
pillars in underground caverns, enormous armies
flattened by a burst of supernatural light, people
being swept up hundreds of feet into the air—these are
all the ordinary images of PlayStation, Game Boy, and
computer games like Age of Empires or Diablo II. They
are images that were unimaginable to a kid in 1963,
for whom Rocky and Bulwinkle represented the cutting
edge of visual culture.

[...]

"Peter Jackson's first cinematic love is horror
movies, and The Fellowship of the Ring is nearly a
horror movie in its intensity. Young kids will be
scared. And for kids pushing fifty, there is a lesson
about the evolution of the mind's eye over the last
thirty-five years that may be a little painful. It's
not Proust anymore."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15101

--- Otto <ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote:
> 
> But I still love LR and therefor have avoided to
> watch the movie(s) yet to keep my own imagination.

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