_NP?_ =?ISO-8859-1?B?oA==?="the_formerly_colonised_coming_back_to_haunt_us"
vze422fs at verizon.net
vze422fs at verizon.net
Sun Dec 22 00:52:18 CST 2002
I saw "The Two Towers" this afternoon. Not as overwhelmed as I was by the
first one because I knew what to expect. But I enjoyed it thoroughly. There
were few interruptions by families leading crying children out of the
theater. That scenario was repeated several times when I saw "The Fellowship
of the Ring" the first two times. I guess people are better informed a year
later.
Of course the scenery in these movies is tweaked. The characters and
situations are extreme. Good and evil are at mortal odds. This is a fairy
tale, and whether Tolkien wanted to admit to it or not, all fairy tales are
analogies and moral lessons. His fairy tale packs a wallop. Today's dark
comic book culture has more to do with TLOTR than it has to do with Captain
America or Green Lantern.
Any debate on the implied racism or xenophobia in TLOTR, is spectacularly
obtuse because it ignores the very content of the books. The members of the
Fellowship came from different SPECIES for chrissakes. They had to put aside
thier culturally imbedded and reinforced mistrust or downright hatred in
order to cooperate to defeat an inhumane and uncivilized menace. Consider
the unlikely devoted friendship between Gimli and Legolas. Think of the
ferocity of Legolas' defense of Gimli before the distrustful and barbaric
riders of Rohan. The haughty and refined Elves putting aside their own
potential for isolationist escape coming to the rescue of Rohan at Helm's
Deep. The two most similar tribes in the story, Gondor and Rohan must
overcome a deep and bitter distrust. The crude and ambitiously ethnocentric
(or patriotic) Boromir is seduced by his desire for the Ring by his
rationalization of the good that he can do for his people. In a vain attempt
at redemption, he sacrifices himself nobly in the defense of innocents not
of his own kind. The King of All Men, a synthesis of Prince Hal and Jesus
Fucking Christ, must continuously prove himself to everybody, but wins the
undying loyalty of everyone who truly knows him regardless of race.
This is not a racist story. It is truly the opposite.
The breeding of the Uruk-Hai, orcs and men, is portrayed as an unnatural
abomination. Is this an argument for racial purity and against race-mixing?
Then, what is the love between Arwen and Aragorn? The simple Sam is a good
person who automatically despises and demonizes the pathetic Gollum. The
conflicted and world weary Frodo recognizes him as a victim of circumstances
and shows compassion. You can argue it either way. That's called balance.
Real life is never balanced that way, but this is a parable.
Oh yeah. I liked the battle scenes.
When are we scheduled for "The Secret Integration"?
Gotta think about Christmas shopping. What do I buy for a 13 year old niece?
Joe
on 12/21/02 8:55 PM, Dave Monroe at davidmmonroe at yahoo.com wrote:
> 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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