Nice backgrounds.
 
 

I can appreciate that.

And they did a really good job. . .

Oh, but the story went far too quickly.  -A statement, I know, which might raise eyebrows from all those who's bottoms and backs ached afterwards from sitting through a film which was nearly 3 hours long!

But still. . .

I would have preferred that they made an 8 part television series in order to be able to properly take their time.  -Though I don't know how the heck they could have financed such a thing.  As it is, I have to wonder if the film will make its money back.  -They spent an unprecedented 16 months on the principal photography!  -And even though they were shooting three films worth of material, the average movie shoot rarely goes beyond 2 months!  This was a very, very expensive film!  -And I don't know how much repeat business it will get; being as heavy and dark a story as it was.  Further, the beloved Elginton theater in Toronto was only filled to half capacity on the opening day!  That's not a very good sign.  We'll have to see how things develop.  But either way, I think a longer television production would have been a better choice in order to capture all the story properly.  To make it truly feel like a journey.  So that when the characters broke into tears at dear partings and arrivals, it would have felt real, and not quite so. . .  Foot-noted.

But they did quite well with what they had to work with.  The design was marvelous!  Everything looked pretty much as I imagined it ought to.  The Shire, and Gandalf, and the ring itself all looked marvelous.  -And Bilbo's house.  Ahhh.  I want to be a hobbit.

Hm.  All except for the elves.

Tolkien always, through his prose, made the elves seem like creatures which somehow managed to dazzle the 5 mortal senses beyond what the 5 mortal senses were capable of perceiving.  The elves in this film just looked like D&D elves, and perhaps not even elf-like enough at that.  They were not tall and thin and light enough.  I've met a handful of people who, without being starved or unhealthy, through the random acts of basic genetics look far more like elves in real life than the actors in this movie did.  Better casting could have made a huge difference.  But overall, and this is perhaps asking too much, unlike the elves in Tolkien's prose, the ones in this film didn't suggest that one would have to fight the urge to drop everything and worship them as minor deities.

But the makers of this movie did get certain emotions right.  The power of the ring was captured very well.  I loved how nobody else could/would touch it except the ring bearer.  I loved the whole sequence where Gandalf left the ring sitting on the ground in the entrance way to Bilbo's home, and how he had Frodo drop it into an envelope which he whisked away and sealed.  When Galadriel was offered the ring and roared with the image of a Dark Queen, I was quite taken aback.

Though again. . .  Too short!  Too much sacrificed to keep the film a reasonable length.  Argh!  Films are not supposed to be just about plot advancement; they are also very much supposed to be about the beautiful, charismatic little scenes in between the larger motions.  They left out the Barrow Weights, and the history of the watch tower; The wisping memories of Gandalf regarding an ancient necklace and its long dead owner.  And they left out the giving of gifts to the Fellowship by the elves!  The elven cloaks with the silver leaf broaches, (the props for which looked far too rough in design and craft to ever have been elvish in origin. For shame!), and the horn of Gondor given to Boromir. . , and the single hair of Galadriel, so earnestly and boldly requested by the dwarf in wonderful defiance of endless centuries of tensions between the elves and the dwarves. . .  Because he had fallen in awe and in love with her. These are the moments I remember most from the whole story.  The rest of the book was merely a carrier for such scenes as these, and they were left out!  And, by heaven!  They left out. . .

Tom Bombadil!

Well. . .

-Actually, I am sort of glad they did.  Like the elves, I'm not certain that Tom could be properly captured in film.  He's too. . .  Dream like, and very few directors have ever been able to capture the sense of such true magic in film.  Very few.  Dream magic is the realm and strength of the prose writer.  But still. . .  I love Tom Bombadil, and I missed him.  He's mythic, more so even than Gandalf; Tom actually manages to exist in that place of true myth.  He lives in the realm of Mother Goose and Jack be Nimble, and those other beautiful and slightly disturbing stories which were part of so many childhoods.  -Stories of vast power recalled from a world no longer part of our own.  Gandalf, while beloved and pervasive in our culture's collective conscious, for exactly that reason, exactly because he can fit into the minds of this world, is something less magical than Tom.  Tom is something else.  Tom Bombadil, 'with his big boots on!', could hold the One Ring, completely unaffected.  It was pondered at the council held in Rivendale why they could not just leave the ring in Tom's care.  And the answer was that he'd likely just forget the importance of the task and misplace it.  I missed Tom very much, but realistically, he doesn't belong in film.

Hm.  Although. . .

Now that I think of it, there was a film production where Tom might have been able to manifest.  A decade or more ago, Jim Henson produced a television show called, aptly enough, "The Jim Henson Hour."  A very short lived program which was something like a variety show; each week an entirely different and unconnected collection of short works would play.  While Kermit and friends made showings, some weeks a peculiar half hour segment called, "The Story Teller," would appear.  Mixing animation with puppetry with real actors, fairy tales were told, all narrated by a wry and somewhat frightful old man and his Muppet dog.  These were dream-like in the extreme, and utterly mesmerizing.  Tom could have lived in that world.  "The Story Teller" was unlike anything I have ever seen before.  If the movie had gone that way when they entered the enchanted forest at the edge of the Shire, (another spectacular piece of story which I very much missed in the film), it might have been a much more interesting movie indeed.

Ah well.

Anyway, I must return to making comics.

I hope everybody has a good holiday season!
 

-Mark Oakley
December 20, 2001
2:30 P.M.