On February 12th, millions of people all over the world turned on their television sets and with anticipation watched as this years nominations were announced for the 74th Academy Awawrds, the most important awards in the movie business. Not without its usual suprises and upsets, it was clear what would be the making the headlines for all the right reasons: thirteen nominations for Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson’s first installment of Tolkien’s epic trilogy brought to the silver screen.
Thirteen nominations is quite a feat in itself, but thirteen nominations for a fantasy film is quite incredible. And it was clear what it meant to both Peter Jackson and Sir Ian McKellen as they gave interviews to the media within the hour of the announcement: for Sir Ian it was a mixture of relief and delight, while for Peter Jackson it was not only pride for what he had achieved but happiness for all two thousand five hundred plus involved in the Trilogy.
Only four other films have shared the (un)lucky number thirteen in the Academy’s history: Gone With The Wind, From Here to Eternity, Mary Poppins, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Only two more, All About Eve and Titanic have gone one better with a record-breaking fourteen. Yet unlike the last few years, this Oscar race is a neck-and-neck race to the finish,, where A Beautiful Mind, Moulin Rouge and The Fellowship of the Ring are heading into April with a room full of awards and accolades between them. The only thing that is certain about the 74th awards is that nothing is certain.
This weekend, the Hall of Fire crew want to get your reaction on the week’s events and how The Fellowship of the Ring will fare when it comes to Oscar night. Peter Jackson commented on the level of believability and credibility Sir Ian McKellen gave to the role of Gandalf…will it be enough to give him the Best Supporting nod? And what about PJ himself, will his debut at the Oscars be greeted with success? And what about Moulin Rouge and A Beautiful Mind, will Fellowship of the Ring be able to see off their claim to the golden statue? It’s all for discussion this weekend as Oscar fever begins to kick in!
Upcoming Discussions: Feb 23 & 24: The Misconcepted ‘Errors’ in FotR
Place: #thehalloffire on theonering.net server; come to theonering.net’s chat room Barliman’s and then type /join #thehalloffire .
Saturday Chat: 5:30 pm ET (17:30) [also 11:30 pm (23:30) CET and 7:30 am Sunday (07:30) AET]
Sunday Chat: 7:00 pm (19:00) CET [also 1:00 pm (13:00) ET and 4:00 am (04:00) Monday morning AET]
ET = Eastern Time, USA’s East Coast CET = Central European Time, Central Europe
As a child actor, Elijah Wood was always expected to achieve big things in his acting career, impressing in films such as Forever Young, The War, and North. But of all the roles he would play to date, none would compare with the role of Frodo Baggins, the main protagonist in the ‘greatest book of the 20th Century’. When Wood heard that Peter Jackson would be making a movie on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he immeaditelly sent in an audition tape in which he was dressed in midievil attire and recited lines from his own copy of Lord of the Rings.
Two years later, and Elijah Wood had finished arguably one of the most gruelling film shoots in history with an 18-month shoot in picturesque New Zealand. Peter Jackson, by picking Elijah Wood (an actor whose previous movies he hadn’t seen before) amongst thousands of other actors, had made the Hobbit actor a star at the age of twenty. A star who for months had the worry of how critics would find his performance as Frodo Baggins hanging over his head like a dark cloud. But on December 19th, fans and critics alike saw just why Elijah Wood was destined for big things only a few years ago.
But now the honeymoon period is over as the Fellowship of the Ring, arguably the easiest of the three performances in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has been and gone and the real hardship on the road to Mordor begins next December in The Two Towers. How does one portray such a gradual deteriation as the one Frodo Baggins experiences in the Lord of the Rings? That was the question both Elijah and Peter Jackson had to ask themselves after so accurately portraying the innocence and spirit of Frodo Baggins in the Fellowship of the Ring.
So how do you think Elijah Wood will cope with the challange in front of him? One person recently described Frodo ‘deteriorating before your very eyes’ when referring to the upcoming The Two Towers trailer. Does this bode well for the future? And how would you go about portraying such a difficult change, especially when jumping from one movie to the next in a hectic 18-month schedule? We’ll be discussing all this and more this weekend at the Hall of Fire!
Upcoming Discussions: Feb 16 & 17: The Misconcepted ‘Errors’ in FotR Feb 23 & 24: The Needed and Wanted on the FotR DVD
Place: #thehalloffire on theonering.net server; come to theonering.net’s chat room Barliman’s and then type /join #thehalloffire .
Saturday Chat: 5:30 pm ET (17:30) [also 11:30 pm (23:30) CET and 7:30 am Sunday (07:30) AET]
Sunday Chat: 7:00 pm (19:00) CET [also 1:00 pm (13:00) ET and 4:00 am (04:00) Monday morning AET]
ET = Eastern Time, USA’s East Coast CET = Central European Time, Central Europe
For some, the Lord of the Rings is a novel about adventure, for others it’s a novel about the way people change and develop in character when faced with adversity and for others its simply a book about the struggle between good and evil. And for some it is about the romance between Aragorn and Arwen, a mortal and immortal who shared love in both life and death. This weekend, the Hall of Fire is discussing the extended role of the romance between Aragorn and Arwen in Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring.
The romance between Aragorn and Arwen, the adversity and sacrifices faced by both lovers only comes to fruition in the Appendices of the Lord of the Rings, and is not as prominent in the tale of the War of the Ring itself. However, the beauty and sadness of the tale has often had Tolkien fans wishing it was more prominently interwoven into the War of the Ring. As Peter Jackson does not have the luxury of movie-goers reading the Appendices beforehand, he has done exactly that: made their romance more prominent than in the book on the silver screen.
Yet in doing so, PJ has had to tinker with the story in places to put the romance up their on the silver screen: if the romance is to be expanded, then the role of Arwen must be similarly expanded also. Also, he has had to use the information found in the Appendices and adapt them to the tale, sometimes having things take place in a different time frame to which they were originally written. In doing so, he has received praise from Tolkien fans with a big heart and hardcore fans who cry outrage for Arwen’s expansion.
So what do you think? Are you happy with what PJ has done in Fellowship of the Ring to portray the love of a mortal and immortal? Or could he have done it differently? Did the story merit inclusion into the film itself, and was the price of tinkering with Arwen’s character so greatly worth it? We want you to ask and answer these questions this weekend as we talk about the great love story of J.R.R Tolkien’s epic.
Upcoming Discussions: Feb 09 & 10: Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins Feb 16 & 17: The Misconcepted ‘Errors’ in FotR Feb 23 & 24: The Needed and Wanted on the FotR DVD
Place: #thehalloffire on theonering.net server; come to theonering.net’s chat room Barliman’s and then type /join #thehalloffire .
Saturday Chat: 5:30 pm ET (17:30) [also 11:30 pm (23:30) CET and 7:30 am Sunday (07:30) AET]
Sunday Chat: 7:00 pm (19:00) CET [also 1:00 pm (13:00) ET and 4:00 am (04:00) Monday morning AET]
ET = Eastern Time, USA’s East Coast CET = Central European Time, Central Europe
For the majority of Lord of the Rings fans, December 19th was the payoff for a wait that spanned almost three years. However in the back of most people’s there was an underlying doubt, not over the quality of the film itself but how the average movie-going, non-Tolkien fan would take to the Fellowship of the Ring, a motion picture that tried to cram 1,500 pages of information into three hours. Judging by the success of the film both critically and in the box office, it seems that somehow, by some sort of magic, Peter Jackson managed to pull it off. Or did he?
This weekend, the Hall of Fire crew are discussing the Friendliness Of FotR To Non-Fans. For Peter Jackson, one of the biggest challanges was to on the one hand satisfy the hardcore fans on one hand while not alienating casual movie fans on the other. How could he achieve this? Well, it started with cutting down the subject-matter by making some changes to the storyline, most infamous of which was the axing of Tom Bombadil completely from the movie. Also many scenes were edited out to keep the film down to three hours, most noticeable of which was the sequence within Lothlórien. In doing this, PJ walked the fine line between criticism and praise in an attempt to give the film a balance.
And the question is, did he achive that balance? Despite these changes, did Peter succeed in making the Fellowship of the Ring more comprehensible to the common man? Or were his attempts badly judged, diminishing the power of the story itself? Is it possible to bring such a book like Lord of the Rings to the silver screen without some of its contents going over non-fans heads? And if so, how would you have gone about the job differently? All these questions and more will be asked this weeked as we focus on the directorial process involved in bringing the Lord of the Rings to life.
Place: #thehalloffire on theonering.net server; come to theonering.net’s chat room Barliman’s and then type /join #thehalloffire .
Saturday Chat: 5:30 pm ET (17:30) [also 11:30 pm (23:30) CET and 7:30 am Sunday (07:30) AET]
Sunday Chat: 7:00 pm (19:00) CET [also 1:00 pm (13:00) ET and 4:00 am (04:00) Monday morning AET]
ET = Eastern Time, USA’s East Coast CET = Central European Time, Central Europe AET = Australian Eastern Time, Australia’s East Coast
We all knew as soon as production started for Fellowship of the Ring that Peter Jackson would take some liberties with certain characters to help Tolkien’s story become more like a cinematic piece; the expansion of Arwen’s role, the removal of Tom Bombadil, the reduction of Glorfindel’s role, and so on. This weekend, the Hall of Fire staff are discussing one such character who experienced some extra character development:
The expansion of Saruman the White
Though Sauron is shown to be the ultimate evil in Middle-Earth during the prologue at the beginning of the movie, at times it feels like Saruman, and not Sauron is the most tangeable evil during Fellowship of the Ring. Though Tolkien’s Saruman seemed to be an unwitting pawn under Sauron’s control, Peter Jackson’s portryal of the Istari is more powerful, less a tool of a greater evil but more a rival to that evil itself.
This seems more to do with Jackson’s expansion of the Saruman character than the acting of Christopher Lee; from the beginning we witness how Saruman turns Isengard and the earth around it into deep pits, dungeons and forges where the instruments of war are forged and tempered. Peter Jackson does well to hint towards the events of the Two Towers when Saruman coldly tells his orcs to ‘tear them [trees] down, all of them’, yet his re-writing of the creation of the Uruk-Hai in pods and the introduction of the Lurtz character seems to have angered some purist Tolkien fans.
The same can be said for the change to the Fellowship’s ascent of Caradhras: the fierce conditions that force them to leave the mountain is no longer due to nature and instead is a creation of Saruman. Though it portrays Saruman as a more fiercer and powerful opponent not to be trifled with, some have seen it as an unnescassary change to Tolkien’s magical tale.
Whatever you believe, we want to hear your thoughts on the subject this weekend! We want to hear your thoughts on Saruman’s character, the unfolding of events in the film and how you think things will play out in the Two Towers. From orc pods to blizzards and snow storms to the portrayal of Saruman by Christopher Lee himself, you get your say at one of our discussions which have a brand new time this week.
Upcoming Discussions: Dec 19 & 20: Fellowship of the Ring Complain Session Dec 26 & 27: The Friendliness Of FotR To Non-Fans
Place: #thehalloffire on theonering.net server; come to theonering.net’s chat room Barliman’s and then type /join #thehalloffire .
Saturday Chat: 5:30 pm ET (17:30) [also 11:30 pm (23:30) CET and 7:30 am Sunday (07:30) AET]
Sunday Chat: 5:00 pm (17:00) AET [also 07:00 am (08:00) CET and 2:00 am (02:00) ET]
Sunday Chat: 7:00 pm (19:00) CET [also 1:00 pm (13:00) ET and 4:00 am (04:00) Monday morning AET]
ET = Eastern Time, USA’s East Coast CET = Central European Time, Central Europe AET = Australian Eastern Time, Australia’s East Coast
Well, folks, the votes are in and tallied. Come July 24th-28th, Ringers shall descend upon Seattle, Washington like some sort of geeky plague! Actually, we probably won’t seem terribly geeky, with Microsoft headquarters but fifteen miles from downtown Seattle, but that’s beside the point!
What, some of you may be asking, IS Barliman’s Bash? Well, it’s fairly simple. Barliman’s Bash is an opportunity to meet up with your fellow Ringers, to get together and talk, goof off, and perhaps see if we can’t get a bar to close because they’ve run out of beer.
We had our second annual run last August, and we all had a blast. There was food, fellowship, ale, and a lot of laughter and glowsticks; many of us were asking about the next Bash before we’d even left the first. Trust me, you’ll love it!
To recap: Barliman’s Bash 2002, July 24th-28th in Seattle, Washington. I’ve not got a hotel selected yet, but hope to by the end of the week. If you have any questions, or if you’re interested and would like to be kept up-to-date via email, please send a note to Curunir and let me know.
