John D. Rateliff is one of the foremost experts on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. He is, of course, the author of the two-part book The History of The Hobbit which was published in 2007. It is considered the definitive examination of how the book came to be.
So just what does Rateliff think of Peter Jackson’s newest installment of his three-film adaptation? He’s blogged about it on his own website. Follow the link to his blog to find out. Choice quote: Continue reading “John D. Rateliff reviews The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”
If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.
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What was your “best of” for 2013? Well, IGN is conducting a poll on a few different categories to find out the popular opinion, including for best movie, best actress and best actor… Continue reading “Vote for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in IGN’s best of 2013 poll”
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Xenite.org founder and Tolkien scholar Michael Martinez discusses the history and inter-relationships of the Silvan elves of Mirkwood and their Sindarin kings — and whether and where Tauriel could have fitted in. Interesting piece. Follow the link at the bottom to read the complete feature.
Q: Is Tauriel in the Book, the Hobbit?
Continue reading “Silvan and Sindarin elves: Legolas, Tauriel, Thranduil… and Oropher”
If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.
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Associate Professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University, Alain Rhett, tries to use phsics in this interesting piece on Wired to estimate exactly how much energy would have been required to melt all that gold in that cool scene in The Desolation of Smaug — you know the one we mean.
After watching The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug I quickly realized my initial estimation for the amount of gold under the mountain was WAY too low. There are some other things I noticed, but perhaps I should give a SPOILER ALERT. Continue reading “Melting gold in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”
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Jenny Cooney Carrillo, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald comes through with a couple of golden quotes in this short feature on Richard Armitage.
‘In the first film, the quest was controlled very much by Gandalf, but in this film you see him leave it in Thorin’s hands, and the first thing he does is to get captured by the elves, so I guess it’s the lowest point in his career,’ Armitage says. ‘But what’s also an important turning point in this film is he goes from being anti-Hobbit to being pro-Hobbit and finally learning to trust Bilbo.’ Continue reading “Armitage: we tried to make him not look like an ageing rocker, but…”
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Not sure how I missed this first time round (possibly because of the fuss over the international cinema hookup and a quick visit to Wellington), but this is an insightful and at-times hilarious interview with several of the dwarven actors from the cast of The Hobbit, including Jed Brophy, Graham McTavish, Dean O’Gorman and William Kircher. Be sure to follow the link at the bottom to read the full transcript. It’s long, but worth it.
Or as Fairfax puts it: At one point we had one interview with an everchanging cast of dwarves. The following is the edited transcript – amusing, informative, long (very long) and occasionally anarchic.
JED BROPHY. My name is Jed Brophy and I play Nori the Dwarf. In The Hobbit. Which is a film. And a book. And possibly a TV series. And a radio play. Yeah.
QUESTION. How would you sum up your Hobbit experience so far? What has it been like?
JED BROPHY. It’s been amazing and exhausting. But mainly amazing.
QUESTION. So you have worked on nearly all of Peter’s films?
JED BROPHY. Yeah, I played a hardcore zombie in Braindead way back in the day in 1991, and then the boarder in Heavenly Creatures who seduces Mel Lynskey’s character, puts her off men for life. We’ve done Lord of the Rings, all three movies, and then got to work on King Kong and did a bit of work on Tintin as a mocap actor. So yeah, I’ve been very lucky to be included in a lot of his projects. It’s been a good run for me.
QUESTION. And he just rang up and asked you, “Want to be a dwarf?”
JED BROPHY. It was really interesting. I had got to do pre-vis on the mocap stage. So we were doing lots of working as a dwarf. They shot it as an animated feature to have a look at how they were going to progress the story and look at the script. I thought I was going to be possibly playing Orcs and maybe Goblins, similar roles that I did on Lord of the Rings. So it definitely went out of the box to be cast as a dwarf. I didn’t see myself physically in that role, but given the fat suits and the boots and the beards, they can do a lot.
QUESTION. What’s the progression been like, from all the way back then, as compared to now?
JED BROPHY. Yeah, look, I think that Peter hasn’t changed his process of filmmaking an awful lot. He is a visionary. People say he’s a genius. He is. He’s a visionary, he has the vision in his head, he surrounds himself with people who are all at the top of their game who share a similar vision, and he’s always been very, very careful to make the movie that he wants to make. He never shies away from making people work really hard to get that. Yeah, I don’t see a lot of difference in the way that he works, from the very first time.
QUESTION. How long did it take before you were comfortable to have lunch in the beard?
JED BROPHY. It’s never really comfortable to have lunch. I eat a lot of the yak hair. I’m pretty sure I’ve got fur balls. It’s just one of those things where you just have to get used to holding it down to [eat]. I don’t have morning tea once the mustache is on. It becomes impossible because it kind of hangs in there and you end up just eating yourself, which is not the most enjoyable thing, really.
QUESTION. Seeing as you’ve worked with Jackson on the previous ones, how’s the makeup changed for you? Is it much better now?
JED BROPHY. Yeah, the old days of foam latex. The foam latex is difficult in that once it gets dry, you can see the edges and it’s very hard for people doing the paint work. They have to continuously recheck and repaint and keep it moist. But with the silicon, with the translucency, it looks a lot more like skin. It’s a lot lighter to wear, you don’t sweat quite as much in it, and it looks fantastic.
I’ve had people come up to me not knowing which is my face and which is the prosthetics, which you can take as a [good or bad] thing. Obviously my nose is a lot smaller than this in real life. But yeah, it’s always a buzz that people can’t quite tell.
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