The folks over at United Cutlery and BudK have a new item for fans of Middle-earth to pre-order. The new item available for pre-order is a replica of the Morgul Blade Radagast discovers during The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. You can order this awesome collectible for only $129 and it will be in-stock in just 60 days. So you won’t have to wait long before you add this to your collection. Also, if you’re feeling lucky you can enter into a contest and you just might bring this item home. The contest ends when the Morgul Blade ships in 60 days.
Category: Movie The Two Towers
Mark Lee at Overthinking It follows up his Words in Books per Second of Movie analysis of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and other successful movies with some additional analysis examining IMDB ratings, plus the trend in adaptations over the decades.
In last week’s article, I started with a simple question: how do book lengths, as measures by word count, compare to their adapted movie run times, as measured by seconds? I was mostly looking for a statistical basis to express my displeasure at The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (and by extension, parts 2 and 3 of this unnecessary trilogy), but I wound up comparing the density of the Hobbit movies, as measured in Words in Book per Second of Movie (WIBPSOM), to other prominent movie adaptations of books: The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and the Twilight franchises.
The findings were interesting in and of themselves (TL;DR: The Hobbit Books have way smaller WIBPSOM values than the other franchises), but they begged for a larger scale analysis, both in size of dataset and scope of inquiry. To address the size of the dataset, I found all of the (English language) entries on this list of best-selling books that have theatrically-released, non-silent movie adaptations. After including multiple movie adaptations of the same movie and excluding movies where I couldn’t find any data on book length as measured by word count, I came up with a dataset of 59 movie adaptations of best selling books.
As for scope of inquiry, well, let’s get down to brass tacks: is there any relationship between the density of a book’s movie adaptation, as measured by WIBPSOM, and the quality of the movie, as measured by its IMDB rating?
In a word, the answer to this intriguing question is an emphatic “no.”
We recently teamed up with our friends at The Noble Collection to help announce the launch of their Facebook Page. The prize, as so many of you know, was not one but five of their The One Ring Sterling Silver edition. This awesome item retails for $129 and five of you lucky people are getting one of them added to your collection. Tonight, we’re pleased to announce the five winners of this contest. A big congratulations to the winners: Dawn S. of Dayton, Ohio, Meagan M. of Carlisle, PA, Lorie P. of Aiken, SC, Sam W. of Wolverhampton, and Rachael V. of Naperville Illinois. You will be hearing from The Noble Collection about your prize soon. Thank you again to The Noble Collection for the prizes!
TheOneRing.net with Galatia Films offer this exclusive interview with the Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones actor John Rhys-Davies. Learn about what inspires him to work as an actor. He talks about how it felt to be wearing all the wardrobe and battle axes for the fight scenes, his view on the Dwarves and his love for the films. The original interview was done for Galatia’s Live Reclaiming the Blade Day. Check out its Kickstarter page for more details and the full interview and of course you can also support its Kickstarter campaign for a new film that will feature The Hobbit swords and Narnia actors Ben Barnes (Prince Caspian) and William Moseley (Chronicles of Narnia).
John Rhys-Davies is Welsh and a screen actor and voice actor. He is perhaps best known for playing the dwarf Gimli and Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the charismatic Arab excavator Sallah in the Indiana Jones films. He also played Agent Michael Malone in the 1993 remake of the 1950s television series The Untouchables, Pilot Vasco Rodrigues in the mini-series Shōgun, Professor Maximillian Arturo in Sliders, King Richard I in Robin of Sherwood, General Leonid Pushkin in the James Bond film The Living Daylights, and Macro in I, Claudius. Additionally, he provided the voices of Cassim in Disney’s Aladdin and the King of Thieves.
Ringer Tajik tells us of this fascinating analysis of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and its two follow-ups by Mark Lee at Overthinking It that adds more fuel — and some hard numbers — to the gently simmering debate over the three-film decision that Jackson and the studios made in mid-2012.
The image at right, part of Lee’s analysis, is certainly food for thought. Continue reading “The Hobbit: too little butter over too much bread?”
Last night, (in their most recent newsletter) our friends at Weta Workshop released a new collectible that we first saw at Comic-Con 2013.
This item is the stunning Arwen mini-statue from The Return of the King. Sculpted by the artists at Weta Workshop, this piece is going to be one you want to add to your collection and for only $75 it’s quite affordable. Continue reading “Collecting The Precious – Weta Workshop Reveals Arwen, Bookmarks, and a new Con”