Sasha from oscarwatch.com writes: This morning, the Producers Guild threw their hat into the mix, nominating six in a tie vote, rather than five:
ADAPTATION – COLUMBIA/ SONY PICTURES ENT. CHICAGO – MIRAMAX GANGS OF NEW YORK – MIRAMAX MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING – IFC FILMS ROAD TO PERDITION – DREAMWORKS/ SKG LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS – NEW LINE CINEMA
The PGA’s winner has gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscar nine out of the past 13 years, since they started giving out awards. You can see the charts of how the nominations and wins have matched up over the years by visiting: http://www.oscarwatch.com/Awards/pga.html
This is great news, albeit somewhat expected, for IFC’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and gives it a healthy boost toward an Oscar nomination. Road to Perdition sees its first real pre-award inclusion as well, and of course, this proves Chicago, Gangs of New York and Two Towers are still heavy hitters in the race.
Adaptation was the surprise pic, unless you’ve noticed the buzz lately — it’s a popular film that will have across the board guild support — it will get and win the WGA; Spike Jonze will likely be nominated for the DGA and the ensemble may be nommed at the SAG — so a BP nomination seems inevitable. Well deserved it would be.
Missing from the list are the two critically acclaimed films from Focus Features – Far From Heaven and The Pianist — both are too good to ignore, but how will the Academy respond?
Meanwhile, the USC Scripter put out their noms (you can see the past winners by going here) – the Scripter, headed up this year by famed scribe Robert Towne, honors both book author and film writer.
As follows:
About Schmidt Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, screenwriters; Louis Begley, author (New Line Cinema; Ballantine)
Adaptation Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter; Susan Orlean, author, The Orchid Thief (Columbia Pictures; Ballantine)
The Hours David Hare, screenwriter; Michael Cunningham, author (Paramount Pictures; Picador USA)
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Frances Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Stephen Sinclair & Peter Jackson, screenwriters; J.R.R. Tolkien, author (New Line Cinema; Houghton Mifflin)
The Pianist Ronald Harwood, screenwriter; Wladyslaw Szpilman, author, Death of a City (Focus Features; Picador USA)
Pre-Awards are coming fast and furiously — next up are the AFI awards (which are just doing best film), the Broadcast Film Critics, tomorrow, and the Golden Globe awards on Sunday.
Predictions for the Globes are everywhere — starting with http://www.moviecitynews.com and http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/66724.htm
We also have a predict the Globes contest running, which you can enter by clicking on http://www.oscarwatch.com/Contests/ggcontest_2002.html
The Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers is enrapturing millions. But we like to ask director Peter Jackson some questions:
What happened to the trees of Fangorn? And why is an Orc using his cell-phone right in the midde of the battlefield?
“The big doors closed. BANG! Inside, iron bars were locking it. SNAP! The door was closed. Sam threw himself against the metal doors and fell to the floor unconscious. He lay outside in the dark. Frodo was alive, but captured by the enemy.”
This is the last paragraph of J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Two Towers”, the second book of the “Rings” trilogy. In Peter Jackson’s movie version however this scene, when Frodo gets captured by the Orcs, is not included. Instead, the movie ends about 50 pages before the end of the book: Frodo and Sam, who are at a crossroad, are being led into the ambush of the giant spider Shelob (in German: Kankra – don’t ask me why…) by their companion Gollum. So Shelob’s appearance is being postponed until the beginning of the third installmant, “The Return of the King”. Jackson’s cliffhanger is working without Shelob, but still the question remains, why the “Ring” filmer is dealing much more freely with the second installment – after he stuck so true to the first book “The Fellowship”.
Insiders already expected that Jackson wouldn’t leave the book unimpeached: Out of all three books the second one balks itself the most against transferring the dramatic demandings to the medium film. Neither the decreasing suspense nor the story being split into three different storylines suits to the conventions of a Hollywood-script.
So Jackson moved the Battle of Helm’s Deep and the destruction of Saruman’s weapon forge Isengard from the middle of the book to the end of the movie and created – in benefit of a stunning showdown – a Nazgul attack at the human outpost Osgiliath. Yet not all of Jackson’s interventions can be explained with cinematographic formalities. In some parts, the New Zealander’s film differs from the book in a considerable way – sometimes even in a distorting way.
The first of these arbitrary acts concerns the creature Treebeard, who in Tolkien’s book is an symbol for nature’s powers, against which humans better shouldn’t oppose. Jackson doesn’t let the tree-keepter go to war out of his own decision – the Hobbits Merry and Pippin play a trick on him to get him there. Treebeards “without-me” position undermines the criticism on industrialisation from the first movie, which is one of the most important aspects of Tolkien’s fantasy epos. “An important aspect of “The Two Towers” is the nature’s fight against the machines.”, Jackson says. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t show this.
Another, no less arbitrary change concerns the character of Boromir’s brother Faramir. In the book, he’s being described as honorable, faithful, noble and and non-corruptible – the film is turning him into exactly the opposite. Just like his fickle brother Boromir, Faramir gets lured by the ring and captures Frodo to take the it. This turning of Faramir’s character doesn’t make any sense to the context of the book and can only be explained as a “crook” to increase the amount of action in the (this time less exciting) Frodo-storyline.
The attack of the Warg riders has a similar function. The scene where Aragorn together with one of the hyena-like monsters falls over the cliff is a downright creation of Jackon’s, that doesn’t give any fresh impetus to the story, but prepares the way for the bewitching dream sequence, where the beautiful Elven princess Arwen appears to her tormented lover Aragorn.
Not every of these changes to the book seem to make sense, but in view of the incredible dimensions of the projects, even strong Tolkien-purists will be forbearing: The Two Towers is a cinematographic event of really biblical dimensions. After the christian allegory of the first installment, Peter Jackson now goes for a dark, huge and firing metaphor to World War 2, where the armies of darkness march as if Hitler’s favourite director, Leni Riefenstahl, had directed the parade. And the usually peaceful Sam does a Churchill-like speech on resistance.
Not all of the dialogues are done well In between the frontlines there are some bad warrior lines (“A red sun is rising. Tonight blood has been shed.”) but the outstanding effects and the biblical dimensions of the battle scenes make more than up for this. And not to forget Gollum, this computer-generated creature who looks like Steve Buscemi in a loincloth.
BANG! The door closes. SNAP! The iron bars are locking it. And this is the real annoyance about Peter Jackson’s “The Two Towers”. Three hours can be over so damn quickly. And now the terrible waiting starts again.
I picked up a copy of the complementary magazine published by the ‘Cineworld’ cinema chain here in the UK because it contained an interview with Liv Tyler about ‘The Two Towers’. Amongst all the usual stuff about costumes and elf ears there was one answer that caught my eye:
Q. You shot the trilogy a few years ago. What have you carried forward with you since that experience ended?
Liv: “The thing that I don’t think everybody understands is that we’re still working on it. I can’t tell you much work I’ve done on it in this year [2002] alone! We went to New Zealand for a month this summer and did pickups. We shot all sorts of new scenes – it was like shooting another movie all over again, and that was just for film two. And I just came back from London, where I spent two weeks recording a song for the soundtrack. I’d been working for a voice teacher for five months on that. Plus, we just completed all the post-production looping and voice overs.”
Dusty writes: Just wanted to inform you of an interesting class being offered at Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus in NYC this Spring semester. Lincoln Center Courses:
Fantasy and Philosophy (PHLV 3942) John Davenport
This Senior Values Seminar addresses the moral and religious themes of classic works of epic fantasy: in the spring of 2003, we’ll focus on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. With the aid of recent scholarly criticism, we will discuss ways in which Tolkien’s work sheds light on our moral experiences and encounters with evil in the real world. We will also focus on the author’s portrayal of religious hope; human freedom and moral character; the relationship between human creativity, technology, and nature; and questions about power over others.
Students are encouraged to read Tolkien’s entire trilogy in before the class begins in the spring. My preferred edition, to be used for this class, is the red hardback Collectors Edition by Houghton Mifflin. Please get this edition!
I wanted to let you know that the Swiss-British Society in Basel, Switzerland, is having a lecture by Allan Turner, University of Newcastle, on “The Lord of the Rings – translating into film” on Thursday, 16th January 2003 at 6.15 pm, room 3, Nadelberg 6, Basel, Switzerland (for those view of you who actually live near there… 😉 ).
Here’s the text of the flyer:
“By now the second part of Peter Jackson’s film trilogy will have hit the screen and no doubt broken a few more records. Meanwhile it continues to meet with a mixed reception from Tolkien fans, as some love the special effects, while others feel that, in spite of Jackson’s evident commitment to the book, he has sacrificed too much of its essence for the sake of Hollywood clichés. This talk clears away the razzmatazz to see how a highly complex work of literature has been transformed into a different medium, and compares it with the translation of the literary text into another language, bearing in mind that both of these processes need to be seen as commercial enterprises.
Allan Turner decided that he wanted to be a philologist after reading Tolkien in his early teens, and has since fallen into all the cracks between diachronic linguistics, synchronic linguistics and literature. For ten years he was Lektor at the English Seminar in Basel. At present he works in Newcastle and is completing a Ph.D. dissertation on the problems of translating the philological element in Tolkien.
Members of the Swiss-British Society: free entry; Members of the British Circle and Anglo-Swiss Club&Students: CHF 5.–; non-members: CHF 7.
