Garfemiao writes:
OK, the Two Towers is out, and most of us went to see it at our local Line Party events on Tuesday at midnight, so what’s next? Well, in Los Angeles, the Irvine Line Party is having a second day of activities this Saturday, December 21, including a Blood Drive.
We will be having a full schedule of events such as a costume contest, gaming demos, children’s activities and a combat recreation group, along with the Blood Drive. There will be prizes for many of these events, so come on down and partake of the Line Party experience. The events will be from 10am until 4pm, and Two Towers is playing on 4 separate screens, so there will be plenty of showtimes to choose from. Check out the Irvine Line party page for more details, or email me at Garfeimao@yahoo.com.
This is a critical time of year for our blood supply, so please consider coming down and donating. Everyone who signs up recieves a free Red Cross shirt, a coupon for 6 Krispy Kreme donuts, and a raffle ticket for some other prizes. This will be held at the Irvine Spectrum in the lobby of the Edwards cinema, located at the junction of the 5 and 405 freeways in Irvine. Give the Gift of Life this Holiday season.
You can read all the details here.
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It’s the morning after the night when many Tolkien fans throughout the world lined up for our first look at The Two Towers. So how are we all feeling?
Relief. What a relief. We’ve seen it, at last, after so many months and years of waiting, and generally the impression I’m getting is that people are very happy with the movie, and it was worth the wait. People are shaken and moved by it – it’s not a happy movie, but it’s done with a passionate sense of purpose and dedication. Whatever quibbles we might have with some details, the overall sense is that it is a great work. ‘Overall sense’ is right, because most people are saying that they have to see it again, they need time to digest it and understand it. I think that FOTR taught us that we have to see Peter Jackson’s Rings movies in a new way. You don’t swallow them at a gulp. I doubt many people could get much out of seeing TTT if they hadn’t seen FOTR and didn’t know the books at all. It demands your concentration. I’m reminded of Wagner’s Ring cycle, not because it’s about a Ring nor because the story takes place over 4 operas, but because the story is told in such a complex, layered way, relying on words, on melody, on leitmotifs that you must memorise and on action. Most Wagner opera buffs do a great deal of background reading and listening so that when they finally see it staged, they’ll appreciate the totality of it. Peter Jackson’s Rings movies are like that. We won’t know how we feel about TTT until we’ve seen it a few more times and thought about it some more. Interestingly enough, there were many scenes in TTT where I found myself thinking ‘oh, this is a bit rushed but I bet it’ll all come clear in the extended DVD.’ So we’ve learned to wait and trust a little more, since last year, because it turned out that there was so much more of the story that we KNEW, waiting for us on the extended DVD.
I’m churning my way through the reviews that are being sent in to the site – part of a long process that will go on for months. Hundreds have come in so far and the response is very positive. People are excited and awed, and list dozens of scenes that they thought were perfect or amazing. There’s a lot of agreement that the changes to Faramir’s character don’t really appeal though, and the scenes with the Ents seem rushed so that their story with Merry and Pippin doesn’t develop in a realistic way. Other changes such as the scenes with Arwen have been widely accepted and enjoyed. Almost everyone raves about Gollum and the battle of Helm’s Deep, and they love all the things they loved about the last movie – the epic sweep, the grand landscapes and so on.
This morning the website seems to have closed shop after posting a bunch of reviews and an update – we’re all presumably catching up on sleep or wading through today’s email, which has doubled from the usual spate into something that feels like one of those flattening waves known as ‘dumpers.’ I feel we owe our readers and our correspondents an apology. We used to pride ourselves on answering every single email, even if it was just a simple thank-you note. Now it just isn’t always possible, though we continue to try. So I apologise to any of you that the pressure of time has forced us to neglect.
It has been a great pleasure to share the long wait for these movies with so many ardent fans. I hope we have a great time waiting for the last movie, and that we have much to celebrate in the year to come.
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Math P writes:
Well, here is my Boston LP report. I just got home, and it’s around 6.30am Dec 18. Like last year’s LP, it was a huge success! Thanks to my members, TORN, and TORN’s sponsor (Badali Jewelry). The Boston LP started around 7pm. We have our 3 maidens of Rohan (Amy, Maria, and Laura) who were the life of the party. Neat costumes! All 3 women of course brought home the prices for best costume.
Anyway, the wait was almost unbearable, but thanks to the lively chat and humor of every members, the painstaking hours of waiting quickly waned. More and more people have arrived by 10pm. Loews decided to let us in early, and so we were all seating nice and comfy inside the theater by 10.30pm. When midnight came, we were treated with a kind of more previews than one would expect (though it seemed eternity, it’s probably just standard length of time for previews). Needless to say, the crowd just got more excited waiting for TTT to start. Alas, TTT was finally shown! It’s definitely an Oscar contender (notwithstanding the beaurocrats and politics involved in this award). But then again, we’re probably biased.
Everyone just loved the film. That’s all I can hear people say after the show. The rest of the gang went to the Blue Diner (last year’s post-show hang out), and had very interesting discussion about the film (while eating our breakfast). Needless to say, we’ll all gonna be back to see the film, the 2nd, 3rd,…Nth-time before 2002 ends with a bang! Looking forward to “The Return of the King.” Cheers everyone, Math
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A sense of imminent apocalypse permeates the stunning second part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Sukhdev Sandhu reports
Splat. There goes somebody’s ear. The Lord of the Rings is back, and it’s dark as hell. Actually, it’s an atrocity exhibition, a Bayeux Tapestry of gore and dismemberment, as strung-out and infernal a piece of kiddie cinema as can ever have been made.
WEARISOME: ELIJAH WOOD ALTERNATES BETWEEN PERPLEXED AND CONFUSED
Like a certain chocolate bar, it’s probably “not for girls”, but it’s still very good, infinitely better than Harry Potter and, let’s not be bashful here, the collected oeuvres of Oliver Stone and Terrence Malick.
The first part of Tolkien’s trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, was a rare triumph of magic over marketing. It tapped into the dreadful, uncanny recesses of children’s imaginations, locating terror in gothic mountains, wild horses and huge forests, rather than in the prosaic world of the school playground or the town centre car park.
It also avoided the icky cuteness and razzle-dazzle joyrides of most American teen movies. The last hour of Peter Jackson’s film was one of the slowest and most emotionally exhausting stretches of cinema I’ve ever sat through, like watching Tarkovsky direct Ben-Hur.
The Two Towers is equally desolate. It’s an Anglo-Saxon epic poem in the fashion of The Seafarer, in which the journey and its attendant struggles are as important as the actual completion of the quest. Frodo (played by Elijah Wood) is making his way towards Mordor, where he hopes to throw the accursed Ring into a volcano.
He’s helped out by Gollum (Andy Serkis), a hobbit gone bad, a monstrous hybrid halfway between a spasming Caliban and a vein-mangled, Bobby Charlton-haired crack addict from an Aphex Twin video.
His body is contorted with pain; his mind is pretty ugly too, tortured by the knowledge that he killed his own cousin in order to get the Ring. Shady and duplicitous, he tries to win the trust of Frodo and Sam, but his overtures are about as sweet as disinfectant.
Elsewhere on Middle-Earth, the none-so-solid crew of Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), his comically blond Elf-archer pal Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and plucky little dwarf fellow Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) are trying to help the people of the besieged Rohan kingdom fend off the armies sent by Saruman (a wonderfully crazed Christopher Lee).
Their efforts, while slightly impeded by Aragorn’s growing affection for a Rohan princess (Miranda Otto), are at least more efficacious than those of Merry and Pippin (Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd), who have managed to get themselves captured by Treebeard, a very old and very slow-talking tree, many of whose arboreal colleagues have been chopped down by ecocidal Saruman.
The Two Towers is grimmer than The Fellowship of the Ring. It lacks the hey-nonny-no bucolics of that film’s early parts, and, from the opening scene onwards, feels oppressively heavy, as if the sky is about to fall down. Jokes are few and far between. The characters, taciturn and engloomed, resemble pack horses forced to trudge through swampland for centuries on end. Even the forests are full of memories and anger.
The blighted landscapes and feeling of imminent apocalypse that permeate The Two Towers remind us that Tolkien served as a junior officer in the trenches during the First World War. The battle scenes, bloody and remorselessly protracted, recall the killing fields of the Somme and Passchendaele.
Such ghostly echoes may lead us to speculate that The Lord of the Rings, far from being merely mythological, or an ageless story about the battle between good and evil, speaks very forcefully to many of the conflicts and catastrophes that were destroying Europe in the middle of the last century.
Peter Jackson doesn’t exaggerate the extent to which the story may be read as a political allegory, but he does wrench The Lord of the Rings from the sweaty-palmed clutches of its core audience of misfit male adolescents.
Instead, his version harks back to that moment in the late Sixties when the trilogy was commonly found next to tomes by Wilhelm Reich and Carlos Castaneda on the bookshelves of beatniks and counter culturalists.
Frodo sees the Ring’s destructive powers as confirming the adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Saruman, meanwhile, is The Man, a power-crazed fundamentalist and authoritarian. He mistreats the environment and cares not a jot for those weaker than him.
The shots of Sauron’s fortress within Mordor are perhaps the most terrifying in the film: tens of thousands of midget workers, hunched in servitude and drudgery, looking like a cross between the mechanical toilers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the huge colonies of granite-cliff labourers in a Sebastiao Salgado photograph.
Fear is the key to the success of The Two Towers. It’s much more scary than the average thriller or teen slasher movie. The Berzerker Uruk-Hai are as frightening as anyone since the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Archers aim for the heads of those rushing at them. The bodies of the slain drip with pus and gore.
All the while, the cameras, swooping and dancing with abandon, make the carnage seem wholly exhilarating. Jackson, for all the multi-million-dollar budgets at his disposal these days, is still pretty much the same guy he was when shooting such splatter-fests as Bad Taste in the 1980s.
It should be admitted that the film sags and drifts for long stretches. Those scenes starring Elijah Wood are especially wearisome. He’s supposed to be a hero for our times, weighed down by destiny; instead, he looks like a pop-eyed homunculus whose range of gestures alternates between perplexed and confused.
By contrast, Andy Serkis is superbly slithery as Gollum, a major achievement given that he performed wearing a motion-sensor suit, and then had his own body parts masked out in favour of computer-generated images.
It’s crucial that the film, like the journeys it narrates, is straggly. I spent the duller sections thinking about how flaxen-haired Legolas looks like a Milky Bar hippy as he pings his egg-slicer-strong arrows at the barbarous monsters. I also drifted off looking at Viggo Mortensen: has a more virile, dynamic actor ever appeared on the silver screen?
The Two Towers is as epic as mainstream cinema gets these days. We should count our blessings. It has the courage to be gloomy and feral and despairing. Slow and magisterial, it never chivvies along the action just to placate ADD-stricken kids.
It also feels like a romance, reminding us of the sheer thrill of sitting in a packed cinema with a thousand strangers, getting lost in storytelling, and transported to lands more far-flung and fantastic than we can imagine. “Do you think people will ever talk about us or tell stories about us?” asks a character at one point. Were the same question to be asked of The Two Towers, the answer would be an enormous yes.
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Ringer Spy Matthew C sends in these great pics from the Wellington Premiere of TTT!
Billy, Dom, Karl Urban, Elijah, PJ and many more were on hand (including a MASSIVE Gollum creeping over the cinema). Take a look!
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Well, New Zealand’s media was out in force at the Wellington premiere of The Two Towers at the Embassy Theatre.
The unveiling of the menacing Gollum was one of the highlights. All I had was the Middle Earth Cam video feed, and I thought it looked quite spectacular!
As Ringer Fan Richard first reported, the other was confirmation of the persistent rumour that the world premiere for Return of the King would be in Wellington next year.
Before an audience of thousands of (undoubtedly parochial) onlookers, Jackson made New Line Executive Mark Ordesky promise that the debut for RoTK would be in Wellington.
Very cool stuff. And nice for all the antipodeans to finally get a piece of the action. 🙂
Also, Ringer Fan Telkemeniel reports that all the announced cast were there: Billy Boyd, Elijah Wood, Dominic Monaghan, Peter Jackson & Richard Taylor, Lawrence Makaore, Karl Urban. The latter two stayed with the crowd for a long time!
As I mentioned, the Kiwi media was there in force, here’s a roundup of stories (and pictures) from them:
NZoom — [More]
The NZ Herald — [More]
Stuff.co.nz (check out Gollum looming over Embassy theatregoers!) — [More]
Scoop.co.nz (great shot of the red carpet … and the banners!) — [More]
And just a reminder from Ringer Fan Willomere: An exhibition of the WETA workshop wonders seen in FOTR and TTT will be on display at the Te Papa in Wellington. A wealth of items including backdrops, costumes, weapons, and models — not the least of which is Saruman’s tower Orthanc — will be on view from December 19, 2002 through February 28, 2003. [More]
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