I was watching MTV around 1:30 EST, and a news report came on featuring an interview with Elijah Wood on the Fellowship of the Ring. They played rock music over a few scenes we’ve seen repeated frequently in commercials, then talked about Frodo’s taste, or distaste rather, of the food in New Zealand, and his spare time working as a DJ in the local clubs. After they showed some footage first seen from the fox special with the rock music theme. It is safe to say Howard Shore’s soundtrack does a better job of fitting the feel of the Lord of the Rings.
Just writing to inform you that Christopher Lee (together with his Danish wife through 30 years, Giee Krönke) and Viggo Mortensen will attend the FotR premiere the 18th of Dec. in Denmark.
An addition to the two FotR stars, representatives from the Danish royal family will attend: Queen Margrethe and Prince Henrik. The royal family has decided to show up since the gala event is also a fund raiser for The Red Cross. The ticket price is 500 DKr, so for once the celebrities must grab their pockets.
Queen Margrethe is actually a great Tolkien-admirerer, and has illustrated the special edition of The Lord of the Rings back in the 70s, when she as a princess still attended university in England.
The special edition was published in 1997 with illustrations by Ingahild Grathmer, the queen’s pseudonym at that time. This edition has just been republished.
A link with additional info for Danish readers: Posted in:
Minnesota “Lord of the Rings” fans can catch an advance screening of the feature film one week before its Dec. 19 official release date.
The film will be shown at 7 pm Wednesday, Dec. 12, at the Historic State Theater in downtown Minneapolis. The advance screening is a fund-raiser event for Carleton College in Northfield. The film’s executive producer Barrie Osborne graduated from Carleton in 1966.
Tickets are available at two levels: a $50 ticket includes the 7 pm screening and a post-screening social hour at Backstage at Bravo in Minneapolis; a $200 ticket includes those events plus a pre-reception with Osborne at The Palomino restaurant.
Tickets can be purchased by calling the Carleton College Office of Alumni Affairs at 1-800-729-2586.
Morning guys and gals! I flicked over to ITV just in time to see the four hobbits, Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd sitting together ready to begin their interview.
The interview begins with the presenter asking where Sean Bean is. The four all say that Sean couldn’t be here because he has some problems..then all four simultaneously open their mouths and put their finger over it. Dominic turns to the camera and says if Sean is watching, they’ll bring him some corks next time they see him.
They then begin to show a minute of the clip of Sean Bean holding the ring on Caradhras which we brought to you exclusively here yesterday. I can honestly say it looks ten times as good on television.
We return to the boys, and the first question is to Elijah. What was his favourite part of the whole production? Elijah says any time that all four of them together was great, which gets a chorus of ‘awwwwww’ from the audience. “We’ve become great mates.” Sean Astin then mentions the helicopters that they had to take to fly up the mountains for months on end. Dominic mentions he flew a plane twice during the shootings.
The next question is to Sean Bean, who ain’t here, asks whether it’s true that the New Zealand army was involved in the shooting. All of them admit that the New Zealand army was used during the films, they think in the Rohan scene. Billy tells us how great it was to have their own personal army behind them, especially leading them into battle despite being much smaller than the soliders themselves.
The next question for Dominic asks how difficult it was to get the part. Monaghan says that they went through days of training in the gym, learning how to fight with swords, and all the other skills they needed to play the parts.
Finally, Elijah is asked whether it’s true that he has the One Ring. Elijah admits it’s true, and then does his best Gollum impression, muttering ‘my preciousss’.
The hobbits then feature in a skit later on in the show, in which the show’s presenter, Cat Deeley, pretends to be a bride mourning in her appartment after leaving her groom at the altar. Sean and Billy come out first and talk with Cat, saying they would take her and her friend out if they weren’t on the rebound. They claim to be honorable guys, and that their mates, who aren’t as respectable as they are, might be interested. Pop group Westlife come out with Dominic. All of them act very macho and sleazy until Cat says she has a bit of a breath problem, and all of the guys leave. The show ends a minute later.
In the end, it was great to see all four of the Hobbit actors together and even better to see footage from the Fellowship of the Ring.
Well, here it is. The most eagerly anticipated.. OK, the second most eagerly anticipated film of the year, an adaptation of the most popular. OK, second most popular fantasy story of the 20th century. New Line cinema are probably still scowling into their coffee and complaining about how THE movie event of the decade could somehow have been usurped by a small boy in John Lennon glasses and no nose. But their panic is my gain. So confident are the film makers that (in almost complete disregard of recent movie lore which suggests that the critics should be the last people to see any ‘blockbuster’ film, in case word of the quality of the product should inadvertently reach the consumer!), they have dragged forward the critics screening of this magnum opus in a game attempt to generate some non-Potter excitement. So I’ve seen it – ya boo sucks to you.
Whatdya mean, does it have Quidditch in it? No!
There hardly seems to be any point relating the story, which would be like recounting the story of Moses when reviewing “Prince of Egypt”, but a bit of education for the Potterites might not go amiss. Our hero is Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood), a small person with hairy feet and only slightly more of a nose than Harry Potter, who inherits what might appear to some to be a really cool present – a magic ring that makes the wearer invisible. Unfortunately, it turns out that this cool present is cursed, and will corrupt and deform any that posses it, while at the same time holding the power to subjugate all the free peoples of the world to whoever has the strength to use it. Because of this, Frodo suffers the twin inconvenience of a) not being able to use it without turning into a evil ghost thing and b) being hunted by bigger evil host things who want to take said hugely powerful talisman back to its original owner, The Dark Lord, so that he can indulge in aforementioned subjugation of the free peoples of the world etc.
Not good.
Fortunately, Frodo has some good friends and advisors. Foremost is the white-haired wizard (no, not Dumbledore!) named Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellan) who firsts suspects the ring’s true nature. Also on hand is working class pal Sam Gamgee (Sean Astin) and rather more posh, but equally silly friends Merry (Dom Monaghan of “Hetty Wainthrop Investigates”!) and Pippin Took (Billy Boyd). After Gandalf advises Frodo to escape with the ring, with the eventual aim of destroying it in the only fire hot enough to melt it (unfortunately in the Dark Lord’s own backyard of Mordor), the four companions set off. Needless to say, it doesn’t go entirely to plan.
But you knew that. So onto the bits you didn’t know.
Peter Jackson has created, if not a classic, then a film which comfortable wins the genre race of fantasy films. This is no Willow. No ridiculously muscled Arnie’s in oiled leather roam around with humorous accents in a Conan stylee. The story makes sense, the characters are believable. And somehow, Jackson has condensed 350 pages of action in just under three hours without butchering the story.
Special mention must go to Sir Ian McKellan, who portrays his Gandalf with a genuine sense of humanity blended with divinity in a far more absorbing way than Willem Dafoe managed in “The Last Temptation of Christ”, and the film develops a poignant listlessness after his (for reasons I won’t explain) departure from the action towards the end. McKellen’s Gandalf is an itinerant conjuror and firework manufacturer who has been waiting for his true purpose on earth to arrive, and to his credit Sir Ian displays fully the dichotomy of the terror and excitement he faces when he realises the true nature of his Hobbit-friend’s trinket. His dismay and loneliness when faced with the treachery of his fellow wizard Saruman (or Saroom’n as they seem to insist on calling him) is also a truly involving moment in the film, which lifts this effort way about previous efforts at this kind of filmmaking.
Not all the characters achieve quite the same perfection. Frodo is better when looking cute and distressed, though to be fair Wood may get a better chance to extend his range in later films. Legolas (Orlando Bloom) looks the part, but unfortunately squeaks his way through the film like a weasel having its tail squashed by a very fat cod-liver-oil salesman. And Sean Bean, so crucial to the effectiveness of the tale as Boromir (B’row’mir?! – what are they playing at?), plays the whole thing like a pantomime villain, leaving his final conversion to the Dark Side as nothing short of boringly predictable.
But the Hobbits are delightful as a group, and Strider (Viggo Mortenson – no, that is an actor, not a character) commands the screen quite convincingly as the mysterious friend of Gandalf who shepherds the halflings to temporary sanctuary at the castle of Rivendell. And it is his personal crisis after the departure of Gandalf that gives the end of the film it’s engaging aimlessness – at least up until the as-surprising-as-cheese ending.
I will gush a little more later, so I will deal with some of the problems – and they’re not huge.
Firstly, chilling as the Nazgul are, why (given that five of them cannot overcome four hobbits and a man who hasn’t washed his hair for twenty years) are the company so scared of them after they’ve been joined by two powerful Elves (Glorfindel and Arwen) at the Fords of Rivendell? Glorfindel drives them into the water easily enough to drown them – why doesn’t he just drive them away and say “leave us alone”? Strange.
Secondly, how does the love of Aragorn’s life, Arwen Evenstar (a very Elvish Liv Tyler) get from Rivendell to Lothlorien when the same journey nearly kills the Fellowship itself? It reminded me of those Droopy cartoons where the cartoon dog would be buried under fifty feet of rock, only to appear outside the villain’s house with a sardonic expression. I half expected her to drawl “You know what, I’m the love interest”.
My last complaint is the disappointment of the Balrog. It is as if Peter Jackson was so scared on coming down on any one side of the famous fan-debate about Balrog’s appearance that he chickened out altogether! You don’t see the blessed thing! A flaming foot here, a shadowy hand there, a main of fire, nasty looking eyes. To his credit, Jackson disguises his cowardice by presenting it as a problem with scale. The Balrog is seemingly so huge that the cameras cannot fit it all in. But it also conveniently avoids proving or disproving whether or not the demonic creature had wings or not. Shocking.
That said, the Moria sequence is one of the highlights, and its format shocks you when you realise that Tolkien, for all his fame as a fantasist, was almost the father of modern horror cinema! A group of people take a spooky, but apparently safe, journey. Creepy things start happening, culminating in the realisation that the previous occupants of the place they’re in have been horribly slaughtered – and then the same things described by their deceased predecessors in a conveniently discovered diary start happening again. If Tolkien had the guts to kill off more than one of the company, it could have been any of a vast number of horror films of the last fifty years. Jackson exploits this to the full, and the denouement of the sequence is genuinely shocking, for all the shadowy protagonist, and the fact that I knew perfectly well what was about to happen.
And that perhaps is Jackson’s greatest triumph. His core audience has already read the book (perhaps fifty times!), but he keeps them on their toes with little changes. Bilbo (Sir Ian Holm)’s attempt to hide the ring from Gandalf by turning invisible and playing a short but amusing game of hide and seek in Bag End was a nice touch. A black rider eviscerating the likeable Farmer Maggot (John Rye) helps emphasise the danger felt by the halflings in their escape. Arwen herself is allowed to become a visible and understandable figure of devotion for Aragorn, though having her ride to the rescue twice – once at Rivendell, then again on the borders of Lorien after the escape from Moria – is a bit much. And the story of S’room’n, shown here when absent from the book, allows a whole sub-world to be explored, while also allowing Christopher Lee, who plays him, to be deliciously evil.
Less successful are the rendering of Bill Ferny as comic relief, a Nazgul running around in panic when it’s cloak gets set on fire, the Dwarves’ rendering as the Klingons of Middle Earth (“Sauron has no honour!” – no kidding guys!) and the way the Fellowship escape from Caradhras (did you know Gandalf invented snow-boarding? Now you do).
But these are piffling complaints. The actors, by and large, manage to create fantasy figures as real people. The scenery is, as expected, absolutely stunning, as Jackson manages to merge the real beauty of his homeland with some pretty seamless effects work. The “forced perspective” effect to shrink the Hobbits and Dwarves is also largely successful (though from time to time you can tell one of the hobbits is just kneeling down!), and testimony to the patience with which the crew build two sets of everything (one big, one small) to lend it verisimilitude. The score is beautiful, if unobtrusive, and the script keeps the feeling of Tolkien’s words, even though it often changes them to the modern vernacular (Sam even refers to Arwen as “that Elvish bird” at one point!).
A remarkably risky project appears to have emerged as well as could reasonably expected – and I mean that in an overwhelming positive way! It might not win traditional Academy Awards, but I fully expect my fellow critics to endorse my view of this film as a damn good blast.
One tale to rule them all and in the darkness bind them
AFTER the events of September 11, it’s not hard to imagine a world in which those who represent freedom and democracy are threatened by a source of great power and evil.
It’s a feeling that was shared, no doubt, by those who lived through or were born during World War Two, the people who were the first in history to read a book that many now regard as one of the greatest stories ever written.
Since its publication in 1954-55, The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien has endured as a tale of heroism in a world of increasing darkness. Although a “fantasy”, its themes of good versus evil, the changing nature of the world and heroism are still just as applicable to Western society today as they were half a century ago.
This month The Lord of the Rings, considered the grandfather of modern fantasy literature, comes to life on the silver screen. One fan lining up at the box office to buy a ticket will be PhD student Kerrie Le Lievre, from the Department of English at Adelaide University, Australia.
Tolkien’s novel plays a major role in Ms Le Lievre’s PhD thesis, which examines a number of “high fantasy” novels and the themes common to them all. Her thesis is titled Worlds and Mirrors of Worlds, and explores how fantasy writers use the secondary worlds they create to critique and challenge the dominant paradigms of modern Western society, and to provide alternative models. The other novels dealt with are the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K Le Guin and The Riddle-masters’ Game by Patricia A McKillip.
“I’m working on a close reading of the three high fantasy texts,” Ms Le Lievre said. “Because they’re all high fantasies, they’re all closely related in terms of their structure and the issues that they deal with, and there’s also a sense in which both Le Guin and McKillip can be seen as writing back to Tolkien; they both took inspiration from The Lord of the Rings and started thinking about it in different ways.” For the uninitiated, The Lord of the Rings is divided into three books: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return Of The King. The first of these will be seen on cinema screens around Australia from December 26, with the others to follow in 2002 and 2003.
Fellowship tells the tale of Frodo Baggins, a Hobbit (about half the size of a normal man) who discovers he possesses a ring of great power. This ring is being sought after by the evil Sauron, a dark lord who hopes to rule over all of Middle-Earth (the fictional “secondary world” created by Tolkien). With his friends and with the help of the wizard Gandalf, Frodo leaves his home and seeks to rid himself of the ring. He is then entrusted with the mission of destroying the ring, and to do so he must enter the very heart of darkness itself: the land of Mordor where Sauron lives.
In its most basic form, The Lord of the Rings is a grand adventure, a tale of against-the-odds heroism. But Tolkien has created a world with such depth that scholars like Kerrie Le Lievre continue to search its text for theme and meaning. So strong was the influence of Tolkien’s novel that it can be seen again and again in other works of fantasy, even in the Harry Potter novels by JK Rowling. Like those novels, in its time The Lord of the Rings was also a huge commercial success.
“I guess you could say it’s been a mixed blessing,” said Ms Le Lievre.
“The first effect The Lord of the Rings had on the general field of fantasy literature is that it separated it from the body of mainstream fiction. The precursors of Tolkien’s work, authors such as Lewis Carroll, William Morris, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote something that was generally called “romance”, but it was also part of the mainstream. There was no sense in which Stevenson’s romance writings were considered different from his more mainstream or gothic writings.
“The Lord of the Rings was a massive commercial success, and that meant that it started having imitators very quickly. The imitators were published because people wanted to read more things like The Lord of the Rings, and they started being bracketed away to this strand of publishing, or marketing, which got labelled “fantasy”. People started thinking of fantasy as only things that were roughly like The Lord of the Rings, and that went on until it started becoming only things that were like The Lord of the Rings.
“The problem is that a lot of the imitations weren’t the best; they tended to understand the rough shape of Tolkien’s creation but missed the subtleties and complexities that Tolkien built into it. The Lord of the Rings does have a very replicable form, but it combines that with a unique and extraordinary content that nobody has been able to surpass,” she said. While Tolkien claimed that his work was not specifically a retelling of World War One or, even more likely, World War Two, he is on record as saying the issues and themes dealt with in his works were applicable to the modern world.
Caption: Kerrie Le Lievre with some of the fantasy novels she’s examining for her thesis. Photo: David Ellis.
“Many of the issues that were current in Tolkien’s day remain current today,” Ms Le Lievre said.
“Things like industrialisation—that was definitely a big one. Mordor as a culture or as an image is very much to do with industrialisation. There are also issues to do with the environment, damage to the environment and how the world is changing because of the industrialisation process; with the changing nature of evil and how that’s perceived in the world; with the need for a different model of heroism, one that doesn’t focus on a central hero but becomes a shared sense of heroism; and related to that are the issues about our sense of community and a shared responsibility for the world.
“Tolkien’s rethinking of the nature of heroism in the modern world is one of the most important strands of The Lord of the Rings,” she said.
“A lot of his heroes look like old-fashioned epic heroes striding off into battle with swords and so forth, but really they’re not. Tolkien’s heroes are always collective, so the journey into Mordor isn’t just about Frodo, it’s about Frodo, Sam and Gollum working together as a unit. At the same time, the other strand of the story isn’t just about Aragorn; although Aragorn is the hero he wouldn’t be able to function without Legolas and Gimli backing him up. And there are many other characters added into the mix, each from different races of elves and men, dwarves and hobbits. So it’s not just an individual who sets things right, it’s a group of people who stand against an incoming enemy or a moral wrong. They all play an important role in the scheme of things, and without their collective effort the heroes, plural, would not win through to the end.” While the upcoming film of The Fellowship of the Ring will not have any bearing on Ms Le Lievre’s thesis, like many Tolkien fans and scholars she is both enthusiastic and reserved about her feelings on the film.
“I’m approaching it as though I’m going to see a particular production of a play. When you go to see a performance of Hamlet it’s always going to be somebody else’s Hamlet, not the one I have in my head. So if you see the movie of The Lord of the Rings you’re seeing one interpretation of it.
“A lot of the changes that I’ve heard of [from book to screen] seem to make sense according to the logic of film. I’m comfortable with what I know about the film so far, but I’m suspending judgement until I see the results,” she said.
