What most foreigners don’t appreciate about The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy is that they aren’t fantasy movies. They are real life documentaries set in modern day New Zealand.
The greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the movie going audiences of the planet is that Weta Workshop is some magical cinematic monster making factory akin to a Dungeons & Dragons Willy Wonka. It’s a lie. Peter Jackson jumps on the back of a ute and waves a camera around and just films real life as it happens with no special effects required.
Hobbits are from Wellington, An Elf comes from Auckland, Dwarves are anyone living in the South Island and the Orcs are Australians on vacation.
100% Middle Earth isn’t a tourism slogan, it’s a literal rendering of the facts for tourism insurance purposes.
The Hobbit and the killing of Smaug the dragon all happened last year and you’d know this if Fox News wasn’t constantly suppressing the fact that Mordor has fallen to Aragon years ago. Apparently Sauron is a major share holder in 20th Century Fox, and news of the destruction of the ring in Mt Doom would hurt his stock price.
The worst thing about the Nazgul are their smell. It’s awful if they sit next to you on the bus.
So the Hobbit opens with nonunionized dwarven miners being roasted to death by a corporate dragon who has no issue with exploitation. This leads to worker resentment and a scheme to retake their capital investment with an independent contract arrangement that ropes Bilbo Baggins into it.
Like every stoner Hobbit who thinks the grass is greener in West Australia, Bilbo joins the collective agreement and they all set off with a gay pot smoking Wizard from Parliamentary services.
Trolls, bunny rabbit powered sleds and giant spiders pretty much spells out a normal Tuesday afternoon for most New Zealanders but here Peter Jackson manages to take the everyday and make it last so very much longer.
Friends are tested, adventures had and protagonists find themselves challenged and overcoming of trials and tribulations.
I think there were 2 stone giants too many for my liking.
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You’re right, Martyn, all one has to do is wave a camera around and you’d capture the extreme systemic ineptness in the face of actual people (with or without dicks or uteri) who’ve been thrown into the machine.
This is the reality of life in AO/NZ, I have to quote :
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/it-was-like-a-circus-australian-deportees-escape-isolation-seen-crying-and-drunk/UAR5DHYRG5ZYVSWY3GXR6Z2R4A/…….
‘He (a business owner) said one young man came into a store crying and intoxicated.
“He was worried he had no place to go after this and [that] he’s been dropped in a s***hole country, that’s what he said.”
Is this the best reality we can provide for Bezos/Jackson to hoover up into their digitally enhanced Ponzi? I know that thanks to neo-colonialist schadenfreude, death and suffering make movie bank.
When I was a little person with a vagina a long, long, time ago, my father would read us a chapter of the Hobbit every night at bedtime, thus teaching us to use our imaginations.
Sid Kemp says this:
‘J.R.R. Tolkien clearly felt that the media that show things to the eyes – theatre, movie, and so forth – present a very different psychological function than the written (or spoken) word. For those who live in the world of writing, reading, and telling tales, the listener or reader’s visual imagination engaged in the process of listening or reading. Tolkien believed that no dramatic presentation would work for the Lord of the Rings because it would supplant the reader’s act of imagination with the creator’s (director, costumer’s, special effects) interpretation. (This view that visual arts do not engage people’s creative function the way the written and spoken word does has now been substantiated in psychological research. See the works of Joseph Chilton Pearce and the book Five Arguments for the Elimination of Television.)
The second element is that any adaptation into movie form would have to cut out many parts. And the items cut – such as the time with Tom Bombadil – are, arguably, crucial elements of the book. In this, either Tolkien’s dislike of the movie is similar to Stravinsky’s feelings about Fantasia. He so couldn’t bear the cutting of his music that the visual additions were irrelevant.
The third element is that The Lord of the Rings has an underlying spiritual significance, and that significance has religious origins. No successful Hollywood movie can convey such significance, and the reasons that Hollywood movies do not do that is that such elements must be removed if one wishes to achieve popularity and commercial success.’
So I could smugly say that I have not sullied my bonce with hollywood hobbits to date, after all, I live in the smug hermit kingdom where Returning Offenders are given the fright of their lives and little else and Bezos’/Jackson blackmail the scenery – maybe they could give those returning offenders roles as orcs and so on- oh, wait, they’d want what? to be paid? oh haha ha
Where do you buy those Ponzis? They sound like sleek, slippery machines with grunt!
try Prince A. Saxe-Gotha
Quick get the neuralizer
Poor Martyn has seen thru the matrix
The LOTR movies never cut the mustard for those who loved the books.
The Harry Potter series was better done ,which is easy to achieve because JK Rowling is no JRR Tolkien.
I must admit I’m keen to see Jackson’s Let It Be.
That quote from the herald is cringeworthy for the ineptitude of the authorities. How naive are they?
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