Re: The good parts of the films, was Re: Ages of actors in CC -- was Years of SA & SD


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Posted by Peter Ceresole on January 23, 2011 at 22:55:50 user PeterC.

In Reply to: Re: The good parts of the films, was Re: Ages of actors in CC -- was Years of SA & SD posted by andyb on January 23, 2011 at 14:47:28:

I'm afraid I thought the LOR film trinity unspeakably awful.

I can see why you might think that, however it seems to me to be an excessively severe judgement. But that's the whole point: it seems so to me. Clearly, it gave great pleasure to a very large number of people, who paid to go to see it. When you are spending many zillions of New Zealand dollars, I'd say that was the benchmark of success.

For me (again) seeing it on screen emphasised Tolkien's dead hand with dialogue, but the story banged along and the bravura battle scenes were genuinely spectacular. Not too bad, really. I reckon the important thing with adaptations is; if you enjoyed the original, don't expect too much. The change of medium is very likely to remove the source of your original enjoyment. It might, of course, introduce another, and then it'll work for you, but it won't be the same. For instance, one of my favourite series of books is Anthony Powell's 'Dance to the Music of Time'. It was adapted for TV by two separate producers making programmes turn and turn about. One got it right, the other got it wrong, but it was purely a queetion of their relative skills as TV producers. As it is, I still re-read the books with no fallout from the programmes. As far as AR is concerned, I enjoyed Claude Whatham's SA, in spite of what I felt was the rather poor casting of Ronald Fraser as Captain Flint (not nearly stout enough). But this was because Whatham is a good director, with decent financial backing, who made a lovely looking film. But I didn't buy the DVD, and although I read the book for pleasure, I've not looked at the film again.



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