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My position (oft stated) is that I find the films fairly average entertainment & actually struggle to get worked up about them at all. That said I do find some parts of them quite silly, & other parts nonsensical. I'm happy - if I get a moment between the feeds & changes - to point up how Tolkien handled the story, incidents & characters far better than Jackson et al did.
What does irritate me is the lack of respect for Tolkien himself & for Christopher which some people display - if its pointed out that Tolkien strongly disapproved of adaptations of his work, or that Christopher (having seen the films) dislikes them, this is dismissed with the flip comment that 'Well, Tolkien sold the movie rights, so ... tough!' I would venture to suggest that if Tolkien had lived long enough to see the movies & expressed approval of them, or if Christopher had publicly stated he liked them then those very people who are dismissing their opinions would have latched onto them & prefaced every positive comment about the movies with the statement 'Tolkien himself/Christopher loved these movies, which proves how accurate/authentic they are...' - the feelings of Tolkien & Christopher would not have been so summarily dismissed if they suited their arguments.
I've pointed up elsewhere Humphrey Carpenter's comments re an adaptation of The Hobbit he was putting together for a school play & how, while Tolkien thought the whole tidea of adapting his work was 'silly' & 'nonsensical' , he was still polite enough to see Carpenter, suggest a few tunes for the play & go along to see it. Apparently (& I think this is mentioned in his biography of Tolkien) Tolkien liked the bits of the play that stuck to his story, & disliked the changes Carpenter had made. Probably he would have felt the same about the film. And one can understand that - if an author spends 14 years writing a book, & most of his life creating a mythology of which that book is a major part, he will understandably feel miffed if someone else has the temerity to think they can 'improve' on it. And a writer may sell the film rights to his work believing that anyone choosing to make a film of it will actually want to put his story on the screen, rather than turn it into something else entirely. I know that Ursula Le Guin was furious with the makers of the Earthsea mini-series, feeling that the makers had messed it up big time & turned it into something a million miles away from her creation.
This argument 'Films are different from books' is wheeled out everytime the movies are criticised for any reason at all - as if the fact that the two media are different somehow excludes the films from all criticism. My criticisms of the films have been mainly of them as films - Denethors 3 mile run through the upper levels of Minas Tirith while on fire (& even from shots in the film - long shots of the city, the distance Gandalf & Pippin walk from the Citadel to the precipice - this is clearly impossible. It may not be clear that it is a full 3 miles, but its fairly clear that its way too far for anyone in that state to run) , or Boromir beeing hurled right across the chamber of Mazarbul into a rock wall & ending up only mildly stunned, the Rohirrim charging down a 60 degree scree slope for example, the cringeworthy mis-use of the English language by the scriptwriters, or the misunderstanding of the social rules which bound the kind of society Tolkien created.
There is a special place in my heart for the BBC radio adaptation - because it captures the spirit of the books for me in a way that the films never could. Perhaps that's because it relies on words - & most of them are Tolkien's own. After listening to the series, hearing Stephen Oliver's heartbreaking music play over the reading of the final credits, I know I've been in the Middle-earth I know & love for the last thirteen hours. When the movies ended I didn't feel that at all. And to me that's the whole point. That's why the movies - however technically good they are, however much the writers & production team may have loved the books, however good the actors were - don't work for me. Something is just not there. And, sorry, but all the stats on how much money they made, how much the critics liked them or how many awards they got, is irrelevant. For me they are fake, because the heart is missing. Its there in the books, its there in the Radio adaptation. Its absent from the movies. They aren't orange juice for me, they're Sunny Delight ...
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