Lord of the Rings Humour: Parodies, Satires and More [4]

I like "It's a red flag to have a conversation with a complete stranger who's into Bombadil..."  

The more I listen the more I enjoy her take on things.  She's right: Bombadil would have had more impact if he appeared later.  And then "This creepy old man is married to this young baby he took from the river...."

"Women in LotR fall into 3 categories: the nice wives, the strong women with ambition who are much happier once they settle down and get married, and the man-eating female spiders who need to die."  

{{ the views on women and Tolkien she espouses here are where I have a fundamental disagreement with her reading of Tolkien. Her view for me lacks historic context and understanding, the assumption for example that Eowyn is much happier because she settles down and gets married, rather than her own actions and the events that occur resolved the personal sense of hopelessness and depression she was feeling, allowing her to actually think and plan for a future she never wanted or expected before. And in doing so marriage in such society is as much a career move as anything else. And Faramir in that regard is a good match, the fact hes a nice guy is more a bonus than a necessity, its a good political and career move regardless. History is full of strong, determined highly capable women who rose through the ranks of society to the very top through the careful use of their own marriage and arranging others, women had a lot of power in such matters and smart women used it to get ahead in a mans world. There is no weakness in such a marriage on the woman's part, nor is it in any way acquiescing to become the quiet domestic housewife. It's just a smart move. And one she is only capable of making at that time, mentally and emotionally, because of all she has done to that point, herself off her own back.
I find the current generation of young women have a very distorted and misunderstood view of marriage in such societies and they should read more history to find out just how people like Queen Margaret or Aggripina operated. Forceful, strong, determined women in a man's world, history is not short of examples of them.
So I find her entire attitude regards the subject somewhat frivolous and shallow in its understanding. }}

I have read LOTRs,as we all have. Maybe I havent read it enough times but, I didnt give a sniff about how women were portrayed or if there were enough or what role they had, for me it was an exciting adventure, and in my day, as a child, it was men who had adventures. It was Dan Dare not Denise Dare, Batman and Robin not Batman and Rita, Tarzan was the guy who had sway over animals and swung thru the jungle. I was curious about Faramir and Boromirs mother, and Elronds wife etc but I wasnt bothered to the extent of voicing it. Did Tolkien not really pad out women in his tale because he didnt get to understand them enough ? his mother died when he still needed her and when he met Edith she was enough for him and thats all he wanted ? I dont know.

When watching the video under discussion you have to separate her take on things versus her commentary on her generation's take on things. Petty, I think you are getting the two confused.

{{ I admit I did flick through the vid, but that was in part as I was finding her lack of historic context to her comments crabbit inducing, so it's possible there was some distinction in views I missed, but she still struck me as bringing insufficient knowledge to the subject she was discussing. }}

{{ }}

Just WOW
Amazing

{{ I'm sort of disappointed it doesn't have a 'PJ lever' that when you push it Frodo falls face-first into the mire in a ridiculous over-the-top fashion! }}

I was expecting that myself.

What's this taken from? Looks great.

{{ Has an AI look about it to me and a nosey at their youtube page confirms it, they are using several AI programs to generate images, Midjourney and Runway it seems are the main image generation, the voices are done with AI voice generator Elevenlabs, and then they have composited it together in Adobe After Effects and added any noise/filters/animations/titles and stuff or other touch ups it needed, and then finally it's been edited together in Adobe Premiere pro.}}

I have to admit their conceit that PJ would have done a better job with it than Amazon is probably true, though we'd still be screaming bloody murder.

{{ Not sure what you base that on Halfy, the longer and more time PJ got to adapt Tolkien, worse and worse they got. Look at the mess by time he'd got to end of all 6 of his films, can you imagine what PJ nonsense and pointless over done spectacle he'd have shoved in there given hours and hours of time to play with?!! }}

Actually the Hobbit was so bad because he didn't have time to overcome his worse tendencies. It was a rush job. The changes were mainly additions to the story more than ignoring the story as Amazon did. In LotR the additions such as having Arwen fight at Helm's Deep were muffled with time; and the bigger changes accumulated towards the end as they were rushed in writing. Given more time I think they would have gotten closer to the original.

Amazon had a long development time, but they also had a team that got further rather than closer to the original with time. I think with PJ it's the opposite, though it still would have had some humdingers.

{{ I dont see much, if any difference at all between the appalling mess of cgi Legolamb Mario jumping over brickwork and cgi Legolamb Mario jumping about a Mumakil in RotK.
The longer the story the further and further PJ will stray from character and narrative and the more into the dumb, stupid spectacle it'll go, it's what he likes. He'd do the same given tv, it'd start ok he'd set out to do a proper adaptation of Tolkien, and by the time the story got to the Barrowdowns PJ would be so bored they'd find an old cart in the barrow and escape in an exciting and ridiculous cart chase scene smashing through the old barrows chased by wights on phantom motorcycles! He can't stay the course on a narrative if it's not visually ridiculous, so he has to make it so. }}

Peejers has a different mythology to us. The things he must have heard as a child, the ancient stories are a 100 miles away from ours. We have King Arthur, Robin Hood, we have castles and knights, we have such a tapestry of history. We have mysteries, myths, spooky stories we worry kids with. Peejers just doesnt get Tolkien at all. He doesnt sink and swim in the fantasy as we can. He wouldnt understand Narnia either, C.S Lewis. I think we have a better understanding of Norse sagas too. I cant tell how far Peejers feeling for a merge of fantasy and history goes but, its obviously not far. Id say early 1900's when we had Keystone Cops, Buster Keaton, et al. I think I detect a little lunacy of those black and white silent movies in the F**K awful Slobbit with those cringy chase scenes. He cant think back further in time. We have King Alfred, and he did a darn site more than burn bloody cakes. Scotland has a rich history also. we can build mythology and fantasy so real that youde think it was true. People still believe King Arthur and Robin Hood are real people because of the legends that were created. Peejers has nothing to draw on but Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.

Don't knock Harold Lloyd!

But getting back to the discussion with Petty - all the things listed from LotR were from the later rushed phases. His first tendency is to invent slapstick, then to invent visuals that go with the story but are less comic, but he eventually pulls away from invention when given enough time for his writing crew to come to their senses and pull him along with them. Aside from Arwen, we were also going to see Aragorn fight Sauron. Again, that was edited into something closer to the original.

I think we all know that "Strider" was originally "Trotter", but that's not the half of it. Yes, even though this is all true, it still belongs in the Humour thread.

But getting back to the discussion with Petty - all the things listed from LotR were from the later rushed phases. - Halfy

{{ I don't think it's about time as such, more it is about the sort of film PJ loves. If you look at what his childhood inspirations were; Ray Harryhausen films, King Kong and their ilk, PJ never fell in love with cinema as a narrative expression but as one of spectacle. It's Kong fighting dinosaurs and climbing the Empire State Building while biplanes shoot him, its Greek heroes fighting Titans, skeletons and Medusa, his love of Doctor Who seems rooted more in its monsters than its heroes tale, he didn't spend his money getting an original Doctors costume, he spent it getting an original Dalek. Even when it comes to Tolkien it was not Tolkien's narrative his prose or his imagery that attracted PJ, it was seeing Bakshi's adaptation as a child, it was the spectacle of it, and thinking it could be done better and more spectacularly.

I would argue Fellowship is not PJ reigned in, it's PJ being held back from his natural inclinations by necessity, the necessity of getting the film made at all, of casting, location shooting and all else involved, the script his writing partners put the most into, at least it seems for the start but the longer the process goes on the more and more PJ the process becomes, as his overall duties diminish into more singular roles of director/cowriter and so it becomes the less and less Tolkien.
Fellowship is a decent attempt to condense that book down into a film format, RotK on the other hand bears nothing more than a passing resemblance to its source material and is a terrible attempt to condense that book into a film format. And the reason for that I believe is not time, but that the later parts offered PJ the opportunity for more of what he loves, spectacle. It lets him fill the screen with spectacle, whether that's the charge of the Rohirrim, recreating the battle of Hoth with Mumakil, Denethor running a mile on fire to fling himself from the city top or cgi Legolamb bouncing Mario style about a Mumakil. This is what PJ loves, not narrative which is why nearly all the character narratives take a nose dive or disappear entirely and why some characters like Gimli drift so far from their starting point as to be unrecognisable to the book versions, or even the first version of them we meet in the films themselves.
None of this is excused by time, they had years of prep time, they had a two film script ready before they got the green light to make anything, then got three more years of pure prep time, way more than the average film gets, there is frankly no excuse for not having a finished script by the time of filming, save perhaps that to PJ it was the least interesting element. }}