Odo Proudfoot posted:
It might help if you were to respond to the essence of my post rather than pulling a few lines out of context. In the first paragraphs l make it quite clear what kind of criticism I am referring to.
You began with the unfairness of
ad hominem attacks on Jackson’s motives. That’s a reasonable beginning.
It was your following derived generalization of proper behavior which I find silly.
My point is that criticising an artist for taking license with his source material is self-defeating. You would never get any art if an artist isn't allowed to insert his internalisation into his work.
Self-defeating?
One should be free to praise or blame an artist for anything you want to praise or blame that artist for, whether it be on the excellence of adapting source material or on messing up badly in adapting source material.
What an artist is
allowed to do is something else altogether. An artist is certainly
allowed to mess up badly, if only for certain people. Those people have a right to speak their piece. Those who see something in a work which the majority dismiss also have right to speak.
Why do you want to deny
the one and not the other?
Early response to an artist may be seen later as wrong-headed. But that applies both to praise and to blame.
You curiously and tortuously attempt to justify a restriction of any adverse criticism of an artist on the grounds of artistic freedom. Artistic freedom is only a part of freedom of expression for everyone.
Would you censor
Tolkien’s cutting comments on Disney and Shakespeare and Browning and Wordworth or on Draton’s
Nymphamedia or on A. A. Milne’s play
Toad of Toad Hall? Should Tolkien have accepted all of Zimmerman’s innovations on the grounds that Zimmerman must be allowed to insert Zimmerman’s internalisation into his film adaptation of
The Lord of the Rings?
To take some common subjects in film, are all film representations of Dracula or Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood or James Bond or Quasimodo equal? Are not some at least reasonably well done and some very ill done?
Jackson was not censored (other than possibly by those who set the ratings for films and by the budget he had to work with). But you would deny the free speech you give to Jackson to any who would criticize the results.
Greenwood posted:
How many thought it worked and did not destroy Tolkien or the story? ........ Let's see $2,500,000,000 + gross and climbing for three films ......*tap, tap, tap*....... Wait! Wait! I am still counting. ...... *tap, tap, tap* ...... Millions of new readers of LOTR and other Tolkien works ....... *tap, tap, tap* ...... What the? ....... ?!?!?! ....... My calculator broke. Sorry, I can't answer that last question.
Ah! Yes. Money.
Is Danielle Steele one of the greatest
authors of the late twentieth century? Most writers don’t think so? Is Britney Spears the greatest singing talent? Most musicians don’t think so.
And it’s not just sour grapes.
Argumentum ad populum doesn’t work with me. Didn’t work with Tolkien either. Doesn’t work with people who care about more than the lowest common denominator.
Of course the films are popular. They were based on one of the most popular
books of the twentieth century, had a big budget and in three films had enough room to represent the books without inordinate compression or omissions. They are tremendous spectacle.
Great spectacle.
And they have the great and visionary writing on which the film was based, something
Star Wars did not have. But the points that most people here complain about are the same points that most of the Jackson-purist types don’t talk much about. There’s more agreement on the flaws and virtues than would appear on the surface.
Not all Jackson’s innovations were bad. Michael Jackson is not an idiot all the time. For one example, the eye motif in the first film worked excellently as did the general increased sense of urgency.
But the films could have been so much better. All the pointing to gross receipts don’t prove anything to the contrary, even if popular success at the lowest common denominator level is all you want.
How many of those who see the films are raving about what an incredibly great villan growler
Lurtz was or proclaim the excellence of the scene where
Aragorn is kissed by his
horse? How many repeat to each other
Gimli’s supposedly humorous lines? How many understand the
Osgiliath scene with its blind
Nazgûl and
Sam lying about how
Boromir died?
I don’t understand it.
Whence came that Sauron-nucleosis or whatever it was that felled
Arwen? She was perfectly healthy when we last saw her, soon after her jewel exploded for some unexplained reason.
A story that had far more depth and coherence than the
Star Wars tales has less when put to screen. That needn’t have been so.
Super-Legolas is low-level fun, like the low-level fun of a purposely exagerated Ninja film. But such things take away from the grim reality that keeps poking through the books.