In defense of The Two Towers (which is your favorite?)

Eldorion wrote:BTW, Petty and Dave, I'm not trying to ignore your guys' posts about the intercutting thing, I'm too tired to write a response to that right now so I'll have to revisit it tomorrow.  Hopefully this post will help remind me.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:I don't see how showing a map for the benefit of the movie audience is at all unreasonable.- Eldo

Its not, but the manner in which it is done is poor because there is no narrative reason for it, its there to show the audience, and there is barely any pretence otherwise.
Had they included a map scene when he returns to Miinas Tirith instead it would have serve the same purpose whilst also serving a narrative purpose of demonstrating Minas Tirith is ruled.
Putting it where they do, right after the clumsy here is what is going on telepathy just makes it seem obtrusive and unnecessary.

Also when there is no intercutting between story lines its considerably less necessary.

Now, 14 years on, Mortensen has enough distance from the series to admit that the process of making it was more or less complete chaos.

“Anybody who says they knew it was going to be the success it was, I don’t think it’s really true,” he says. “They didn’t have an inkling until they showed 20 minutes in Cannes, in May of 2001. They were in a lot of trouble, and Peter had spent a lot. Officially, he could say that he was finished in December 2000 – he’d shot all three films in the trilogy – but really the second and third ones were a mess. It was very sloppy – it just wasn’t done at all. It needed massive reshoots, which we did, year after year. But he would have never been given the extra money to do those if the first one hadn’t been a huge success. The second and third ones would have been straight to video.”

Mortensen thinks – rightly – that The Fellowship of the Ring turned out the best of the three, perhaps largely because it was shot in one go. “It was very confusing, we were going at such a pace, and they had so many units shooting, it was really insane. But it’s true that the first script was better organised,” he says. “Also, Peter was always a geek in terms of technology but, once he had the means to do it, and the evolution of the technology really took off, he never looked back. In the first movie, yes, there’s Rivendell, and Mordor, but there’s sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes; it’s grittier. The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects. It was grandiose, and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it’s like that to the power of 10.

“I guess Peter became like Ridley Scott – this one-man industry now, with all these people depending on him,” Mortensen adds. “But you can make a choice, I think. I asked Ridley when I worked with him (on 1997’s GI Jane), 'Why don’t you do another film like The Duellists [Scott’s 1977 debut, from a Joseph Conrad short story]?’ And Peter, I was sure he would do another intimately scaled film like Heavenly Creatures, maybe with this project about New Zealanders in the First World War he wanted to make. But then he did King Kong. And then he did The Lovely Bones – and I thought that would be his smaller movie. But the problem is, he did it on a $90 million budget. That should have been a $15 million movie. The special effects thing, the genie, was out of the bottle, and it has him. And he’s happy, I think…”

Mrs Figg wrote:wow they are unbelievable, (I somehow managed to read the thread) they swing between snide comments about him being bad mannered, ungrateful, and being so bamboozled by the action sequences that he cant see the magnificence of the movie, so basicaly its denial, attack and backhanded insult. way to go TORn!. these people are ridiculous.  

somebody actuallyhad the nerve to say PJs Laketown is stronger than Tolkiens.       yeah right, sheer ignorance.

Mrs Figg wrote:wow they are unbelievable, (I somehow managed to read the thread) they swing between snide comments about him being bad mannered, ungrateful, and being so bamboozled by the action sequences that he cant see the magnificence of the movie, so basicaly its denial, attack and backhanded insult. way to go TORn!. these people are ridiculous.  

somebody actuallyhad the nerve to say PJs Laketown is stronger than Tolkiens.       yeah right, sheer ignorance.

Before they started shooting, back in 2008, one of the producers did ask if I would be interested. I said, 'You do know, don't you, that Aragorn isn't in The Hobbit? That there is a 60-year gap between the books?

David H wrote:

Mrs Figg wrote:wow they are unbelievable, (I somehow managed to read the thread) they swing between snide comments about him being bad mannered, ungrateful, and being so bamboozled by the action sequences that he cant see the magnificence of the movie, so basicaly its denial, attack and backhanded insult. way to go TORn!. these people are ridiculous.  

somebody actuallyhad the nerve to say PJs Laketown is stronger than Tolkiens.       yeah right, sheer ignorance.

Now that you can read TORn again, I can't!! I just gives me an Error message.
They can't have banned me for what I was thinking, can thay?  

Spoiler:

Forest Shepherd wrote:... and if you see A History of Violence first it ruins Easter Promises for you.