LOTR series: a view of the Two Trees

[Ser Drewy]

14 minutes ago, Ran said:

Brandywine is a translation of the Westron Bralda-hîm, meaning "heady ale". That's want some precursor to TA Hobbit Westron, so... Basically, yeah, it makes no sense, but they clearly have made zero linguistic effort.

 

Considering how important language was to JRRT that lack of effort is... grating, to say the least. 

[Fez]

8 hours ago, sifth said:

but the lack of experience of the showrunners will be a very difficult thing for the show to over come for me.

That doesn't necessarily mean much. The Arcane showrunners had zero experience and that worked out. D&D had very little experience pre-GoT and those first few seasons were incredible IMO (even if you dislike the writing choices, the production design was unquestionably good). Ansari and Yang had no experience before showrunning Master of None. And so on.

[Ran]

2 minutes ago, Ser Drewy said:

Considering how important language was to JRRT that lack of effort is... grating, to say the least. 

Yes. It gets really complicated, I admit, because while Brandywine means "heady ale", the original Hobbit name for the river was "border-water" ("heady ale" turns out to be a close pun on the original name) ... and the "Brandy" in "Brandybuck" is in fact related to "border", the old meaning of the river's name. They should probably have been named Marchbuck, for a more literal translation of their actual Westron name (Brandagamba), but Tolkien wanted to keep the association with the river.

If they had simply named her Marchfoot, that could have worked to imply some sort of knowing attempt at hinting at some kind of lingustic precursor. Or if they wanted to go more Tolkienian, the proto-Germanic seems to be *markō, foot appears to be *fōts, so they could have constructed a name along those lines -- Markōfoot, Markōfōts, Markufoots... something like that. Not as pretty or recognizable, of course, and that seems to be the order of the day -- pretend the Second Age is as much like the Third Age as possible, giving us Hobbits long before they enter the histories, wizards (maybe), etc.

[Corvinus85]

This makes me wonder if we're going to hear various languages in the show. Have they hired linguists to help them with that?

[sifth]

49 minutes ago, Fez said:

That doesn't necessarily mean much. The Arcane showrunners had zero experience and that worked out. D&D had very little experience pre-GoT and those first few seasons were incredible IMO (even if you dislike the writing choices, the production design was unquestionably good). Ansari and Yang had no experience before showrunning Master of None. And so on.

Arcane is the only show on that list, that I don't hate. GoT had it's moments, but nearly all of them came from sticking to GRRM's work. Whenever D&D tried their own thing, it usually was for the worst and not the better.

[Poobah]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

they clearly have made zero linguistic effort.

This is so ironic and frustrating given how important this was to Tolkien, and also how much money they had. And funny that of all the areas in which the comparably small/underfunded (though still more than enough money that I wish it looked better) Wheel of Time show might outstrip Lord of the Rings instead of it being on the costumes Jordan spent many thousands of words on it'd instead be in the effort they put in to their fantasy language while this show gets the highly detailed costumes

[polishgenius]

17 minutes ago, Poobah said:

Wheel of Time show might outstrip Lord of the Rings instead of it being on the costumes Jordan spent many thousands of words on it'd instead be in the effort they put in to their fantasy language while this show gets the highly detailed costumes

Just imagining the shit food if they ever adapt Redwall.

[Ser Drewy]

New Vanity Fair piece on the show with interviews from the showrunners

[DMC]

15 minutes ago, Ser Drewy said:

New Vanity Fair piece on the show with interviews from the showrunners

The show's reliance on Vanity Fair as their PR arm has effectively locked me out from reading this.

[polishgenius]

13 minutes ago, DMC said:

The show's reliance on Vanity Fair as their PR arm has effectively locked me out from reading this.

 

'open in incognito window'

 

eta: good grief that article is irritating. From describing a in the last few years move towards using practical effects in big CG-led films as 'led by Lucasarts and Star Wars' to the showrunners of a Lord of the Rings show being surprised that filming in forced perspective is hard. You'd have thought that knowing how the films were made would be the minimum job requirement for this job.  

[Myrddin]

5 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

You'd have thought that knowing how the films were made would be the minimum job requirement for this job.  

Fake it 'til you make it.

[Ser Drewy]

Basic summary:

• Show aims to be very consistent with the Jackson trilogy, though a bit different in places; the sun sword on the poster is Narsil, for example, but got actors who they felt 'could grow' into Hugo Weaving or Cate Blanchette
• Orcs will be prosethics 
• The showrunners say they have no rights to Unfinished Tale or The Silmarillion, that they only have the LOTR & The Hobbit and carefully searched through them for material
• Wanted to give each race its own heroic metre to speak in
• S1 will focus on heroes not villains 
• Call Elrond more optimistic in the show and are going to show how he becomes world weary & comes to hate men
• Talk about Isildur as a Michael Corleone type character in the beginning he's optimistic and naive.
• Howard Shore is composing
• Durin III and Durin IV are father and son
• Galadriel is "full of piss and vinegar" and has a broken sword from so much orc slaying
• The second big story is "Sauron.. when he was a physical villain" 
• “In his letter to Milton Waldman, it’s letter 131,” Payne says, “[Tolkien] said he wanted to create an interconnected mythology that still would leave room for ‘other minds and hands wielding paint and music and drama.’ He wanted other artists to come after him and continue to push the boundaries of expanding what Middle-earth could be. It’s a terrifying but awesome responsibility to take the man himself up on his wish and continue his work in building out Middle-earth.” 

[ASOIAFrelatedusername]

Quote

“In his letter to Milton Waldman, it’s letter 131,” Payne says, “[Tolkien] said he wanted to create an interconnected mythology that still would leave room for ‘other minds and hands wielding paint and music and drama.’ He wanted other artists to come after him and continue to push the boundaries of expanding what Middle-earth could be. It’s a terrifying but awesome responsibility to take the man himself up on his wish and continue his work in building out Middle-earth.” 

Fuck this lie.

What I found funny was that they proved this statement

Quote

As noted above, Peter Jackson took many liberties with Tolkien’s text, and though not all were well-received, many, like Aragorn’s reluctance to be king, have become inextricably linked with some people’s understanding of Tolkien’s characters

to be true themselves

14 minutes ago, Ser Drewy said:

• Call Elrond more optimistic in the show and are going to show how he becomes world weary & comes to hate men [...]
• The second big story is "Sauron.. when he was a physical villain" 

I will echo my reaction from the trailer, this is going to be a shitshow and I do not know whether to laugh or cry.

[Ran]

That quote from Letters is incomplete. Immediately after that sentence is one word: "Absurd." 

Tolkien considered the youthful ambition he had at the very start quite silly in retrospect, and if one considers his views on his enthusiasts ("my deplorable cultus") I think he quite lost any desire to see others play in his personal sandbox. He licensed the rights away for financial reasons, not because he wanted to see what others would make of his life's work.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

31 minutes ago, Ser Drewy said:

Call Elrond more optimistic in the show and are going to show how he becomes world weary & comes to hate men

That’s a film concete.  Elrond’s brother chose to live as a human.  So did his sons and daughter.  It is a misread to think that Elrond “hated” humans.

[DMC]

41 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

'open in incognito window'

Yeah I also could just open it on my phone or ipad.  Just thought it was funny.

[Werthead]

The most interesting bit in the VF article is the idea of developing iambic pentameter dialogue for some characters, and other poetic modes for other characters. That seems interesting, if they've actually handled that.

The false perspective thing I think is also an honest reflection that doing it with walk-and-talks is really fucking hard. Almost all the false perspective shots in the OG trilogy are static, with characters standing or sitting in carefully set-up positions with visual tricks to sell the illusion (Ian Hole pouring tea into Ian McKellan's cup but he's standing four feet behind Ian and you never see the water passing from one to the other, and the table is a weird L-design to sell the illusion). When you see Hobbits and other characters standing next to each other, it's usually CGI (or rather, matting them in from different sources). There was one "action" false perspective scene where Boromir tussles with Frodo on Amon Hen and they got so frustrated by it they gave up, and just had Sean Bean and Elijah Wood fight with no perspective tricks at all and just hoped the audience would buy it, and they did.

On a tangent, behold, Ran was correct!

War of the Rohirrim is a rights-holding exercise and Warner Brothers are very annoyed that the Saul Zaentz Company believes the film rights have reverted to them. WB are disputing that and in discussion with the SZC. I suspect announcing the film's release date is a way for them to try to firmly establish that the film was in production before the termination date last year.

I suspect a major lawsuit heading their way, followed by an out-of-court settlement, unless Amazon is so keen to get the rights they bankroll the lawsuit the SZC.

[fionwe1987]

Quote

He may be hiding in plain sight or he may be yet to come, but Galadriel’s search for him takes her, and eventually the strange human she’s encountered, Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), all over the map.

So Moraine searching for the Dragon Reborn, whose identity is a mystery, is wholesale being transposed as Galadriel searching for Sauron, whose identity is also a mystery? 

Seriously, Amazon seems to delight in needless mysteries that weaken the story. 

[Ser Drewy]

14 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

So Moraine searching for the Dragon Reborn, whose identity is a mystery, is wholesale being transposed as Galadriel searching for Sauron, whose identity is also a mystery? 

Seriously, Amazon seems to delight in needless mysteries that weaken the story. 

Bezos reportedly has a list of criteria that he believes good shows should have.  Maybe he thinks there needs to be some mysterys about finding out who someone is. 

[fionwe1987]

8 minutes ago, Ser Drewy said:

Bezos reportedly has a list of criteria that he believes good shows should have.  Maybe he thinks there needs to be some mysterys about finding out who someone is. 

Wouldn't be surprised if there's some shitty algorithmic storytelling tool that sniffed through the scripts of a bunch of fantasy stories and decided a "Who is X" format is associated with large audiences.

I sincerely hope these shows based on such formulas fail, then. And fail big. Amazon can absorb the shock of it, and hopefully we can all move on from such travesties.