Top 10 reasons why the Lord of the Rings movies suck dromedary balls
I just felt I needed to squash what seems to be a common misconception sweeping the world today, particularly in light of the release of the second instalment on DVD. A mere glance at the IMDb Top 250 will provide you with enough proof of the bafflingly widespread nature of the problem.
# 10. Enya: Enya needs killing. Now.
# 9. George Lucas Syndrome Part 1: Peter Jackson is a producer, not a director. And it shows. Then again, if Scorcese had been put in charge, would it have changed much? Probably not. Just pay the actors to run around and talk a bit and let computers and blue screens do the rest.
# 8. Third Cardinal Rule Of Movie-Making: Behind plot and script, PACE. The pacing of the movies so far, particularly Fellowship, has been about as smooth as congealed gravy. They took the most poignant part of the trilogy, the death of Boromir, gave it the emotional depth of something out of Pearl Harbour, and turned it into a 10 second epilogue squashed it up against the end credits of the first movie just in time to get your shitty little kids to the cinema toilets.
# 7. Dead or still-born careers deserved to be dead: If Elijah Wood has a career resurgence as a result of the success of these movies, I’m holding you all personally responsible. As for Orlando Bloom, pfffft. Can you say “River Phoenix”? Someone introduce this guy to the wonders of heroin, quick. At least Phoenix could act slightly.
# 6. Boring enemies: Remember the battle-droids in The Bantam Penis who couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo? Yeah, so do I. I remember actually being scared of the orcs when I first read the books. Hello dull, dreary CGI cannon-fodder.
# 5: George Lucas Syndrome Part 2: Try to distract us from the banal and flimsy script by showing us a sweeping shot of a beautiful CGI vista/busy action sequence. Sorry, but putting a pretty, shiny thing next to dogshit doesn’t make it any less dogshitty. It just makes it look more and more like the computer game which will inevitably be based upon it. Equally lame: incorporating chapter titles into spoken lines.
# 4. When the plot is lagging, just make shit up: You know about halfway through The Two Towers where they tried to convince us that Aragorn was dead? I nearly threw my popcorn box at the screen in disgust. When you’re going to depart from the story upon which you’re basing your movie, do so to MAKE IT BETTER, like the end of Fight Club or the pruning of the Johnny Fontane subplot in The Godfather, not just to hold the interest of the weak-bladdered peons who need gun shootouts, exploding buses and ritalin to concentrate for more than 90 consecutive minutes.
# 3. Soliloquising doesn’t necessarily make you Macbeth: Why are the hobbits so fucking whiny in the movies? Oh yeah, because the narrative has to be developed through the script, so we have to be constantly reminded of the epic-ness and danger of the quest via repetitive schmaltzy rhetoric accompanied by orchestral swellings and constant “This is so hard, why me?” emoting. Oh, and Frodo is obviously gay. I’m not implying that there’s anything wrong with that, but at times the sexual tension between he and Sam is almost unbearable. Just have them make out for a while in Shelob’s Lair (which they shamelessly excised from the second book purely for the sake of Hollyood Ending) near the start of Return Of The King to clear the air (and of course they’ll use Frodo’s Fake Death the exact same way they used Gandalf’s and Aragorn’s. Yawn.)
# 2. Titanic Syndrome: You know what one of the best things about the books was? There were very few female characters to get in the way. There, I said it. Tolkein felt no compulsion to appeal to the chick demographic by inserting hackneyed and clumsily maudlin love-interest storylines. It was just a bunch of guys who roamed the countryside exploring and kicking arse while the women stayed at home in the castle where they belonged. Also, who did the casting of the non-Hobbit, non-wizard lead actors in this movie, the editor of Cosmo?
#1. Dwarf-tossing joke count so far: Two.
The only three reasons I can think of to explain the overwhelming critical and commercial success of this average-at-best trilogy are a) about 0.5% of people who claimed to have read the books actually did, and hence had no idea what to expect, were pleasantly surprised when they succombed to the hype and overcompensated with their opinions by mistakenly assuming that the cast and crew had anything remotely to do with the good aspects of the books which managed to reach the screen unraped, b) the number of superhero and Jennifer Lopez movies has officially reached critical mass, irreversibly dragging cinematic standards down yet another level, or c) too many people are just nerds who needed something new to jerk-off over. I propose a complex combination of the three.
