Tolkien would be proud?
Gosh, after reading this great review in the LA Times I am more excited than ever to see the first installment of Tolkien's epic The Lord of the Rings.
Evidently director Peter Jackson has realized his dream well...it seems, quite importantly, that he too has been a fan of the book for years, and it was that zeal that carried over into his dedication to produce a film worthy of Tolkien's name. Here are a couple very interesting snippets from the review:
An unprecedented three feature films shot simultaneously in 274 days spread over 15 months at a cost of nearly $300 million are enough to get anyone's attention. Not to mention 26,000 extras and a special foam latexing oven for baking prosthetic devices—including 1,600 pairs of feet and ears—that ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Christmas and New Year's Day.It seems we Americans finally have a movie worth all the hype! Unlike, hechem, this "first installment." For the record, I'm still giving Lucas the benefit of the doubt with Episode II: I'm trusting that he has learned from his Episode I follies, and will now make Episode II a movie worthy of the title Star Wars. Posted by jeremy stock at December 20, 2001 05:49 AM
Those figures fascinate but, as directed by Peter Jackson, "The Fellowship of the Ring" makes you forget all about them. Made with intelligence, imagination, passion and skill, propulsively paced and shot through with an aged-in-oak sense of wonder, the trilogy's first film so thrillingly catches us up in its sweeping story that nothing matters but the vivid and compelling events unfolding on the screen.
As director, co-producer and co-writer, Jackson did everything with an eye to serving the story, to enhancing the texture of its reality. That includes having characters speaking in one of the elfish languages when appropriate (with subtitles), using as many as nine individual units to shoot in the remotest and most strangely scenic corners of New Zealand (director Jackson's home) and doing things like planting, a year before shooting was to begin, 5,000 cubic meters of appropriate vegetation in the part of the country selected to be the hobbits' home area.
The most important thing Jackson has done, however, is pay attention to character...